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Comment by emmender1 | Hacker News Reader

This is my gripe with high school (and college) education..

knowledge which took hundreds of years to discover is imparted in capsules to students - the history of how knowledge was discovered is likely more important and interesting to learn than knowledge itself...

cases in point: heliocentric theory has a rich and dramatic history, and so does galois theory

Quote from article..

As someone who writes about science history, I have long grumbled about how misleading modern scientific papers are. I understand the need to present scientific findings in a clean, concise way, but the papers also omit all the false starts, blind alleys, broken equipment, and dumb mistakes that beset real scientific research every day. By omitting all the human stuff, the papers fail to explain how science really gets done.

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Yeah but you know plenty of how science gets done if you go do science. The goal of a scientific paper is to concisely convey what novel thing has been discovered. It is not to convey how science gets done.

PhD thesis are sometimes good places to look if you want more of the gory details.

Edit: and if you ever take a physics lab in trying to measure the heat capacity of water or speed of light you learn a bunch about how science actually works.

What? Sharing the difficulties you encountered is helpful for other researchers and for replication studies. The goal of a paper is to share your findings in a manner that is clear and helps advance knowledge in your field, and frequently the most important thing you can share is how you performed your experiment followed by why you chose to perform that experiment and whether it conformed to your expectations or not.

Having personally gone through a couple years of lab classes; no, not really. Lord knows your professors may try but at least in my experience the profundity is lost on students. You get a lovely tour of scientific concensus, but most people see the experiments as being fore-ordained or like a recipe.

To put it more simply university lab classes demonstrate so many things that are true that people sometimes never realize that science is a method for disproving things.

indeed, the scientific method is an alien language to most of us.

the fact that the earth revolves around the sun is commonly accepted today.. but it took thousands of years of debate to arrive at that discovery.

I can bet that the average high schooler or college student in science will have a difficult time designing experiments to prove the above fact (and for this reason it took so long - as it is completely non-intuitive).

I guess those failed attempts are reserved for workshops or conference.

Paper are for findings in more presentable state.

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