THE Austrian zoologist Konrad Lorenz had some shrewd advice about getting ahead in science. “It is a good morning exercise for a research scientist to discard a pet hypothesis every day before breakfast,” he suggested. “It keeps him young.”
This will resonate with many researchers, but it might come as a shock to non-scientists, who tend to see science as a conservative process and scientists as conventional. Science is often portrayed as a discipline of certainties, its only currency indisputable facts. The reality is, of course, far more complicated.
To help put the record straight and to show scientists as…
