Going Amiss In Experimental Research

• Corporate Author: SpringerLink (Online service)
• Other Authors: Hon, Giora (Editor), Schickore, Jutta (Editor), Steinle, Friedrich (Editor)
• Format: Electronic eBook
• Language: English
• Published: Dordrecht : Springer Netherlands, 2009.
• Series: Boston Studies In The Philosophy Of Science ; 267
• Subjects: Philosophy.; History.; Science.; Philosophy and science.; Philosophy of Science.; History of Science.; Science, general.

Like any goal-oriented procedure, experiment is subject to many kinds of failures. These failures have a variety of features, depending on the particulars of their sources. For the experimenter these pitfalls should be avoided and their effects minimized. For the historian-philosopher of science and...

Table of Contents:

• Introduction: Mapping “Going Amiss”
• Introduction: Mapping “Going Amiss”
• Error as an Object of Study
• Error: The Long Neglect, the One-Sided View, and a Typology
• Error as Historiographical Challenge: The Infamous Globule Hypothesis
• Learning From Error
• Learning Without Error
• Living Extremely Flat: The Life of an Automaton; John von Neumann’s Conception of Error of (in)Animate Systems
• Concepts and Dead Ends
• Experimental Reorientations
• Concepts from the Bench: Hans Krebs, Kurt Henseleit and the Urea Cycle
• How Experiments Make Concepts Fail: Faraday and Magnetic Curves
• A Pioneer Who Never Got It Right: James Dewar and the Elusive Phenomena of Cold
• Instrumental Artifacts
• Distinguishing Real Results from Instrumental Artifacts: The Case of the Missing Rain
• Going Right and Making It Wrong: The Reception of Fizeau’s Ether-Drift Experiment of 1859
• The Spectrum of ? Decay: Continuous or Discrete? A Variety of Errors in Experimental Investigation
• Surprise and Puzzlement
• The Scent of Filth: Experiments, Waste, and the Set-Up
• In the Thick of Organic Matter.