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BBC Radio 3 is a radio channel that started transmitting on the 30th September 1967. It replaced Third Programme.

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The Essay Podcast

The Essay

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Factual: Arts, Culture & the Media

Essays from leading writers on arts, history, philosophy, science, religion and beyond.

Leading writers on arts, history, philosophy, science, religion and beyond, themed across a week - insight, opinion and intellectual surprise.

The Essay: The Book that Changed Me

The Essay: The Book that Changed Me: Episode 5: Sir Paul Nurse on Conjectures and Refutations

The Book that Changed Me

Episode 5

Episode 5: Sir Paul Nurse on Conjectures and Refutations

Sir Paul Nurse on Conjectures and Refutations

BBC Radio 3 - The Essay, The Book that Changed Me, Sir Paul Nurse on Conjectures and RefutationsClose menu

Geneticist Sir Paul Nurse discusses the book Conjectures and Refutations by Karl Popper.

Geneticist and president of the Royal Society Sir Paul Nurse discusses the book Conjectures and Refutations by Karl Popper and how it rescued his career as a research scientist.

Nobel Prize-winning geneticist Sir Paul Nurse explains how Karl Popper's "Conjectures and Refutations" rescued his career as a research scientist. He read it at a time when he was dispirited by his experimental research methods. Popper's work "helped me out of my intellectual crisis," he says. "It showed me a way to think about my experiments and how to use them to develop more general scientific ideas." The philosopher recommended a new way of thinking about what to study, based on "intuitive leaps of the imagination". This procedure - of a cycle of bold conjectures, which are tested and refuted - dramatically liberated Sir Paul's thinking about how to advance scientific knowledge.
Producer: Smita Patel.

Live music and the arts: broadcasts more live music than any other radio network. Classical music is its core. Genres include world and new music, jazz, speech and drama.

People involved in the arts discuss the books that inspired them in their careers

Series in which people involved in the arts discuss the books that inspired them in their careers

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The Book that Changed Me

Episode 5: Sir Paul Nurse on Conjectures and Refutations

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