Wit & Wisdom

Science. Exploration. Survival.

Editorial team 1 February 19, 2020

E. H. Shakleton at the wheel (National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London).

A scientific career can be a struggle. This week Dave Stegman, Associate Professor at Scripps, draws parallels between being a scientist and being an Antarctic explorer. He dangled in the crevasse, unable to touch the sides; the abyss beneath was hundreds of feet deep; the rope he was suspended from was 14 feet long, connected above to the sledge he had been hauling. Was it luck when his sledge ha ...[Read More]

On carbon footprint in academics, Aikido, train tours and our feeling of guilt

Editorial Team 3 November 27, 2019

Face problems to deal with them (Ueshiba Mitsuteru at the Nippon Budokan in 2017)

This week, Antoine Rozel, senior researcher in ETH Zürich, gives us good news about carbon footprint. We can take the global warming problem as a pretext to change some of our arbitrary habits and make our communication much more efficient! Global warming is real and yes we do need to drastically decrease our carbon footprint. I see 3 options: 1) not caring, 2) feeling guilty about it and not doin ...[Read More]

The conundrum posed by data and models

Editorial team 1 October 30, 2019

A privilege of being an academic is the freedom to muse, staying faithful to the title of a PhD which is, after all, a doctor of philosophy. In his latest reflection on a topic of importance to all scientific disciplines, Dan Bower (CSH and Ambizione Fellow at the University of Bern) discusses the ambiguity that comes with the separation of data and models. What are data? What are models? You ar ...[Read More]

Dancing on a volcano – the unspoken scientific endeavour

Iris van Zelst October 2, 2019

Here I am, standing on a volcano: I have finally reached the top! But wait, is this actually the correct volcano? I think the proposal mentioned a different one... Erm... How do I get down?
Illustration by Floor de Goede from the book 'Dansen op de vulkaan' (more information below).

Doing science is not a walk in the park. In fact, it might be closer to dancing on a volcano. Dan Bower, CSH and Ambizione Fellow at the University of Bern, Switzerland, takes full advantage of the creative freedom of a blog post to reiterate that scientific progress is not a straight-forward endeavour. We all learn early in our education about the scientific method—the scientific approach t ...[Read More]