Editorial

Abstract

Today we cannot speak of the scientific community as a tightly homogeneous group. Scientific practice is based more and more on the heterogeneity of its agents, on the multitude of contributions that shape each field of knowledge, on the diversity of scientists and their networks, but also on a great variety of shapes and formulas for communication. Scientific advances follow each other faster and faster every day, and having such plural points of views and agents comes with more complexity than ever when disseminating and explaining them. This makes it difficult to transmit science to the general public with the required rigour and depth of analysis. One of the long-standing objectives of Mètode Science Studies Journal is to contribute to the placid analysis of science, which requires taking some distance but also keeping our attention on the objective, lest we lose sight of science news and novelties. The volume we are publishing this year reflects that need. It presents some of the challenges science must face immediately here and now and shows how science keeps trying to permeate society. Among these pages, the reader will find a series of texts delving on the challenges and open questions in mathematics for the next decades; following these documents, we take a look back at our past thanks to palaeontology, to understand how this discipline studies our origins in order to help us understand our present. The new Mètode SSJ issue includes also a monograph on the worrisome presence and penetration of pseudoscience in our society and an analysis of how literature has discussed health and disease. A volume collecting a plurality of perspectives to offer the reader tools to take in the complexity of science. A volume to think about science. A volume – ultimately – to make science.

Martí Domínguez. Editor-in-chief of Mètode SSJ.