I’m excited to announce that this is the first post of the Engineering Innovation Newsletter in partnership with Good Science Project. Good Science Project is a new organization dedicated to improving the funding and practice of science.
Subscribe now Since the last article on WW2-era German science was so well-received, I’ve decided to keep the theme of great pieces of scholarship about scientific history going. This week’s post is largely drawn from the essays of Gerard Holton. Holton’s work is, similar to the scholarship covered in the previous post, criminally under-talked about in the progress studies community.
Subscribe now This Week’s Article The primary reason I’m writing this update is to inform subscribers that the article that was slated to come out this Friday will be a few days late. I came down with an infection this week and progress was a bit slow as a result. The planned article will incorporate a lot of ideas from Gerald Holton, a physicist/science historian and all-around fantastic thinker.
Subscribe now In most Engineering Innovation posts, I try to provide some new, evidence-based argument on how to improve the innovation pipeline. The posts try to bring readers on the journey through the academic evidence and relevant history that informs the argument. But this post will be different. In this post, I won’t be taking a stand at all.
This piece contains some longer excerpts from Watson’s writing about the discovery of DNA that tell the story far more beautifully than I ever could.
Subscribe now Last week, I finished a new biography that I’ve been waiting on for months. Eagerly waiting for a book to be released is not something I make a habit of. But this was different: this book was about the great Johnny von Neumann.
Subscribe now The importance of grant-funding panels in science cannot be overstated. Every year in the US, tens of billions of dollars of scientific grant-funding get allocated based on the whims of these panels. The opinions of panels have a massive influence over what can and cannot get researched.
In the previous Engineering Innovation post, I detailed how America’s research ecosystem has become less applied and less exploratory since the mid-1900s. To most, the concept of true exploratory research is fairly intuitive. But wrapping one’s mind around research that is truly applied isn’t so obvious. In today’s piece, I’ll provide a concrete example of a possible course of applied research from the field of economics.
America’s sub-optimal use of applied and basic grants is a major problem.
This post is the first of my new Substack, the Engineering Innovation Newsletter. Every piece in this newsletter shares a common goal: to propose concrete ways forward for those looking to help shape the future of technological research and innovation.
Speaking as a social scientist…real scientists are the coolest I love progress studies and metascience. I’ve loved it since before I knew it had a name. I initially stumbled into the field while doing background research on the Manhattan Project for a project I was working on at my job.
