In 1440 the Italian philologist Lorenzo Valla exposed the Latin document Donatio Constantini, or The Donation of Constantine – which was used by the Catholic Church to legitimize its claim to lands in the Western Roman Empire – as a forgery.
Valla's methods were those of science, and inspired the later scientifically-minded work of Dutch humanist Erasmus of Rotterdam (1466–1536), Leiden University professor Joseph Justus Scaliger (1540–1609), and philosopher Baruch Spinoza (1632–1677).
... How things seem is the starting point for all knowledge, and its development through further correction, extension, and elaboration is inevitably the result of more seemings—considered judgments about the plausibility and consequences of different theoretical hypotheses.
The only way to pursue the truth is to consider what seems true, after careful reflection of a kind appropriate to the subject matter, in light of all the relevant data, principles, and circumstances.
[30] The history of science offers many examples of matters that scientists once thought to be settled and which have proven not to be, such as the concepts of Earth being the center of the universe, the absolute nature of time and space, the stability of continents, and the cause of infectious disease.
[34] About two centuries later, in 1915, a deeper explanation for Newton's law of gravitation was found in Albert Einstein's general theory of relativity: gravity could be explained as a manifestation of the curvature in spacetime resulting from the presence of matter and energy.
[36] In 2016 the Cochrane Library, a collection of databases in medicine and other healthcare specialties, published a report that was widely understood to indicate that flossing one's teeth confers no advantage to dental health.
If McCarthy... had chosen a blander phrase—say, 'automation studies'—the concept might not have appealed as much to Hollywood [movie] producers and [to] journalists..."[42] Similarly Naomi Oreskes has commented: "[M]achine 'intelligence'... isn't intelligence at all but something more like 'machine capability.
The alternative, embodied by IIT [Integrated Information Theory], is that computers will remain only supersophisticated machinery, ghostlike empty shells, devoid of what we value most: the feeling of life itself.
We forsake the society of people and we spend long hours in exhausting contemplation because we are driven by a hunger for knowledge, by a desire to solve the challenges that are constantly thrown up by the world and by life!
Indiana University Bloomington researchers combed through 22 million scientific papers published over the previous century and found dozens of "Sleeping Beauties"—studies that lay dormant for years before getting noticed.
Laura Grego and David Wright, writing in 2019 in Scientific American, observe that "Current U.S. missile defense plans are being driven largely by technology, politics and fear.
[121] A self-taught naturalist, Trevor Goward, has helped create a paradigm shift in the study of lichens and perhaps of all life-forms by doing something that people did in pre-scientific times: going out into nature and closely observing.
[124] Decades ago, psychologist Dean Simonton suggested that brilliant leaders' words may go over people's heads, their solutions could be more complicated to implement, and followers might find it harder to relate to them.
[124] Psychologist Paul Sackett, not involved in the research, comments: "To me, the right interpretation of the work would be that it highlights a need to understand what high-IQ leaders do that leads to lower perceptions by followers.
Kekulé himself had been trained by the great organic chemist Justus von Liebig (1803–1873), who had studied at the Sorbonne with the master J[oseph] L[ouis] Gay-Lussac (1778–1850), himself once apprenticed to Claude Louis Berthollet (1748–1822).
Among his many institutional and cognitive accomplishments, Berthollet helped found the École Polytechnique, served as science advisor to Napoleon in Egypt, and, more significant for our purposes here, worked with [Antoine] Lavoisier [1743–1794] to revise the standard system of chemical nomenclature.
"[143] He notes that Albert Einstein's general theory of relativity, published in 1915, did not spring full-blown from his brain in a eureka moment; he worked at it for years—finally driven to complete it by a rivalry with mathematician David Hilbert.
"This is most clearly true for the kind of pure research that has delivered... great intellectual benefits but no profits, such as the work that brought us the Higgs boson, or the understanding that a supermassive black hole sits at the center of the Milky Way, or the discovery of methane seas on the surface of Saturn's moon Titan.
Innovation is extremely difficult, if not impossible, to predict..." Solutions: "Fund excellent scientists rather than projects and give them freedom to pursue research avenues as they see fit.
It must be communicated to the public and to policy-makers that science is a cumulative investment, that no one can know in advance which projects will succeed, and that success must be judged on the total agenda, not on a single experiment or result.
Historian of science [...] Margaret Rossiter has documented how, in the mid-19th century, female scientists created their own scientific societies to compensate for their male colleagues' refusal to acknowledge their work.
"[151] "When I speak to groups of women scientists," writes Pomeroy, "I often ask them if they have ever been in a meeting where they made a recommendation, had it ignored, and then heard a man receive praise and support for making the same point a few minutes later.
Microassaults are especially damaging when they come from a high-school science teacher, college mentor, university dean or a member of the scientific elite who has been awarded a prestigious prize—the very people who should be inspiring and supporting the next generation of scientists.
[152] Psychologist Andrei Cimpian and philosophy professor Sarah-Jane Leslie have proposed a theory to explain why American women and African-Americans are often subtly deterred from seeking to enter certain academic fields by a misplaced emphasis on genius.
[159][160] The operation of the Sagan effect deprives society of the full range of expertise needed to make informed decisions about complex questions, including genetic engineering, climate change, and energy alternatives.
)[169] Publishing in predatory journals can be life-threatening when physicians and patients accept spurious claims about medical treatments; and invalid studies can wrongly influence public policy.
[170] Naomi Oreskes argues that, "[t]o put an end to predatory practices, universities and other research institutions need to find ways to correct the incentives that lead scholars to prioritize publication quantity...
"[173] Harvard University historian of science Naomi Oreskes writes that a theme at the 2024 World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, was a "perceived need to 'accelerate breakthroughs in research and technology.
"More than 50 years elapsed between the 1543 publication of Copernicus's magnum opus... and the broad scientific acceptance of the heliocentric model... Nearly a century passed between biochemist Friedrich Miescher's identification of the DNA molecule and suggestion that it might be involved in inheritance and the elucidation of its double-helix structure in the 1950s.