'We should expect scientists to be much more open, but also more boring'

摘要

WHEN Stuart Ritchie was a graduate student in Edinburgh, UK, in 2011, he was involved in an incident that shook his faith in science. With two colleagues, he tried and failed to replicate a famous experiment on precognition, the ability to see the future. They sent their results to the journal that published the original research and received an immediate rejection on the grounds that the Journal didn't accept studies that repeated previous experiments. Ritchie remained a scientist - he is a psychologist at King's College London with a focus on studying human intelligence - but ever since that rejection, he has been on a crusade to air science's dirty laundry. His latest book is Science Fictions, in which he shows how, all too often, we can't rely on the facts that science provides.