| “I have this great uncle/ who worked on the atomic bomb/ he got a nobel prize in physics/ and a place in this song/ and I bet there were no windows/ and no women in the room/ when they applied themselves/ to the pure science of/ boom” |
The Nature special issue on Alan Turing reminded me of my visit to Bletchley Park a while ago. It’s a great place if your geeky interests include the history of computing and code breaking with a bombe. I now have a postcard of Turing’s slate statue on my desk.
I had known that Turing had been underappreciated in his own time, but I had never thought much about how he had lived (and died). What I learned was quite astonishing:
The journal Nature had a recent piece titled ‘Life-changing experiments: The biological Higgs‘ asking what fundamental questions in biology might inspire the same thrill as the Higgs particle is currently doing in physics. The four ‘quests’ they have came up with are:
That all sounds nice and I am sure these are valuable questions worth pursuing. But I still don’t feel a lot of excitement stirring up inside me. One of the reasons why I am underwhelmed is already pointed out in the Nature article:
Paradigm shift? Incommensurability? Did you ever wonder where these ideas came from? Thomas Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions was published 50 years ago and several texts online pay homage to this philosophical blockbuster.
The paper Detecting Novel Associations in Large Data Sets stirred up quite some excitement. Mostly in the stats/comp community, where many welcomed a theory paper in a prominent journal, but some voiced concers about the quality of the results. I’ve posted about this previously.
Now another prominent journal, Nature Biotech, tries to explain what the fuzz is about to a wider readership by interviewing 8 experts: Gustavo Stolovitzky, Peng Qiu, Eran Segal, Bill Noble, Olga Troyanskaya, Noah Simon & Rob Tibshirani, and Edward Dougherty:
http://www.nature.com/nbt/journal/v30/n4/full/nbt.2182.html
No big surprises for me, but maybe a nice intro for people not from the network-field.
Florian
