The new NDT series Ideas, Conjectures and Refutations (ICR): elegance in nephrology research.

The new NDT series Ideas, Conjectures and Refutations (ICR): elegance in nephrology research In this issue of NDT, we inaugurate the new series of papers Ideas, Conjectures and Refutations (ICR). This new feature of our journal is sister to Polar Views in Nephrology and aims at creating a special space to host novel scientific ideas, amenable to empirical falsification and well-reasoned proposals for dismissing old hypotheses and theories on the basis of new scientific evidence. The title intentionally echoes the Popperian philosophical masterpiece " Conjectures and Refutations ". Even though new theories of scientific knowledge have been produced , science in biology and in medicine remains largely Popperian, and the principle of falsification profoundly informs basic and clinical research and remains central for adjudicating the " provisional truth " of scientific theories. In launching this new series, I am very pleased that Professor Eberhard Ritz, an Editor Emeritus of NDT who did so much to establish the reputation of our Journal, has accepted to lead the series. He has already produced a list of very stimulating issues to dissect in this new feature of NDT, and I am confident that our readership will enjoy Ideas, Conjectures and Refutations papers. The inaugural paper of ICR is an essay by Marco Nathan, a young philosopher at Denver University, and Diego Brancaccio, a well-known clinical investigator and science manager, focus-ing on elegance in science. In introducing their reasoning, these authors say that " we fall short of rigorous definitions of elegance per se and of elegant science " and tactfully adopt a nice, minimalist approach to the issue. They make an attempt at examining the importance of " perceived " elegance in modern science by making examples taken within the nephrology realm. They equate " elegance " to concepts like knowledge, justice, or probability , concepts that defy universally accepted definitions. In other words, they consider " elegance " as an inherent constituent of thought. I in part dissent with this view because, across diverse areas of quantitative research – from quantum statistics to biology and medicine, " elegance " is almost synonymous to simplicity. In general, scientists and philosophers believe that, at equal explanatory power, simpler theories are preferable. Theoretical simplicity–or elegance–is a measure of terseness and con-cision. E = mc 2 is a luminous example of ingenious simplicity. Occam's Razor, i.e. a principle of logical parsimony used in problem-solving, clearly establishes …