15 Feb 13, Talking about how science is done - a discussion about Popper and Kuhn   (Papers Due) This is going to be a hard paper to write.  Trust me on this.  Instead of trying to read these papers for experiments, read these papers and see if they describe the scientific process you see in the papers we have been reading. Is there a scientific process? Do these papers change your view of how science is done? Can we prove things? Am I indoctrinating you in a paradigm, is that what this course is about? In thinking about how science is done, and what good science is, the first place to start is Sir Karl Popper's book on The Logic of Scientific Discovery.  Here's the book at Amazon Here is the first chapter in Popper's book. This is tough reading, but it's worth the effort. It's one thing to formalize the logic in scientific thinking, but it's another to actually practice the art of science.  Here's an historian's view of how science actually happens.  These are chapters from the beginning of Thomas Kuhn's book on The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.  Here's the book at Amazon Kuhn, chapter 2 In these chapters, Kuhn lays out an intriguing view of the process by which scientific communities really work. Try to understand what he means by Paradigm In Kuhn's view, what causes a shift or change in a field?  Is that consistent with Popper's formula for science done right? Kuhn, chapters 3 through 5