Assignment-

Please read Kuhn Ch. 11 and 12, if you have not already done so. Discuss the issues in these chapters. Comment on any of sections 9- and 10- material in the Student Lecture Material. Please start reading Kuhn's postscript. I will ask in Discussion Forum, 10 whether and, if so, to what extent Kuhn backtracks in his postscript from the main tenets of his book.

1) Note the anomaly of Radium's heat release. Curie does suggest relaxing the paradigmatic rule of conservation of to solve the problem of Radium's heat. Some modern scientist suggest doing the same thing to solve certain problems in Cosmology. Nevertheless, such suggestions usually only come after an acute crisis. Marie would have been very early, in fact she was premature, to make such a suggestion. Einstein solved this problem with his E=mc2 equation. Regarding the Curie paper, how do we react today to the discovery of a previously unknown substance/radiation in our midst? The Century magazine wasn't Scientific American or even Popular Science, and yet its audience was presumably interested in what the leading scientist of the day had to say about her work. Imagine if American felt that way today. Why don't they? Or do they?

2) The articles on gender bias should come as no surprise. Studies have long shown that grading papers by elementary school teachers is biased by the name on the top of the papers. Unfortunately the peer-review process involves knowing who the scientist is, what the quality of their previous work is etc. Just hiding the names, probably isn't good enough anyway. Authors quote extensively from the previous work in their labs and a good guess can usually be made about the author by someone in the field. Short of a quota system, what can be done to mitigate this (unintentional?) bias?