For our final meeting for this semester, we will be discussing an article by Mike Marder, a physicists, writing for a biologist audience.  He points out that there are significant cultural differences between how science is practiced by physicists and biologists, and this has implications for interdisciplinary education.   Even how we define the  "nature of science" reflects our own disciplines.  For example, those of you who do hypothesis-driven research would be shocked that the word "hypothesis" almost never appears in a physics grant proposal.  And as the article points out, "Students arrive in college with the strong intuition that science requires a hypothesis... other ways of spending time are not science."  (To be clear, the article isn't arguing that one approach is better than the other.)

As always, we will be meeting in Rollins Research Center 452 @ 1p on Thursday December 10th.

Find the paper here 

Paper URL:  http://www.lifescied.org/content/12/2/148.full