The Diary of a Young Scientist

Barak Cohen, in eLife, traces how the race for novelty in science is deterring us from achieving true purpose. Good tests kill flawed theories and good tests require creativity and ingenuity. "What is less well appreciated is how utterly Popper rejected the notion of confirmation. Popper was adamant that the survival of a hypothesis in the face of empirical challenge says nothing about its validity, only that that the hypothesis has yet to be falsified. However, Popper’s strict adherence to this idea became difficult to defend and, to be practical, most scientists do allow that empirical evidence can either support or falsify a hypothesis. What if anything can we infer about the value of novelty from Popper's ideas on hypotheses and falsification? Because Popper believed that hypotheses can never be proved, he stressed that hypotheses must be subjected to repeated testing, even after they have survived several empirical challenges. In this sense he valued follow-through over