The arXiv preprint service is trying to answer an age-old question. 

 

Before arXiv, preprint papers were available only within small scientific circles, distributed by hand and by mail, and the journals in which they were ultimately published months later (if they were published at all) were holed up in university libraries. But arXiv has democratized the playing field, giving scientists instant access to ideas from all kinds of colleagues, all over the world, from prestigious chairs at elite universities to post-docs drudging away at off-brand institutions and scientists in developing countries with meager research support.

Source: nautil.us

Despite extensive efforts at public science education, polling over the past 30 years has consistently shown that about 40 to 45% of Americans believe that humans were supernaturally created in the past 10,000 years (1). A natural interpretation of this finding is that U.S. science education is failing to reach nearly half of the population, and that widespread belief in recent human origins reflects basic scientific illiteracy. However, the reality is more complex (2): Many of those who reject evolutionary theory are aware of the scientific consensus on the subject, and such rejection is not always associated with low scientific literacy. Similar results have been found for beliefs regarding anthropogenic climate change (3). On page 321 of this issue, Friedkin et al. (4) provide a key step toward understanding this phenomenon by introducing a simple family of models for social influence among individuals with multiple, interdependent beliefs.

 

Why I know but don’t believe
Carter T. Butts

Science  21 Oct 2016:
Vol. 354, Issue 6310, pp. 286-287
DOI: 10.1126/science.aaj1817

Source: science.sciencemag.org

Complexity science concepts of emergence, self-organization, and feedback suggest that descriptions of systems and events are subjective, incomplete, and impermanent-similar to what we observe in quantum phenomena. Complexity science evinces an increasingly compelling alternative to reductionism for describing physical phenomena, now that shared aspects of complexity science and quantum phenomena are being scientifically substantiated. Establishment of a clear connection between chaotic complexity and quantum entanglement in small quantum systems indicates the presence of common processes involved in thermalization in large and small-scale systems. Recent findings in the fields of quantum physics, quantum biology, and quantum cognition demonstrate evidence of the complexity science characteristics of sensitivity to initial conditions and emergence of self-organizing systems. Efficiencies in quantum superposition suggest a new paradigm in which our very notion of complexity depends on which information theory we choose to employ.

 

Evidence of Shared Aspects of Complexity Science and Quantum Phenomena
Cynthia Larson

Cosmos and History: The Journal of Natural and Social Philosophy, Vol 12, No 2 (2016)

Source: cosmosandhistory.org