Research

In daily life, most of us lack the cognitive resources to make judgements on scientific matters by ourselves. Often, we reach our judgements by relying on testimony of others. This is captured by the concept of epistemic deference: one defers one's belief on a matter to others' testimony. When it comes to scientific matters, most of us don't just defer to anyone's testimony: one first identifies trustworthy informants on the matter and defers to their testimony only. Conventional literature on this topic is dominantly concerned with highly idealised contexts and falls silent on non-ideal ones. I show this with a case study of COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy in China. In this paper, I make a preliminary attempt to provide alternative guidance for problematic environments with politicized scientific institutions and heavy information censorship such as China. I argue that the 'dissent scouting' requirement is a helpful addition in epistemically problematic environments.

Liquid scintillators are typically composed from organic compounds dissolved in organic solvents. However, usage of such material is often restricted due to fire safety and environmental reasons. Because of this, R&D of water-based liquid scintillators is of extreme relevance; yet, no such scintillators have been made commercially available as yet. Here, we investigate an alternative, water-based quantum dots liquid scintillator. Pre-determined and controllable optical properties of the quantum dots, as well as the existence of large libraries of established protocols for their dispersion in aqueous solutions, make them an attractive option for nuclear and particle physics applications. We characterize the optical properties of water-based quantum dots liquid scintillator and find that most of its optical properties are preserved upon quantum dots' phase transfer into water, through the addition of an oleic acid hydrophilic layer. Using the developed scintillator, the time and charge responses from atmospheric muons are measured, highlighting the practical viability of water-based quantum dots liquid scintillators for nuclear and particle physics, special interest on neutrino physics.