Chris Reeve
Chris Reeve | |
|---|---|
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| Residence | San Francisco, CA, United States |
| Alma mater | Carnegie Mellon University |
| Known for | Electric Universe advocacy, scientific social networking |
| Scientific career | |
| Fields | Electric Universe, science education, science communication |
Chris Reeve is an American writer, engineer, and science-education advocate associated with the Electric Universe and plasma cosmology movements. He is known for his commentaries defending unconventional cosmological ideas, for his advocacy of a "controversy-first" approach to science instruction, and for his effort to build an online platform for crowdsourcing information about scientific controversies.
Biography
Reeve holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Carnegie Mellon University. He is based in San Francisco, California. Over a period of years he spent, by his own account, thousands of hours discussing the Electric Universe on scientific and other online forums, and he has been described within the movement as one of its philosophical defenders.
Reeve taught himself computer programming for the specific purpose of building a platform to crowdsource information about scientific controversies. He has maintained a Patreon page dedicated to the "controversies of science," through which he supports this work.
Work
Reeve is a contributor to the Thunderbolts Project, the volunteer organization that promotes the Electric Universe. His writing for the project includes the essay "Science as a Personal Journey" (2017) and articles on science education, among them "What We Failed to Learn from the Moonshot" and "Controversy-First Science Instruction."
A recurring theme in his writing is the argument that scientific controversies should be presented to students as open-ended clashes of competing worldviews, rather than as settled questions with predetermined answers. He contends that treating controversies in this way sharpens critical thinking and develops habits of higher-order reasoning.
Reeve has described his broader project as the creation of a scientific social network built on concept mapping, intended to organize and represent the structure of scientific debates. At the Thunderbolts Project's EU2012 conference he participated as a panelist in a discussion on the role of maverick scientists and the risks of what proponents term artificial consensus.
External links
- "Science as a Personal Journey" at the Thunderbolts Project
- Controversies of Science (Patreon)