Academic Buzzwords
According to Thomas Kuhn, this word describes the overarching framework that guides normal scientific research — until it collapses under new evidence.
What is a paradigm?
This prominent professor at Harvard studies the history of medicine and the sciences of consciousness — tackling mind-body medicine from a humanities lens.
Who is Anne Harrington?
This co-discoverer of DNA’s structure later became a Harvard professor and wrote a bestselling memoir about it.
Who is James Watson?
This revolutionary 21st-century gene-editing tool made genetic engineering nearly as easy as editing text.
What is CRISPR?
Long before Excel spreadsheets, the Babylonians kept astronomical records and math problems on this medium.
What are clay tablets?
Historians of science love to say this when talking about the study of how scientific knowledge is produced.
What is epistemology?
This Harvard historian specializes in the global contexts of Chinese and Japanese science and industry, exploring how innovation travelled across borders in East Asia’s modern era.
Who is Victor Seow?
This Harvard student spent more time in the computer lab than in class — and later built a small company called Microsoft.
Who is Bill Gates?
This 19-year-old author’s 1818 novel about reanimation and electricity arguably invented science fiction itself.
Who is Mary Shelley?
This ancient Greek philosopher proposed that all matter was made of indivisible units — nearly 2,000 years before modern atomic theory caught on.
Who is Democritus?
Philosophers use this word (starting with an "o") for the study of what exists — but in most papers, it mostly means “what you claim things are.”
What is ontology?
This Harvard faculty member examines how science and medicine shaped Latin America’s culture and public health, especially via scientific and medical exchange across borders.
Who is Gabriela Soto Laveaga?
While running weather simulations at MIT, this Harvard alum realized that rounding one number slightly differently could change the entire forecast — chaos theory was born, along with the term "butterfly effect"
Who is Edward Lorenz?
This French novelist imagined electric submarines, deep-sea travel, and even spaceflight long before they were possible.
Who is Jules Verne?
Long before Apple and IBM, this 19th-century polymath designed the Analytical Engine — a mechanical general-purpose computer that was never completed in his lifetime.
Who is Charles Babbage?
Bruno Latour turned this term into a star, arguing that we should study both people and instruments as part of science-making networks.
What is an actor-network (or Actor-Network Theory)?
This Harvard professor of early-modern science authored Forbidden Knowledge on how medical books were censored in Renaissance Italy — and now leads the collection of historical scientific instruments at Harvard.
Who is Hannah Marcus?
At Harvard, this psychologist studied how rewards and punishments shape behavior — using rats, pigeons, and the occasional grad student.
Who is B.F. Skinner?
Before NASA dreamed of Alcubierre metrics, this TV franchise made “warp speed” a household term.
What is Star Trek?
Fifty years before Darwin, this French naturalist proposed that species evolve over time — though he thought they did it by “use and disuse,” not natural selection.
Who is Jean-Baptiste Lamarck?
This buzzword, starting with a "p", reminds us that all knowledge depends on where you stand — physically, socially, politically.
What is positionality?
This Harvard assistant professor researches how post-colonial physician migration from Asia to the U.S. became embedded in global health systems and changed American medicine.
Who is Eram Alam?
This Harvard biologist helped popularize sociobiology — and got into legendary debates with Stephen Jay Gould about the role of genes in behavior.
Who is E.O. Wilson?
This 1950's mathematician and computer scientist wrote about thinking machines and asked whether they could ever be considered intelligent — decades before AI existed.
Who is Alan Turing?
Before germs were even discovered, this 17th-century draper looked through his homemade lenses and saw what he called “animalcules.”
Who is Antonie van Leeuwenhoek?