In his scientific autobiography of 1948, the physicist Max Planck described how new ideas win in science: Eine neue wissenschaftliche Wahrheit pflegt sich nicht in der Weise durchzusetzen, daß ihre Gegner überzeugt werden und sich als belehrt erklären, sondern vielmehr dadurch, daß ihre Gegner allmählich aussterben und daß die heranwachsende Generation von vornherein mit der Wahrheit vertraut gemacht ist. (A new scientific truth does not usually win by convincing its opponents and making them say they have learned. It wins because its opponents gradually die out, and the next generation grows up familiar with the truth from the start.)
science
Mission control
American spaceflight puts every flight controller on continuous voice loops, each one listening to several conversations at once and able to speak into any of them. The room is designed so that nobody has to ask. The information arrives whether or not you knew to want it.
The second doctorate
Die Habilitation — traditionally required in Germany before appointment to a professorial chair, a further substantial body of original work after the PhD. Advancement at the top of the academic system is gated by more research, not by management experience.
The derivation
The derivation. In German physics and engineering teaching, the Herleitung is required — you show how the formula follows from what came before.
A formula that is merely known is not yet owned. The student is asked to bring it down from its origins, which is what the word says.
David Hilbert
In lectures given in 1922 at Göttingen, Hilbert launched his Beweistheorie — proof theory. The aim was to take the proofs of mathematics and make them themselves the object of investigation, to establish that no contradiction could ever be derived within the system.
As he put it, we move to a higher level of contemplation, from which the axioms, formulae and proofs of the mathematical theory are themselves the objects of investigation.
Not: are these results correct. But: is this way of reaching results sound at all.
Justus von Liebig
Liebig found that plant growth is limited not by the total nutrients available but by whichever single nutrient is scarcest. Add more of everything else and nothing improves. Add the one that is missing and the crop grows.
The Law of the Minimum is a diagnostic principle disguised as agricultural chemistry. The problem has one cause, and treating the others is waste.
Robert Koch
Koch established a formal procedure for proving that a particular microorganism causes a particular disease. The organism must be found in every case, isolated and grown in culture, produce the disease when introduced into a healthy host, and be recovered again from that host.
Before Koch, causation in medicine was asserted. After Koch, it had to be demonstrated, in four steps, in order.
Rudolf Virchow
In 1858, at the Pathological Institute in Berlin, Virchow published Die Cellularpathologie. His argument was that disease does not reside in organs or tissues in general, but originates in individual cells, and that the nature of a disease can be understood by looking at those cells under a microscope.
He also developed the first systematic method of autopsy, and the modern autopsy still uses his technique.
He is called the father of modern pathology. Pathology is diagnosis pushed as far down as it will go.
Trial and error
The method has a name in English, and the name contains the error as a component rather than a defect. Not trial and success. The errors are half the procedure.
Public access to federally funded research
US policy requires that research funded by federal agencies be made freely available to the public, and the requirement has been extended and tightened over successive administrations. The reasoning is stated plainly: the public paid for it, so the public may read it.