A Tale of Two Transmitters

摘要

Scientists are crazy people. How else would you describe an individual who works late into the night in order to destroy or falsify another scientist's hypothesis, or even more bizarre, to destroy his or her own hypothesis? Yet, as clearly enunciated by the philosopher Karl Popper, this is the very essence of scientific inquiry. On the basis of a few bits of data, we form a hypothesis that goes far beyond the data. The hypothesis provides a framework upon which experiments are designed to verify—or refute—the hypothesis. The longer the hypothesis can withstand these potshots, the more likely it is to be "true." More often than not, hypotheses do not withstand the onslaught of experiments and have either to be abandoned altogether or to undergo major overhauls. As cumbersome as it may seem, this is the way science advances. The history of Dale's principle, which receives a direct hit from a series of elegant experiments reported in this issue of Science on page 419, is a beautiful example of this process.