Scientific Epistemology
The core DNA of science lies in how we engage with fundamental questions—how we conceive of the practice of research, and the methods through which we operate in the laboratory. To change science, we must first be willing to rethink how it is done.
Scientific Methodology
The Scientific Method™ has become one of the most powerful myths of modern science. Yet the history of discovery tells a far stranger story. We seek to explore new modes of inquiry, experimentation, and reasoning that preserve scientific rigor while moving beyond the narrow methodological orthodoxy inherited from the twentieth century.
Metascience
Metascience encapsulates much of our practical effort toward examining the preceding areas of inquiry. As a relatively young field, it turns the scientific enterprise back upon itself, placing a magnifying glass over the practices, cultures, and methodologies that shape research within the laboratory. We have a particular interest in examining this substrate upon which modern science rests, beginning with the reproducibility crisis and other related questions as a natural point of departure.
Philosophy of Science
Questions surrounding evidence, explanation, realism, reductionism, emergence, and scientific progress have quietly shaped every experiment ever conducted. Yet philosophical concerns are often neglected in the prevailing culture. We believe the future of science depends upon taking these fundamental questions more seriously.
Current Work
Procedural Observability
Our latest work has centered around Procedural Observability, using cameras, computer vision, and artificial intelligence to observe real-time experiments conducted at the laboratory bench, primarily within the life sciences, while generating an auditable trace of researcher actions, object interactions, and environmental sensor readings throughout the end-to-end process of an experiment.
Thesis. Wet-lab experiments are fundamentally messy, and sometimes chaotic, involving varying degrees of tacit knowledge possessed by researchers. Many of the variables that ultimately shape an experiment are therefore never sufficiently captured within polished scientific artifacts such as laboratory notebooks or publications.
One practical implication is reproducibility. When substantial portions of an experiment's context are abstracted away, it can become increasingly difficult, and at times impossible, for another laboratory to faithfully reproduce the work. We see this hidden procedural layer as one contributing factor to the broader reproducibility crisis.
Yet the implications extend beyond reproducibility alone. It is precisely this abstraction of scientific output that may have gradually led us to believe science itself is a perfectly smooth, linear process of executing prescribed methodological steps. The reality inside the laboratory is something altogether different. It is messy, dynamic, uncertain, and continually shaped by human judgment.
Through our for-profit organization, Heterodox Labs, we developed an early prototype system called Experiment Engine, which is currently undergoing active testing within life sciences laboratories. In parallel, the Heterodox Research Society has employed the system for metascientific research.
Human-Centered Augmentation
We also think this can serve as a foundation for human-centered augmentation research, rather than the end-to-end robotic laboratory automation approaches that have become highly popular in recent years. Through augmentation, the human remains an agent of chaos, variability, and creativity that has historically fueled the scientific enterprise.
It is our aim to reveal the true nature of scientific research, and in doing so illuminate a reality that has otherwise remained hidden.