What powered Einstein’s discoveries? Was it asking naïve questions, stubbornly? Was it a mischievous urge to break rules? Was it the destructive power of operational thinking? It was none of these. Rather, Einstein made his discoveries through lengthy, mundane investigations, pursued with tenacity and discipline. We have been led to think otherwise in part through Einstein’s brilliance at recou...

We present a system for automatically discovering meronyms (noun pairs in a part-whole relationship) from text corpora. More precisely, our system begins by parsing and extracting dependency paths similar to (but not the same as) those used by (Snow et al., 2004). For each noun pair we calculate an empirical distribution over dependency relations, which are then used as features of a Support Ve...

In traditional exerimental sciences one forms hypotheses explaining an empirical sample of some natural phenomenon. The hypothesis discovery process can in certain cases be automated using machine learning algorithms. I discuss some consequences of viewing scientific discovery, primarily computer based, itself as a natural phenomenon, whose empirical sample may be analyzed or hypothesized about...