Imagine one day you wake up and go to your favorite websites to find the internet abuzz with the latest controversy - a new study has come out claiming to "prove" that everyone's favorite tech gadget actually causes cancer. People are attacking the study saying it's just scaremongering, others are attacking the deniers saying that they're trying to cover up the truth; needless to say everyone is pretty emotional.



Now imagine that instead of having to wade into the chaos and tying to determine the truth from the ongoing battle of opinions firing back and forth you could instead go to one site where researchers are parsing the information and presenting it the rest of the internet community with a simple data visualization.

Thonk is meant to be a place where people can work together to lay out the scientific evidence for different claims in a way that is easy to understand.

The map will be open to everyone but only those with a researcher email will be able to modify it in order to best curate the information. People can search for terms to find the scientific data published about it, ask questions about specific scientific claims and also freely browse the entire tree which is all interconnected.

Trees have been used as a metaphor for mapping knowledge throughout human history. One of the earliest being the Tree of Knowledge suggested by the ancient Greek Porphyry to illustrate the different classifications of matter in the universe as described by Aristotle. Later two Frenchmen designed the Figurative System of the Human Knowledge which attempted to map out different types of knowledge with the 3 main branches of "Memory/History, Reason/Philosophy and Imagination Poetry".

Taxonomies of Knowledge

Figurative System of Human Knowledge

Augustus Comte attempted to map out the different fields of Science which was later described in the Text Book, "The Central Science" as another Tree Map.

Partial ordering of the sciences proposed by Balaban and Klein.

Thonk is a similar attempt except that instead of being undertaken by a small team we will use the technology of the internet to make it open to editing by the entire scientific community. It will also be engineered to focus on scientific verification of concepts.

Now you will be able to see the scientific support for explanations for things such as whether or not the 5 second rule works, are GMOs safe to eat, do toilets flush counterclockwise in the southern hemisphere or what are the economic consequences of different tax policies.