The Demarcation Problem: What Makes Science Scientific
Why distinguishing real science from imposters proves harder than you'd think—and why it matters anyway
Why Scientific Laws Aren't Really Laws
Scientific laws might be our best descriptions of patterns rather than rules the universe actually follows.
The Reproducibility Crisis: When Science Can't Repeat Itself
Why many scientific findings can't be repeated, and what that reveals about knowledge itself
How Thought Experiments Reveal Natural Laws
Why imagining impossible scenarios teaches us what reality must be like
The Social Construction of Scientific Facts
Scientific facts aren't discovered—they're constructed through rigorous social processes that produce genuine objectivity
Why Predictions Matter More Than Explanations
Discover why scientific theories earn trust through risky predictions rather than comfortable explanations of what we already know.
How Background Beliefs Shape Scientific Discovery
Why understanding the invisible assumptions behind scientific research reveals more about discovery than any single experiment ever could
The Measurement Problem: How Observation Changes Reality
Why the act of looking transforms what we see, from quantum particles to human behavior
The Holism of Testing: Why Experiments Never Test Single Hypotheses
Why every experiment secretly tests dozens of assumptions at once, and how scientists still find truth anyway
The Unity of Science: Can Everything Reduce to Physics
Exploring whether all knowledge ultimately collapses into particle physics or whether reality is genuinely layered, requiring different sciences for different levels of organization.
Why Simplicity Matters in Scientific Theories
Discover why scientists trust simpler explanations and what their predictive success reveals about the structure of reality itself.
How Analogies Drive Scientific Discovery
Discover why comparing the unfamiliar to the known is science's most creative—and treacherous—reasoning tool.
The Experimenter's Regress: When Tests Need Testing
Why scientific instruments can't validate themselves—and how research communities solve this through trust, skill, and distributed verification
The Role of Values in Objective Science
Discover why acknowledging values in science strengthens rather than undermines our pursuit of objective truth about the natural world
The Hidden Assumptions That Make Every Experiment Possible
Discover why science's most rigorous experiments depend on philosophical beliefs that can never be empirically proven
The Observation Problem: Why Pure Data Never Exists
Explore how scientific observations are always filtered through theories and concepts, revealing why neutral facts are philosophical impossibilities
What Makes a Good Scientific Explanation
Explore how science transforms observations into understanding through laws, mechanisms, and unifying principles that reveal nature's hidden order
Why Scientific Theories Never Actually Prove Anything True
Discover how science gains reliability by abandoning certainty and why the strongest theories are those we've tried hardest to destroy
The Underdetermination Problem: When Evidence Can't Choose
Discover why multiple incompatible theories can perfectly explain the same evidence, revealing science's hidden philosophical depths
How Science Decides Between Competing Theories
Discover why scientists choose one explanation over another when multiple theories fit the same evidence perfectly
How Paradigm Shifts Actually Transform Science
Discover why scientific breakthroughs require abandoning entire worldviews, not just updating facts, and how conceptual revolutions reshape the questions science asks.
The Realism Debate: Does Science Describe Reality or Just Predict It
Uncover why science's greatest successes raise profound questions about whether we truly know reality or just predict it remarkably well