How Could Science be Different?

Read the Winning Essays Here

This essay competition is now closed. Read the Winning Essays Here

Competition Timeline

February 14, 2023, Contest Announced

February 28, 2023, Open to Submissions

Extended deadline! May 3, 2023, at 10 AM US EDT, Submissions Closed

Extended deadline! until May 24, 2023, Competition Rating Period

May 25, 2023, to July 11, 2023, Competition Judges Evaluation Period

By July 12, 2023, Finalists Announced; Names Revealed

How could science have emerged differently?

Galileo claimed that the book of nature is written in mathematics, and indeed the discipline that he, Newton, and other 17th-century natural philosophers and mathematicians founded took on a particular form: mathematical laws expressing necessary relations between elements of the world, largely expressed in differential equations governing the time evolution of the state of the world. Their insights were often based on data collected and intellectual leaps made by people across the globe and from multiple societies.

Natural philosophy evolved into physics, chemistry, biology, and so on, but largely with this paradigm at its core, such that many believe that at some fundamental level nature is in direct correspondence to mathematics—and in particular, some mathematics that we know or can learn—that can (in principle, at least) be probed by experiment. We’ve also seen the communication of science develop in a particular way: largely through written books and papers, predominantly by scholars at universities, that are reviewed, edited, and published in a formal process, primarily by (especially in modern times) for-profit publication companies.

Could it have been otherwise? Should it be otherwise now?

In this Competition, we invite creative and thought-provoking essays addressing science itself by considering the questions: To what degree is the science we have today necessarily the way it is, versus contingent on the particular history and human societies in which it originated? What could a science free of prejudice and bigotry have looked like, what can it look like in the future? And how could the process of science be better?

Questions to Consider:

How could science be different?

To what degree does (or must) math come before physics versus being created to address questions in physics? Could we have had centuries of advanced mathematics before physics came to be? Or is the opposite possible?
Could there be very different sets of mathematics—potentially based on different axiom choices—that support science comparable in power to the way it is now?
Could scientific modeling be done on a basis other than mathematics, such as clockwork constructions or other analog models?
What would it be like if science were fundamentally based on discrete computation, cellular automata, and the like, rather than differential questions?
If we meet technologically advanced aliens, how similar is their physics (or mathematics) likely to be? How different could it be?
Is it possible to have technology comparable to current human technology without scientific reasoning of a type we would recognize? E.g., could an incredibly powerful artificial or biological neural network predict or design elements of reality “unconsciously” without models, theories, and mathematical reasoning of the type we do? (We can note that nature has solved many problems by trial and error rather than understanding and design.)
Could different branches of science have evolved at different rates? In such a case, what would have happened if e.g., biology had advanced rapidly before the development of physics?
In another historical timeline, or in a fully egalitarian culture without prejudice and bigotry, how could it have been different? How would one make it different now?

How could science be better?

How and why are scientific theories guided by data, simulation, prediction, consistency, beauty, simplicity, breadth, and so on? What are essential, and what are distractions?
Are there significant elements that the current practice of science is missing that would make it much more effective, or perhaps as effective but very different?
Are there significant changes to the institutions and ways of learning, journals, and other way of communicating, etc., that would make science more effective and equitable?
Suppose science were different—and better—decades from now. How? In such a future, how does publication (if it happens) work? How do universities (or their replacements) work?

Competition Update: We're making it anonymous!

As we consider How Could Science be Different, FQxI is experimenting with how different our Competitions can be: All submissions will be anonymous* during the public reading and judging period. (An FQxI personnel who is not involved in the judging will hold a record of names, biographical details, and whether or not the entrant is an FQxI member.)

Essays complying with the rules and satisfying minimal relevance and quality criteria will be automatically posted on FQxI’s website anonymously; after Prizes are awarded, Competition Winners will be highlighted as such, with their names revealed. At the end of the Competition, the name and biographical info for each entrant will be shared publicly, unless indicated otherwise on the submission form.

*Once winners are chosen by the judging panels, all essay author names will be revealed unless indicated otherwise in the submission form. We request that all participants do their best to maintain anonymity during the competition itself.

FQxI thanks the Fetzer Franklin Fund and The Peter and Patricia Gruber Foundation for their support of this Competition.