Science Magazine embraces replication (and gets its nose bloodied)

Science has put its money where its mouth is.  In this week's issue, the editor Jeremy Berg writes about "Replication Challenges".  They have published not one, but three NIH-funded replication studies of an earlier paper.  That is the good news.  The bad news is that a sister journal published a 10-patient human clinical trial, also based on the original paper, in parallel with the 3 replication studies.  Like all 3 replication studies, the human study was not able to reproduce the effect claimed in the original paper.

Can you see why journals may be reluctant to press forward with publishing replication studies?  They can certainly get their noses bloodied.  DTLR commends the editor of Science for restating his commitment to publishing replication studies.

Jerry Gollub, 1944-2019

The first substantive post I wrote for this blog, back in 2013, was a commentary on a paper of Jerry Gollub's, on continuum mechanics in physics education.  I learned recently that sadly, Dr. Gollub lost his life earlier this summer.  An obituary by his renowned collaborator, Harry Swinney, has been posted at Physics Today.  See also this obituary posted at his institution, Haverford College.  I never met or corresponded with Dr. Gollub, but his work has been an influence on mine since I was a junior in college, when I studied from his book with Gregory L. Baker, Chaotic Dynamics:  An Introduction.  In graduate school, the book he edited with Swinney, Hydrodynamic Instabilities and the Transition to Turbulence, was of equal importance to my work.  In my student days, I had these books checked out "long term" from the library, and eventually acquired copies of my own.  DTLR joins the physics and fluid mechanics communities in mourning the loss of this inspiring scientist. 

Since I completed my doctoral thesis in 2001, several other titans I cited in it have passed.  These include V. I. Arnol'd (1937-2010), Robert P. Behringer (1948-2018), Philip G. Drazin (1934-2002), Louis N. Howard (1929-2015), Daniel D. Joseph (1929-2011), Leo P. Kadanoff (1937-2015), E. Lothar Koschmieder (1929-2017), Robert Kraichnan (1928-2008), Olga Ladyzhenskaya (1922-2004), Edward N. Lorenz (1917-2008), John L. Lumley (1930-2015), Steven R. Orszag (1943-2011), William Hill Reid (1926-2016), Philip G. Saffman (1931-2008), James B. Serrin (1926-2012), and Norman J. Zabusky (1929-2018).  There may certainly be others I am not aware of.

References

G. L. Baker and  J. P. Gollub, 1996:  Chaotic Dynamics:  An Introduction.  Second edition.  New York:  Cambridge University Press.  (First edition, 1990.)

H. L. Swinney and J. P. Gollub (eds.), 1985:  Hydrodynamic Instabilities and the Transition to Turbulence.  Second edition.  Topics in Applied Physics, Vol. 45.  Berlin:  Springer.  (First edition, 1981.)

The New Yorker weighs in on statistics

Hannah Fry writes in the New Yorker this month about the benefits and pitfalls of statistics.  Highly recommended.