Tagged: Science

Layers upon Layers

September 27, 2011 at 4:15 pm

All works of art are built from the works that have preceded them, in a series of creative reinterpretations that allow artists to explore new possibilities. As Core scholars, we are familiar with this flow of creation, but this week it took on a more literal meaning when the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam found a new […]

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Analects of the Core: Feynman on uncertainty in science

May 3, 2011 at 10:35 am

I would now like to turn to a third value that science has. It is a little more indirect, but not much. The scientist has a lot of experience with ignorance and doubt and uncertainty, and this experience is of very great importance, I think. When a scientist doesn’t know the answer to a problem, […]

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Looking with a scientific eye

April 27, 2011 at 3:36 pm

Core student Nora Spalholz (CAS’14) checks out the surviving shrimp in the ecosystem she and her partners built two weeks ago in a lab session of CC106: Biodiversity. Photo by Cydney Scott, from BU Today.

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Contribute to the Core Eco-quotes Project!

February 25, 2011 at 3:22 pm

The second-ever Ecolympics, April 1-15, is going to be bigger and better than last year’s, and you can help: by contributing to the Core Eco-quotes Project. As you know, Core is about tackling the big questions in life and certainly one of the biggest these days is how can humans best live with and within […]

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CC106: The monkeys are at it again

February 10, 2011 at 5:31 pm

Do you see them? Those monkeys are banging away at their typewriters, trying to type out the complete works of Shakespeare. Every time there’s a problem involving randomness, the monkeys get called into action. But these are not your average monkeys. No, these are gedanken monkeys. They can madly type 24 hours a day, seven […]

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Analects of the Core: Gould on replacement of theories

February 2, 2011 at 10:35 am

In this view, any science begins in the nothingness of ignorance, constructing theories as facts accumulate.  In such a world, debunking would be primarily negative, for it would only shuck some rotten apples from the barrel of accumulated knowledge.  But the barrel of theory is always full; sciences work with elaborated contexts for explaining facts […]

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Analects of the Core: Durkheim on faith and knowledge

November 17, 2010 at 12:08 pm

On the relationship between religious faith and knowledge: Knowledge does not have the destructive power with which it is credited, but it is the only weapon that allows us to struggle against the dissolution from which it itself results.  It is not by gagging science that one may restore authority to vanished traditions; we shall […]

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