Abduction: The Logic of Scientific Guessing
How scientists leap from puzzling observations to explanations that reshape what we know
The Lone Genius Myth: Collaboration's Hidden Role in Discovery
Why every scientific breakthrough is a network event disguised as an individual achievement
The Long Conversation: How Scientific Progress Builds Across Generations
Science advances not through isolated genius but through an inherited conversation spanning centuries of accumulated inquiry
When Consensus Goes Wrong: The Pathology of Premature Agreement
Why scientific communities sometimes agree their way into decades of collective error
Scientific Taste: The Aesthetic Dimension of Theory Choice
How cultivated aesthetic judgment shapes which theories scientists pursue—and why beauty sometimes predicts truth.
The Problem of Induction: Can We Trust Generalization?
Why the logical gap between evidence and generalization reveals what scientific knowledge actually is
The Replication Crisis: What Science's Quality Problems Reveal About Discovery
Why science's quality crisis illuminates the hidden infrastructure of reliable discovery
Negative Capability in Science: The Power of Remaining Uncertain
How sitting with uncertainty longer enables the breakthroughs that premature closure prevents
Science by Analogy: How Metaphorical Thinking Drives Discovery
How comparing unlike things became science's most powerful thinking tool
Theory-Laden Observation: Can We Ever See Without Assumptions?
Why scientific objectivity requires acknowledging that observation is never innocent, and how communities transcend individual bias
The Art of the Well-Posed Question: Framing Problems for Discovery
How the formulation of research questions determines what discoveries become possible and which remain forever beyond reach
The Underdetermination Problem: When Data Don't Decide
Why matching the data is never enough, and how scientists choose when evidence falls silent
The Outsider Advantage: Why Disciplinary Boundaries Create Blind Spots
How disciplinary expertise creates systematic blindness—and why breakthrough discoveries often require thinking from outside the field
The Prepared Mind: How Scientific Breakthroughs Favor Those Who Cannot Stop Questioning
Deep expertise combined with cultivated openness creates the cognitive conditions where unexpected observations become transformative discoveries.
The Incubation Period: Why Breakthroughs Often Follow Breaks
Understanding why your best scientific ideas emerge during showers, walks, and other moments when you've stopped trying to have them
Beautiful Theories That Were Wrong: The Seductive Danger of Elegance
Why mathematically beautiful theories have repeatedly led scientists astray—and what this reveals about the limits of aesthetic intuition in scientific methodology.
When Everything You Know Is Wrong: The Psychology of Paradigm Resistance
Why the scientists best equipped to evaluate revolutionary ideas are often least able to accept them—and what this reveals about how knowledge changes.
The Model Is Not the Territory: Understanding Scientific Representation
Why deliberately false scientific models reveal truths that complete descriptions obscure—and how to know when simplification helps versus harms.
Instruments of Discovery: How New Tools Create New Sciences
Scientific revolutions often begin not with new ideas but with new instruments that reveal phenomena no theory predicted.
Failed Experiments That Changed Everything: The Science of Productive Failure
Why the experiments that fail to find what they seek often reveal truths that success never could
The Adjacent Possible: Why Breakthrough Discoveries Cluster in Time
Why Darwin and Wallace discovered evolution simultaneously—and what this reveals about when breakthroughs become inevitable