Alexander Krauss
by Alexander Krauss
42 posts
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Introduction — Sparking a method revolution in science
8 minOur powerful new methods and tools trigger breakthroughs by enabling us to see, measure and imagine the world in ways that were impossible before...
Introduction — Mapping discovery: the book’s structure and key insights
19 minThis is the first book to systematically tackle the puzzle of what the engine of scientific discovery is. We analyse science's over 750 biggest...
Ch 1: Sparking Discovery — Summary / Overview / How we measure and track science’s major discoveries / Five key insights: how powerful new methods and tools trigger discovery
11 minDiscoveries transform our lives—through breakthrough medicines, technologies and completely new ways to understand the world. Yet one of science's...
Ch 1: Sparking Discovery — We spark science’s major discoveries by developing a new method or tool
11 minor tool—that makes the breakthroughs possible Digging into the data and papers of science's major discoveries across fields and over time, we find a...
Ch 1: Sparking Discovery — Our powerful tools trigger new breakthroughs by extending what and how we can observe, detect and measure the world / There are three ways new methods and tools power new discoveries
14 minand how we can observe, detect and measure the world Scientific tools are our lenses, sensors, amplifiers, separators, accelerators, and...
Ch 1: Sparking Discovery — New breakthroughs often follow soon after developing the new enabling tools
13 minthe new enabling tools How long does it take for a new tool to spark a major discovery? The gap in time is getting shorter over time: in the 1800s,...
Ch 1: Sparking Discovery — Creating a new method or tool is often more foundational to scientific progress / The causal effect: how new tools trigger new discoveries / Conclusion
14 minprogress—across different fields and over time—than individual scientific discoveries Many discoveries are almost inevitable once we create a new...
Ch 2: Engineering Serendipity — Summary / Overview / Measuring serendipitous discoveries / Uncovering the elusive role of serendipitous moments in scientific discoveries
10 minUncovering how new tools trigger new breakthroughs leads us to explore the most puzzling and mysterious feature of discovery: serendipity. Many think...
Ch 2: Engineering Serendipity — Vision-enhancing tools trigger unexpected discoveries most often / Serendipitous discoveries triggered by new tools and methods / The powerful role of our tool innovations
10 minWhat kinds of instruments uncover unintended discoveries? We find a striking pattern: most often serendipitous breakthroughs come from using tools...
Ch 2: Engineering Serendipity — The odds of uncovering serendipitous breakthroughs are zero before we develop the tools of discovery / The scientific toolbox view of discovery / Conclusion
12 minwe develop the tools of discovery There is another side to the coin: researchers have focused on exciting serendipitous moments in discoveries, but...
Ch 3: Paradigm Shifts or Cumulative Progress — Summary / Overview
7 minUnderstanding how powerful tool innovations unlock breakthroughs leads us to fundamental questions about how science evolves: do we abandon some...
Ch 3: Paradigm Shifts or Cumulative Progress — Measuring revolutionary and cumulative scientific progress
16 minExamining science's major discoveries and methods across fields offers us a unique opportunity to probe the fundamental nature of scientific...
Ch 3: Paradigm Shifts or Cumulative Progress — A conceptual framework of the cumulative nature of science / Evolution over revolution in science / Redefining the scientific method / Conclusion
17 minWhile an individual hypothesis or theory of a scientist can be tested, challenged and even abandoned, the broader methods and scientific fields...
Ch 4: Discovery-Makers — Summary / Overview / Most discoverers have an interdisciplinary education
10 minWith our expanding toolbox driving major discoveries and cumulative science, this opens an important question: how do our powerful tools connect to...
Ch 4: Discovery-Makers — Greater productivity and impact of younger scientists / Only about a third of discoverers worked at top 25 universities / Funding and the scientific community
18 minThomas Kuhn famously argued that ' Almost always the men who achieve these fundamental inventions of a new paradigm [or major breakthrough] have been...
Ch 4: Discovery-Makers — Conclusion
2 minWe explored the features and traits of the researchers behind history's biggest breakthroughs, enabling us to build a general profile of who...
Ch 5: The Birth of Fields — Summary / Overview / Measuring and tracking the birth of scientific fields / The origins of new fields
17 minPioneering discoveries, such as the structure of DNA, the periodic table of elements and quantum theory, are embodied in our scientific fields, such...
Ch 5: The Birth of Fields — The most powerful tools we leverage to drive new fields / Conclusion
12 mindisciplinary areas What are the most transformative tools across different disciplinary areas? New research domains cluster around key methods that...
Ch 6: The Discovery Engine — Summary / Overview
4 minThe first step to understanding scientific progress is uncovering that new methods and tools consistently spark new discoveries and fields. The...
Ch 6: The Discovery Engine — Establishing new methods and tools as the engine of science
27 min(Chapters 1–5) leads us to the next and equally important question of what the engine of new methods and tools is. But researchers studying...
Ch 6: The Discovery Engine — How our powerful tools drive scientific progress
15 minscientific theories possible—beyond the role of theories Some of science's most celebrated discoveries are at times seen as purely theoretical...
Ch 6: The Discovery Engine — New tools stretch our imagination
8 minstrategy for innovation—beyond the more unpredictable role of creative intuition How we conceive reality—cells, molecules, galaxies, cosmic...
Ch 6: The Discovery Engine — New method innovations unlock new discoveries and fields
18 minthrough five key stages: • Method constraint: generally, we run into a practical problem we cannot solve when using a current method or tool to study...
Ch 6: The Discovery Engine — Methods labs and methods hubs / Eight pathways to invent and reinvent our methods
16 minglobal incubators of innovation Small, unexpected connections between method-curious researchers can prove important. Ernst Ruska, who created the...
Ch 6: The Discovery Engine — Developing the new field of Methodology of Science
19 minpolicies needed to accelerate scientific progress What if we treated the design of scientific tools across science as a field of research in itself...
Ch 6: The Discovery Engine — Conclusion
5 minIf we were to adopt these seven reforms, we could trigger a method revolution in science—a deep transformation in how science progresses and at what...
Ch 7: The Origins of Our Toolbox — Summary / Overview / Rethinking the origins of science and civilisation, beyond culture and geography: the missing role of methods / Our early ancestors sparked major early breakthroughs through method revolutions
12 minIs the engine of science today the same as it was in our past? What are the origins of science and our powerful methods? We find that the key turning...
Ch 7: The Origins of Our Toolbox — Science of smart animals / Science of early humans / Homo sapiens science (until about 11,000 years ago) / Early civilisation science / Ancient Chinese and Ancient Greek science
14 minHow did our species come to develop such a powerful toolbox that not only helps us survive but also enables us to do science—to study particles with...
Ch 7: The Origins of Our Toolbox — How did we develop modern science around the 17th century? / The invention of the microscope and telescope
12 minThis is one of the great unsolved mysteries in the history of science. Common explanations point to a mix of external factors: the role of Christian...
Ch 7: The Origins of Our Toolbox — Greater use of mathematics to describe what new tools uncovered / Tools and methods sparked a deeper understanding of scientific methodology / National scientific societies, the growing scientific community and systematic observational methods took off after, not before, the microscope and telescope / The enabling conditions for science and civilisation: a framework
18 minNewton is often seen as the greatest of 17th-century scientists—portrayed as a lone genius relying on mathematical methods for his transformational...
Ch 7: The Origins of Our Toolbox — Conclusion
4 minThe key turning point in the history of science came with the invention of two remarkable tools: the microscope and telescope. Through their lenses,...
Ch 8: Homo Methodologicus — Summary / Overview / Where does the mind end and the methods we create begin? / Expanding our toolbox
11 minThroughout history, we have continually refined our abilities, to invent navigation techniques using stars, apply medicinal plants to heal wounds,...
Ch 8: Homo Methodologicus — Our species’ most unique capacity: cumulative method-making / Our universal toolbox: an early, unified method for gaining knowledge over human history / On the origin of science: how our mind’s method-making capacity drove human evolution / Mimicking, upgrading and outsourcing our evolved mind with better tools / Conclusion
16 minCurrent explanations of what makes our species unique and successful focus on factors like our ability for shared intentionality or cooperation or...
Ch 9: The New Methods-Driven Discovery Theory — Summary / Overview / Before-and-after (statistical) explanation / Evolutionary explanation / Cognitive constraint explanation
13 minWe cannot design an experiment to measure what our tools cannot detect. In science, the tools we use largely determine how and what we can study—and...
Ch 9: The New Methods-Driven Discovery Theory — Scientific practice explanation / Philosophical explanation
10 minquestions, problems and experiments Science is often imagined as a logical process—one that begins with an unsolved question or problem, then applies...
Ch 9: The New Methods-Driven Discovery Theory — The new methods-driven discovery theory: backed by five different perspectives / A method revolution in science / Conclusion
9 minby five different perspectives Can we reduce how we make discoveries and fields to a universal theory that we can test with evidence? Can we describe...
Ch 10: The Edge of Discovery — Summary / Overview / The evolution of science: expanding the boundaries of science
11 minAre we close to hitting the limits of what we can discover? Or can we keep pushing forward into the edges of the universe, atoms, genes and human...
Ch 10: The Edge of Discovery — The five factors shaping the current limits of science / How the current boundaries of our toolbox shape the current boundaries of science / Conclusion
18 minMethods and tools Here we unpack the five factors that both hold us back and drive us forward as we try to break through the frontier of science. In...
Ch 11: Pushing the Limits of Science — Summary / Overview
7 minScience is a quest to push the boundaries of what we know and reveal fundamental mysteries of the universe, matter, human life and the mind. But how...
Ch 11: Pushing the Limits of Science — Redrawing the edges of science by reinventing our toolbox
15 minThe future of science is not just about finding answers to questions we already know to ask—questions about life and the universe that current...
Ch 11: Pushing the Limits of Science — How artificial intelligence can be combined with our scientific tools to accelerate science / Are there set limits to human knowledge and what we can discover? / Inventing the future of science
10 mintools to accelerate science AI can be a powerful tool in a scientist's toolbox—amplifying how the world can be explored and predicted. AI systems can...
Ch 11: Pushing the Limits of Science — Conclusion: the science of discovery
10 minrevolution in science Most people are familiar with big breakthroughs like Franklin, Crick and Watson's discovery of DNA's double-helix structure,...