Science Atlas

Disputed Statements

Claims this atlas currently marks as unsettled or as tested and found false. A debated fact is one scholars hold competing positions on; a debunked one has been checked against the record and found not to hold. Both are kept in view rather than quietly smoothed over, with the reasoning that put each one where it stands.

Entity Type

39 statements marked Debated.

Millikan Oil Drop Experiment, Key FindingEvery droplet's measured charge was a small whole-number multiple of one base value, about 1.5924(17) times ten to the minus nineteen coulombs, showing electric charge is quantized and providing an early precise measurement of the elementary charge.

Millikan Oil Drop Experiment, Experiments

Standing

Concerns Key Finding

Currently States Every droplet's measured charge was a small whole-number multiple of one base value, about 1.5924(17) times ten to the minus nineteen coulombs, showing electric charge is quantized and providing an early precise measurement of the elementary charge.

Millikan's student and uncredited co-experimenter Harvey Fletcher, and later historians of science including Gerald Holton, raised documented disputes over authorship credit and over whether Millikan selectively excluded droplet measurements from the published dataset; David Goodstein's later investigation concluded the exclusions were of incomplete observation series rather than unfavourable results. See the paired Dissent record on this fact.

Source Oil Drop Experiment (Wikipedia)

Occam's Razor, DescriptionOccam's razor is the principle that, among explanations that fit the evidence equally well, the one that assumes the fewest new entities or the least additional complexity should be preferred. It is named for the fourteenth-century English Franciscan friar William of Ockham, though the underlying preference for simple explanations is older and Ockham himself never phrased it as a single maxim; the Latin tag often attached to him, entities must not be multiplied beyond necessity, was coined by later writers summarising his views. Its philosophical standing is genuinely debated: it is not a law of nature and cannot prove a simpler theory true, only recommend it as the better starting point, and philosophers disagree about whether simplicity is really evidence of truth or merely a practical convenience for working scientists, a live question the Stanford Encyclopedia entry cited here surveys at length.

Occam's Razor, Concepts

Standing

Concerns Description

Currently States Occam's razor is the principle that, among explanations that fit the evidence equally well, the one that assumes the fewest new entities or the least additional complexity should be preferred. It is named for the fourteenth-century English Franciscan friar William of Ockham, though the underlying preference for simple explanations is older and Ockham himself never phrased it as a single maxim; the Latin tag often attached to him, entities must not be multiplied beyond necessity, was coined by later writers summarising his views. Its philosophical standing is genuinely debated: it is not a law of nature and cannot prove a simpler theory true, only recommend it as the better starting point, and philosophers disagree about whether simplicity is really evidence of truth or merely a practical convenience for working scientists, a live question the Stanford Encyclopedia entry cited here surveys at length.

Source Simplicity (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)

Occam's Razor, Proposed ByWilliam of Ockham (traditional, contested attribution)

Occam's Razor, Concepts

Standing

Concerns Proposed By

Currently States William of Ockham (traditional, contested attribution)

Traditionally credited to William of Ockham, but he never stated it as a single maxim and the familiar Latin phrasing was coined by later writers summarising him; the preference for simple explanations over complex ones also predates Ockham in earlier philosophy, so the attribution is a convenient shorthand rather than a settled origin.

Source Simplicity (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)

Particle Physics, Founded Year1932

Particle Physics, Disciplines

Standing

Concerns Founded Year

Currently States 1932

No single founding date is agreed among historians of science. Candidates include 1932 (Carl Anderson's discovery of the positron in cosmic rays, confirming Dirac's prediction of antimatter), June 2 1947 (the Shelter Island Conference, often dated as the birth of modern theoretical high-energy physics), and 1950 (the first elementary particle, the neutral pion, discovered using a particle accelerator rather than cosmic rays). The field is more often described as emerging from a convergence of nuclear physics, cosmic-ray studies and quantum field theory than from a single founding act.

Source The Rise of Particle Physics (arXiv preprint)

Paul Feyerabend, DescriptionPaul Feyerabend was an Austrian-born philosopher of science, born in Vienna on 13 January 1924 and died in Genolier, Switzerland, on 11 February 1994. He held positions at the London School of Economics and, for most of his career from the 1960s onward, the University of California, Berkeley. His 1975 book Against Method: Outline of an Anarchistic Theory of Knowledge argues from detailed case studies in the history of astronomy and physics, most centrally Galileo, that no fixed methodological rule survives contact with how major scientific advances actually happened; scientists who followed the rules of their day as strictly as later textbooks imply would often have discarded the theories now considered their greatest successes. He summarised the resulting position, often shortened to the slogan anything goes, as epistemological anarchism: not that method or evidence do not matter, but that no single rule holds across every context science has actually faced. The position remains one of the most contested in twentieth-century philosophy of science, read by supporters as an honest account of scientific practice and by critics as license for relativism about which claims are worth believing.

Paul Feyerabend, Scientists

Standing

Concerns Description

Currently States Paul Feyerabend was an Austrian-born philosopher of science, born in Vienna on 13 January 1924 and died in Genolier, Switzerland, on 11 February 1994. He held positions at the London School of Economics and, for most of his career from the 1960s onward, the University of California, Berkeley. His 1975 book Against Method: Outline of an Anarchistic Theory of Knowledge argues from detailed case studies in the history of astronomy and physics, most centrally Galileo, that no fixed methodological rule survives contact with how major scientific advances actually happened; scientists who followed the rules of their day as strictly as later textbooks imply would often have discarded the theories now considered their greatest successes. He summarised the resulting position, often shortened to the slogan anything goes, as epistemological anarchism: not that method or evidence do not matter, but that no single rule holds across every context science has actually faced. The position remains one of the most contested in twentieth-century philosophy of science, read by supporters as an honest account of scientific practice and by critics as license for relativism about which claims are worth believing.

Feyerabend's epistemological anarchism, that no methodological rule holds without exception across the history of science, is read by supporters as an honest reckoning with how science actually proceeded and by critics, including working scientists and other philosophers of science, as tipping into relativism about whether any claim can be shown more credible than another; this atlas records the position and the dispute rather than resolving it.

Source Paul Feyerabend (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)

Philosophy of Science, Founded Year1620

Philosophy of Science, Disciplines

Standing

Concerns Founded Year

Currently States 1620

Francis Bacon's Novum Organum (1620) set out an inductive method for acquiring scientific knowledge and is commonly cited as founding philosophy of science as a subject of study; the modern analytic discipline is more often dated to Karl Popper's Logik der Forschung (1934), which reframed the field around falsifiability.

Source Karl Popper (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy), Stephen Thornton

Solid-State Physics, Founded Year1912

Solid-State Physics, Disciplines

Standing

Concerns Founded Year

Currently States 1912

Max von Laue's 1912 discovery that X-rays diffract through crystals, followed within a year by William Henry and William Lawrence Bragg's first crystal structure determinations, opened solid-state physics as a field distinct from general physics. A competing, later origin point is 1947, when John Bardeen, Walter Brattain and William Shockley's invention of the transistor turned semiconductor solid-state physics into a major research and industrial program.

Source 100th Anniversary of the First Crystal Structure Determinations (OUPblog)

Statistical Significance, DescriptionStatistical significance is a measure of how likely an observed result would be if there were really no effect at all, formalised by Ronald Fisher in his 1925 book Statistical Methods for Research Workers around the p-value and the conventional threshold of p less than 0.05. It became the standard test across experimental science for deciding whether a result is worth taking seriously. It is also one of the most criticised tools in modern statistics: a result below the threshold is not the same as a result that matters in practice, the 0.05 cutoff is an arbitrary convention Fisher himself did not intend as a rigid rule, and the American Statistical Association issued a formal 2016 statement warning against treating it as a substitute for judgment; this contested standing is a live thread in the reproducibility crisis entry below.

Statistical Significance, Concepts

Standing

Concerns Description

Currently States Statistical significance is a measure of how likely an observed result would be if there were really no effect at all, formalised by Ronald Fisher in his 1925 book Statistical Methods for Research Workers around the p-value and the conventional threshold of p less than 0.05. It became the standard test across experimental science for deciding whether a result is worth taking seriously. It is also one of the most criticised tools in modern statistics: a result below the threshold is not the same as a result that matters in practice, the 0.05 cutoff is an arbitrary convention Fisher himself did not intend as a rigid rule, and the American Statistical Association issued a formal 2016 statement warning against treating it as a substitute for judgment; this contested standing is a live thread in the reproducibility crisis entry below.

Source Statistical Significance (Britannica)

Statistics, Founded Year1901

Statistics, Disciplines

Standing

Concerns Founded Year

Currently States 1901

Karl Pearson founded the journal Biometrika in 1901, commonly cited as marking statistics' emergence as its own mathematical discipline; Thomas Bayes's posthumously published 1763 essay is an earlier theoretical root, and Pearson did not found the world's first university statistics department, at University College London, until 1911.

Source Statistics (Wikipedia)

Synchrotron, Invented Year1945

Synchrotron, Instruments

Standing

Concerns Invented Year

Currently States 1945

The basic synchrotron design was proposed independently by Vladimir Veksler in the Soviet Union in 1944 and by Edwin McMillan in the United States in 1945; Britannica records the two as independent, simultaneous originators rather than crediting either alone.

Source Synchrotron (Britannica)

The Reproducibility Crisis, DescriptionThe reproducibility crisis is the documented, ongoing finding that a large share of published results across psychology, medicine and other experimental fields cannot be reproduced or replicated when other researchers try. The Open Science Collaboration's 2015 project attempted to replicate 100 psychology studies and reproduced the original result in well under half of them; a 2016 Nature survey of over 1,500 scientists, cited here, found more than 70 percent had failed to reproduce another scientist's experiment. Its causes are debated rather than settled: proposed drivers include publication bias toward positive results, small sample sizes, the misuse of statistical significance as a pass or fail line rather than one piece of evidence, and outright questionable research practices, and researchers disagree about how much of published science the crisis actually touches versus how much is normal, honest variation between studies.

The Reproducibility Crisis, Concepts

Standing

Concerns Description

Currently States The reproducibility crisis is the documented, ongoing finding that a large share of published results across psychology, medicine and other experimental fields cannot be reproduced or replicated when other researchers try. The Open Science Collaboration's 2015 project attempted to replicate 100 psychology studies and reproduced the original result in well under half of them; a 2016 Nature survey of over 1,500 scientists, cited here, found more than 70 percent had failed to reproduce another scientist's experiment. Its causes are debated rather than settled: proposed drivers include publication bias toward positive results, small sample sizes, the misuse of statistical significance as a pass or fail line rather than one piece of evidence, and outright questionable research practices, and researchers disagree about how much of published science the crisis actually touches versus how much is normal, honest variation between studies.

Source 1,500 Scientists Lift the Lid on Reproducibility (Nature), Monya Baker

The Scientific Method, DescriptionThe scientific method is the general name for the loop of observing, forming a testable hypothesis, predicting what that hypothesis implies, and checking the prediction against experiment or further observation, revising or discarding the hypothesis when it fails. It is usually taught as a fixed sequence of steps, but historians and philosophers of science have long argued there is no single method every scientist actually follows: physics, field biology and epidemiology gather and test evidence in genuinely different ways, and figures like Paul Feyerabend argued the very idea of one universal method does not survive contact with the real history of science. This atlas treats it as the family of practices the rest of its concept entries, the controlled trial, peer review, falsifiability, reproducibility, are the working parts of, rather than as one fixed recipe.

The Scientific Method, Concepts

Standing

Concerns Description

Currently States The scientific method is the general name for the loop of observing, forming a testable hypothesis, predicting what that hypothesis implies, and checking the prediction against experiment or further observation, revising or discarding the hypothesis when it fails. It is usually taught as a fixed sequence of steps, but historians and philosophers of science have long argued there is no single method every scientist actually follows: physics, field biology and epidemiology gather and test evidence in genuinely different ways, and figures like Paul Feyerabend argued the very idea of one universal method does not survive contact with the real history of science. This atlas treats it as the family of practices the rest of its concept entries, the controlled trial, peer review, falsifiability, reproducibility, are the working parts of, rather than as one fixed recipe.

Source Scientific Method (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)

The Scientific Method, Proposed ByNo single individual; developed cumulatively over roughly two millennia

The Scientific Method, Concepts

Standing

Concerns Proposed By

Currently States No single individual; developed cumulatively over roughly two millennia

The Stanford Encyclopedia traces contributions across two millennia, from ancient philosophers through medieval scholars to the Scientific Revolution, with no single founding figure or year the field agrees on.

Source Scientific Method (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)

Theory-Ladenness, DescriptionTheory-ladenness is the claim that observation is never the theory-free foundation it is often assumed to be: what a scientist notices, how they describe it, and even what they perceive, are already shaped by the theoretical framework they bring to the looking. The philosopher and historian of science Norwood Russell Hanson set the idea out in his 1958 book Patterns of Discovery, arguing that two scientists holding different theories can look at the very same instrument reading and, in a meaningful sense, see something different in it. Thomas Kuhn's 1962 account of paradigm-bound normal science and Paul Feyerabend's argument that rival theories can be strictly incommensurable both build directly on Hanson's claim, and both are minted as scientist entities on this atlas. How far the claim reaches is itself contested: a strong reading holds that no observation can ever adjudicate between two sufficiently different theories, since each side may describe the very evidence differently, while a weaker and more widely accepted reading holds only that observation is coloured by theory, not that it is powerless to correct or falsify one, a distinction the atlas's own falsifiability entry depends on remaining possible at all.

Theory-Ladenness, Concepts

Standing

Concerns Description

Currently States Theory-ladenness is the claim that observation is never the theory-free foundation it is often assumed to be: what a scientist notices, how they describe it, and even what they perceive, are already shaped by the theoretical framework they bring to the looking. The philosopher and historian of science Norwood Russell Hanson set the idea out in his 1958 book Patterns of Discovery, arguing that two scientists holding different theories can look at the very same instrument reading and, in a meaningful sense, see something different in it. Thomas Kuhn's 1962 account of paradigm-bound normal science and Paul Feyerabend's argument that rival theories can be strictly incommensurable both build directly on Hanson's claim, and both are minted as scientist entities on this atlas. How far the claim reaches is itself contested: a strong reading holds that no observation can ever adjudicate between two sufficiently different theories, since each side may describe the very evidence differently, while a weaker and more widely accepted reading holds only that observation is coloured by theory, not that it is powerless to correct or falsify one, a distinction the atlas's own falsifiability entry depends on remaining possible at all.

A strong reading of theory-ladenness, that rival theories are observationally incommensurable and no shared evidence can adjudicate between them, is a minority position among philosophers of science and is in real tension with falsifiability and the ordinary practice of theory testing this atlas's own concept entries describe; a weaker reading, that observation is coloured by theory without being powerless to correct it, is far more widely accepted, and this atlas records both rather than picking one.

Source Theory and Observation in Science (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)

Thermometer, Invented Year1714

Thermometer, Instruments

Standing

Concerns Invented Year

Currently States 1714

Galileo's open thermoscope of about 1592 is the earliest device to register temperature change but had no fixed scale and vented to open air; Fahrenheit's sealed, scaled mercury thermometer of 1714 is the version usually credited as the first practical, reliable instrument.

Source Thermometer (Britannica)

Van de Graaff Generator, Invented Year1929

Van de Graaff Generator, Instruments

Standing

Concerns Invented Year

Currently States 1929

Van de Graaff built early working versions from the late 1920s; Britannica describes his generator as built in the early 1930s, and the exact year of the first working device is not sharply fixed in the record.

Source Robert Jemison Van de Graaff (Britannica)

Virology, Founded Year1898

Virology, Disciplines

Standing

Concerns Founded Year

Currently States 1898

Ivanovsky observed the filterable tobacco mosaic agent first, in 1892, but read it as a bacterial toxin; Beijerinck reached the same experimental result independently in 1898 and correctly named it a new class of infectious agent, the virus. Sources treat both as co-discoverers, with 1898 marking the recognition of a genuinely new agent and 1892 the first observation of it.

Source Martinus Beijerinck, a Co-Discoverer of Viruses (Hektoen International), Philip Liebson

Zacharias Janssen, DescriptionDutch spectacle maker traditionally credited, alongside Hans Lippershey, with building an early compound microscope around 1590. The claim rests entirely on testimony given in 1655 by his son Johannes, more than two decades after Zacharias died and inconsistent across retellings; historians Van Helden, Dupre, Van Gent and Zuidervaart concluded the son invented the story for fame and financial gain. Even Zacharias's own birth year is uncertain, given variously as 1580 to 1588.

Zacharias Janssen, Scientists

Standing

Concerns Description

Currently States Dutch spectacle maker traditionally credited, alongside Hans Lippershey, with building an early compound microscope around 1590. The claim rests entirely on testimony given in 1655 by his son Johannes, more than two decades after Zacharias died and inconsistent across retellings; historians Van Helden, Dupre, Van Gent and Zuidervaart concluded the son invented the story for fame and financial gain. Even Zacharias's own birth year is uncertain, given variously as 1580 to 1588.

The attribution itself is the subject of the dispute, not merely the date.

Source Zacharias Janssen (Wikipedia)

Zoology, Founded Year1758

Zoology, Disciplines

Standing

Concerns Founded Year

Currently States 1758

No single founding date is agreed. Aristotle is called the father of zoology for Historia Animalium in the fourth century BCE, the first systematic animal classification; Linnaeus's 1758 tenth edition of Systema Naturae is recorded here because it is fixed by the International Code of Zoological Nomenclature as the actual starting point of zoological nomenclature; and Georges Cuvier's early nineteenth century work founded comparative anatomy and vertebrate paleontology as rigorous sub-disciplines.

Source Article 3, Starting Point (International Code of Zoological Nomenclature)

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