Universal Principles That Apply Across Domains

What has been corrected on this page?

Every accepted correction to this page is recorded with the exact change, so readers can see how the page improved over time.

1. 29 July 2026 · corrected by Emir Baycan

   Corrected a minor institutional misattribution for physicist Per Bak and softened an overstated claim about Didier Sornette's scientifically contested crash-prediction research, presenting it as disputed rather than settled fact.

   What the page claimed

   Article stated physicist Per Bak was at the Niels Bohr Institute when he published the 1987 self-organized criticality paper, when he was actually at Brookhaven National Laboratory at that time (he moved to the Niels Bohr Institute later in his career). It also stated as settled fact that Didier Sornette's log-periodic power law model 'successfully identified the approximate timing' of the 2000 dot-com crash and 2006 housing peak in advance, without noting that this claim is genuinely disputed within economics and econophysics - critics argue the apparent successes rely on cherry-picked cases and after-the-fact parameter adjustment rather than rigorous advance prediction.

   What was corrected

   Bak's affiliation corrected to Brookhaven National Laboratory for the 1987 paper, noting his later move to the Niels Bohr Institute. The Sornette passage rewritten to accurately describe his claims as claims, while noting the real, ongoing scientific controversy over whether the method genuinely predicts crashes in advance or relies on cherry-picked hindsight.

   Why: Independent verification found this was the cleanest article checked in this entire batch - 4 of 6 major citations (Geoffrey West's scaling laws, Adamic/Huberman/Zipf/Gibrat power-law work, Marten Scheffer's lake ecosystem research, and Robert Axelrod's prisoner's dilemma tournaments) were all fully accurate with correct figures, dates, and attributions.

   View the full record →
2. 12 July 2026 · corrected by Emir Baycan

   West, Brown & Enquist quarter-power metabolic scaling paper appeared in Science in 1997, not 2002.

   Before

   His findings, published in Science (2002) and summarized in Scale (2017), demonstrated that metabolic rate in mammals scales as body mass to the 3/4 power.

   After

   His findings, published in Science (1997) and summarized in Scale (2017), demonstrated that metabolic rate in mammals scales as body mass to the 3/4 power.

   Why: Verified fix already fully applied in body text (Science 1997); no bibliography entry existed for this citation to check; FAQ field does not mention this fact. No further changes needed.

   View the full record →

Who checked this page?

1 contributor has checked "Universal Principles That Apply Across Domains" on When Notes Fly. Each name below links to that person's public CitePep profile, where every contribution they have made is listed with the exact change they proposed.