Introducing ‘The Finding’

Back in July I promised you a new service to fill the void left by the decision to close Research Professional News on 31 December. This note is to tell you what it will be called, and in doing so to explain its purpose.

Up front, as the person who founded Research Professional, I want to say that we are here to serve our readers and this is a purpose we take very seriously indeed. You will be hearing a lot about it in the weeks to come, especially at the sales presentations in November where we will be unveiling the new service. Our remit is research, higher education and industrial strategy (including questions of place) and, put simply, you will be getting everything you love about Research Professional News plus a whole lot more in a modern, easy-to-use package that will be useful across your entire organisation. However, the new service is emerging from a deeper sense of purpose, which is what this post is about.

There is a kind of attitude to the world that is empirical, curious, critical and itself open to criticism. This is what people are talking about when they celebrate the challenge function in science but it applies as much to engineering and swathes of the humanities today, not to mention business and government. It is a kind of pragmatic epistemic humility. It is the foundation of the incredible progress humanity has made in recent centuries in science, technology and medicine. And it is a basic, largely unspoken assumption at the heart of our democracy.

For the first half of my life, this attitude was so entrenched that it seemed almost superfluous to mention it. But by the 1990s that understanding, like the broader post-war politics of consensus, was beginning to break down. Since then the problems have only grown and today it is obvious that this precious attitude is under siege in many parts of the world.

Our deepest purpose then is to champion and defend an attitude of empirical criticality. This means we are taking sides – not in an ideological or party political way but in an epistemic one. The side we are taking is that of scientists, colleagues in the humanities, and of people throughout society who share this basic stance towards the world.

One way our commitment emerges in a practical way is in the form of journalistic ethics, which are as important to us as research ethics are to any university. We can't, for example, have a situation where some politicians or governments get preferential treatment.

Opticks

Now, how does all this turn into a name for a publication?

If you want to pick a specific event as the start of the era shaped by this attitude, one place to start is with science. And an obvious candidate for the start of the scientific era is the publication of Opticks by Isaac Newton in London on 12 February 1704. For decades previously Newton had been investigating light, including by pushing a blunt needle against the back of his eyeball to find out what happened. In Opticks all that work was digested and presented in what we now understand as the scientific way. It is empirical and quantitative. There is a rigorous use of hypotheses and evidence to establish facts. The set up of the experiments is described exactly with diagrams, making them reproducible. [2]

Since then there has been the most incredible unfolding of inquiry and discovery. Today the word we usually use for that activity is “research” but there is another way of talking about it that better captures its vastness and relentlessness, and this is what we have taken for our title – The Finding.

Living our values

This approach to the world is reflected in the visual language we are adopting. There are three elements of this that you will see a lot of.

The website we are developing for you at thefinding.news leans heavily on Inter, a contemporary typeface chosen for its flexibility and readability. It is part of a general effort to make sure that all readers can easily find and read what they need on the website. Inter is a workhorse of the online world today and often, including on our website, it is used in light variants. However, in the era of AI slop, that familiar aesthetic is a double-edged sword and for the masthead we wanted something that spoke more obviously of human effort. To find it, we have leaned back towards the age of print, pulled out one of the heaviest weights available and put it on very tight tracking. Here is the result:

We have also adopted two elements that can be traced back to Opticks.

The first is a counter that goes back to the day of the book’s publication. As I write this, it stands at 117,843 days since then, though you will of course see a higher number.

This is a calculation that is somewhat arbitrary but meaningful nonetheless. It reminds us that we are all participants in the momentous, epochal unfolding that is the Finding.

The second is this pattern of five stripes:

All over the world, children today are taught that there are seven colours in a rainbow, a habit that can be traced back to Opticks. There, not only did Newton introduce the idea of a colour wheel based on the seven, he also set out a general mathematical system for calculating the colour that would be yielded by different mixtures of coloured light. It works.

Yet when Newton first articulated the idea that everyday light was composed of a small number of primary colours, he didn’t originally reach for the number seven. When he was delivering lectures in Cambridge in 1670, he noted there were five: “rubrum [styled red in Opticks], flavum [yellow], viridem [green], caeruleum [blew] et violaceum [violet-purple]” [3]. His reasons for subsequently moving from five to seven were more aesthetic, even mystical, than empirical; with orange and indigo included as primaries, he could draw a parallel with the musical octave [4].

The stripes in the block above are our rendering of an illustration of the spectrum Newton could have come up with in 1670 using the inks available to him at the time. They remind us that the truths of science often emerge in a halting and partial fashion, that mathematics can be abused to imbue arbitrary ideas with spurious authority, that the humanities (in this case the history of science) have much to offer, and that even the work of the most eminent researchers deserves pitiless scrutiny.

At a practical level, the news team's role is to report on what is going on, to analyse it and explain its ramifications. This gives you actionable intelligence and saves you from planning for yesterday's world. In this, we use the five colours to distinguish and explain the different elements of our coverage:

• Red - Decisions of governments, agencies, companies, universities and all the other organisations involved in research, higher education and industrial strategy
• Yellow – Decisions specifically about the flow of money, from Spending Review to grant
• Green – Data that describes our world
• Blew – Context such as social attitudes, the economy and the march of technology
• Violet-purple – Discussion and debate around all of the above.

In short, The Finding is defined by its values, which are at root a passion for truth. We believe in seeking out empirical evidence, adopting a curious and critical stance, showing our working – and in championing those individuals and institutions that work in the same way, often today under great duress.

Now, back to the task of building an incredible service for the 2030s and beyond...

Updated 12 October

Find out what’s in The Finding – before it’s too late

The Finding will be unveiled in sales presentations in early November. So if you are looking for sector intelligence when Research Professional News closes in December, book yourself in by emailing us via the button below.

Housekeeping for people who have already registered for email updates: The Finding is located on the internet at thefinding.news. The website that was at theresearchdesk.co.uk has been moved over to this domain. However, for now, you will receive updates still from theresesearchdesk.co.uk.

References

[1] Francis Fukuyama, Elon Musk and the Decline of Western Civilization, Persuasion 2025.

[2] David Wootton, The Invention of Science: A New History of the Scientific Revolution, Penguin 2016.

[3] Alan Shapiro, The Optical Papers of Isaac Newton, Volume 1: The Optical Lectures, 1670–1672, Cambridge University Press 1984. Page 436.

[4] David Topper, Newton on the number of colours in the spectrum,
Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A, Volume 21, Issue 2, 1990, Pages 269-279.