Smash Notes
Phil Plait
Episodes
Notes
TED Talks Daily · The secret to scientific discoveries? Making mistakes | Phil Plait
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What Scientific Discovery Occured in 1995
A planet was found orbiting a star like the sun. Observatories were designed to seek for more of these planets. Today, thousands have been found orbiting a star.
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What Does Phil Plait Say Is Part of the Scientific Method?
On TED Talks Daily, Phil Plait says the scientific method includes admitting when you are wrong. Scientists, he says, bring the usual human baggage: ego, stubbornness, superstition, and tribal feeling. He illustrates the stakes with his time on the Hubble Space Telescope. A colleague thought one data set might contain the first picture of a planet orbiting another star. No such picture existed yet, so a real detection would have been a major find. Plait dug into the data. Planets are faint and stars are bright, so pulling the signal out was like hearing a whisper. The method, he says, includes paying the price of admitting you are wrong.
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What Is One of Science’s Strengths and Weaknesses
It’s done by people. We understand the universe well due to science. However, its weakness is that it's done by people! We bring a lot of baggage along with us when we investigate. We are egotistical, stubborn, superstitious, and tribal. We must be aware of this when studying science and developing a thesis.
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What Does Phil Plait Say Is the Ultimate Goal of Science?
On TED Talks Daily, Phil Plait says the ultimate goal of science is to understand objective reality as well as we can, from evidence. Science is not a pile of facts. It is a process and a way of thinking, and collecting facts is only one piece. Because people are good at fooling themselves, the process includes a way to limit bias. You observe something, such as a blue sky, and you question it. You offer a hypothesis, predict what that hypothesis would imply, and then you test the prediction. His sample idea is that the sky might only be reflecting the blue of the ocean.
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Is Science Just a Big Pile of Facts?
A big misconception is that science is just a big pile of facts. Science is actually a process and a way of thinking. Gathering facts is only a piece of it, not the ultimate goal.