THE WONDERFUL WIZARD OF tUNA!

When I first saw this title for one of our speakers, I thought, Tuna? Yum! Magic with tuna? Uhhhh...
Sooo glad he didn't make a tuna can disappear before our very eyes and instead did something actually cool: he froze his index finger and smashed it with a hammer. 0.o BUT DON'T WORRY, FOLKS! It was just a hot dog. (I was sitting in the front row, and Dr. Mike just so happened to catch the appalled look on my face as he tested to see it his "finger" was frozen just right. Then, with a devil-may-care grin, he pounded the hammer on his frozen limb and pulverized the contents of his glove. He came over to me and said, "It's all right. You have nothing to worry about!" I was thinking to myself, Oh, sure, it's just a finger. Then, the rascal took of his glove and demonstrated his actual pointer and the impaled hot dog. OH... MY... GOSH.)
After his amazing display of sorcery, the Wizard of tUNA turned back into Dr. Mike, a guy in a lab coat. He said that he didn't know what values were in science, but I have a feeling he did. First, he described science as something objective to reality dealing with facts whose methods lead to truth. The works and foibles of humans, he joked, were scientists.
Scientists have epistemic values, or philosophy concerned with the origin of nature, methods and limits of knowledge. Scientists also have cultural values, each to his own. These impact what studies are pursued and set ethical guidelines. Both types of values emerge from science and are redistributed into culture/ society.
Dr. Mike taught us about Occam's Razor-if more than one explanation can equally well satisfy a set of observations, then scientists adopt the simplest explanation. For example, it was not a little elf that made the liquid in the bottle turn blue, but something much more simple: two chemicals mixing when the bottle was shaken.

• Scientists value simplicity (really? So... what about all those chemical formulas?)
• reliability
•  testability 
• accuracy 
• precision 
• generality 
• heuristic power (such as discovery and inventiveness) 
• novelty 
• controlled and unbiased observation
•  peer review
• confirmation of prediction
• repeatability and statistics 
• universalism 
• communism (GASP!), as in, sharing knowledge (oh, okay.)
• etc

What they do not value is error, fraud and pseudoscience.


SO ANYWAY, a quote 'fore parting:
"It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education."
-Albert Einstein