It’s not often you hear a scientist praise the virtues of failure, but this week’s guest on the Inquiring Minds podcast is no ordinary scientist. Stuart Firestein, who previously wrote a book about ...

Kicking off with an examination of astrology, What Science Says hopes to draw in readers open to reevaluating their beliefs ...

Failure is nothing to disparage — at least in research. Indeed, it’s one of the principal “engines that propel science forward,” argues Stuart Firestein in the provocative new book Failure. A ...

Ignorance and science are, at best, strange bedfellows. Their juxtaposition has the ring of an oxymoron. But Stuart Firestein, onetime stage manager and theater director, now neurobiological ...

Stuart Firestein is the Professor and Chair of the Department of Biological Sciences at Columbia University, where his highly popular course on ignorance invites working scientists to come talk to ...

In his excellent book Ignorance: How It Drives Science, Stuart Firestein writes: Scientists don't concentrate on what they know, which is considerable but also minuscule, but rather on what they don't ...

Scientists do not sit in the light looking for facts they know exist, waiting to be discovered, says Firestein, chair of the biological sciences departments at Columbia University. Rather, the ...