For example, the year before GCSE course in the school I was at, everyone took Physics. Now it didn't help that the teacher was an odious little toad of a man, but even with a better teacher, a year dominated by waves, little tappers in water tanks and measuring the deflection of a pencil when viewed through a prism is nothing more than a good way to discourage people (particularly non-geeks) from thinking about science ever again.
I went on to study engineering at university, so obviously I was hard to put off. But now I'm not an engineer, how much of what I was taught is really useful for understanding the kind of public policy issues we discuss here?
And could we do future poets/etc. a bigger favour by focusing their science curriculum on the things that will be useful for them in that regard?
But my point is that the presentation of wave physics, and optics, is excellent, and engaging, and uses topics from biology, and colour vision, and stuff. And it's not overly mathematical either. The first 6 chapters are excellent, nontechnical, and set the methodological and philosophical stage, and address the relevance. And then he goes and he shows you how you can calculate an elliptic orbit using Newton's law with a pocket calculator and Euler's method. The guy also does quantum mechanics with 2x2 matrices, and only introduces the Schroedinger equation in the last 3 chapters of the third volume. But most physics instructors don't know how to make heads or tails out of it. And the students don't like it because it's not a cookbook (by the time they encounter it they have been conditioned to study the wrong way). Can the last politician to go out the revolving door please turn the lights off?
You should take a look through that biology of SF cinema book-- bookstores specializing in SF/Fantasy might have a copy. It's a real hoot, he did a thorough job!
Firstly, they're obvious cash-in titles, and there's something quite cynical about them.
Secondly, I've yet to read one that made me feel excited about what I was supposed to be learning.
Finally, there's a kind of grim crashing of gears as drama collides with pedagogy. I don't think the interests of either are served particularly well, because usually all you get is more story telling.
Feynmann is interesting, but still - I think - too technical for many people. He explains a lot of stuff, but never quite gets across why people should care. If you're already excited you'll be curious, but if you're not, you won't understand why you should be.
And that is the whole problem with "science education". It really is hopeless because what you cannot teach people is curiosity. Can the last politician to go out the revolving door please turn the lights off?
I really don't know. It's hard for me to imagine not being curious about things, but that's a personal view.
Based on experience I'm sure there are totally incurious people out there. But I'm not sure what percentage of the population they'd be.
Because, clearly, people spend incredible amounts of effort researching sports, celebrities, music, film, fashion... Can the last politician to go out the revolving door please turn the lights off?
Something's wrong with the science round here grrmmble...
And I conclude the zapping only happens to me.
Lightning!
Science is cutting edge, and moaning about how stupid people are is not cutting edge, it is reactionary. Some people are stupid. Why? How do we educate people so we aren't overwhelmed by stupidity?
Heh heh!
People used to believe the sun rose every day. They needed astronomers to explain the eclipses. But...how stupid were people that they needed such fears assuaged?
I see science, as a method, as...pffff...the history of method. How did we learn to walk, talk, move, eat? Trial, error, hypotheses tested by experience. It was only when science delved beyond the senses that scientists told us "This is true, strange though it may be."
And yet (and so) I don't respect scientists who work for large pharmaceuticals. I'm not saying they're evil, but I don't see any high moral dimension to such activity. Ditto those who make explosives, or...these days...any endeavour that isn't based around limit, recycle, reuse, reduce, fine elements used to maximum advantage...
I think astrology (a loud irritating note for many) is simply decadent astronomy. The fact that these people know when the moon gets up and when it goes to bed is, for me, a positive, because at least they're tied into, in some way, the long cycles. The moderately rich banker who ponders, between sniffs, the global cost of the house, the sauna, or the jacuzzi, can be useful to finance the next wave of smaller, more efficient, electrified...via solar/wind/wave, yack yack.
Afew! If you know farming people, are they heading to permaculture, or are they resisting? The agricultural sciences, the symbiotic scientists are, for me, by far the more enlightened beings. Propose, test, evaluate. If it works, it works. There are some fundamentals, such as "I breathe to live" that only crazy people think should be taxed.
Maybe the fact that there are too many humans means humans have to hate away a certain percentage. Like rats in cages, the more we are, the more we bite. But against that, against that endless irritation created by "the other"...against that defeat of the person in the face of ego logic...
the ego needs to curb itself, get out of the mental car, look around, go some place different, and science is no more and no less than the ability to judge, by experiment, certain experiences.
The ego is partial. As Chris quoted, ach, science is in man's image ergo: nuclear bombs. Created in a cultural milieu, where science is part of business, the business of science is money, for the scientists....
I suggest that the green elements of society are, by far, the most scientific and most forward thinking in terms of science. "Organic", for me, means "without pesticides". There's something unscientific, for me, in a person who demeans "organic."
Science teaching to primary kids is, effectively, the scientific method. Hypothesise, test, evaluate. But if adult society is obsessed by economics, or big brother, or porn, the young will...simply react, which is what we all do. Action and reaction. The zen point between the two is as amenable to scientists as anyone.
Yack yack!
Hey! All that to say, cazang! Lightning!
Don't fight forces, use them R. Buckminster Fuller.
But honestly, I could care less about waves and stuff. Physics is astoundingly boring. I just don't care. I find the ultimate results of current astrophysical and cosmological research interesting from a conceptual point of view, but only in 1-5 paragraph tidbits.
At a rather basic level, I think some people find that stuff interesting, and some people don't. The key to good science education has to take this into account, and as bad as it sounds, I think it has to separate them into two different tracks as soon as possible, so that the people who could care less about "real" science are introduced to the kind of stuff that can lead them to appreciate the method and practice of science in a very general way, even if basic algebra is a challenge.
Sadly, though, as science is usually taught by science-types, and amongst science types a rather common attitude is "If you don't find this interesting, than you're a hopeless dolt," it's really not surprising that many people will reject it entirely.
You go from the macro to the micro to the nano... go sub atomic. You don't need to get the maths to appreciate how absolutely incredible it is that all these different factors come together and that we actually exist.
We exist, it's amazing! I'm made up of proteins and other macromolecules, with enzymes doing their various jobs, bacteria living in me, without which, I would die. I eat food, drink water, breathe the air, all of this is chemistry, biology and incredibly fine tuned to keep me alive.
If anything significant had altered the path of human history or evolution, or a random clash of primordial soup had formed something else or the energy had escaped and gone elsewhere, this planet may not be here, humans and cats and dogs and sheep wouldn't be here. If the mitochondria hadn't quite pulled it off or the DNA mutated in the wrong place a million years ago...
Oh the probability threads, how tenuous they become when you look at everything that could have happened and then see what did.
And all these millions, billions of proteins and molecules that I'm made up from, somehow are sitting in exactly the right place for me to function and live; these are made from atoms, with electrons and protons and neutrons all these funnily named sub atomic things, that whizz about and it's only probability that puts them in a point in space at any one time with their complex energy levels and empty space.
So much space, how am I even solid? Do I really exist the way I think I do? I'm pure energy.
We are made from space dust!
Tell me that is not amazing. Physics is not boring really, but it's a damn shame that they don't start the story with the narrative that we know nothing at all and how did this world become what it is? And then bit by bit, unpick and discover and test and fail and learn and be inspired.
Science is a great big adventure to explore the world with so let's go and discover... Ad astra per aspera
I find that understanding science makes the day to day alone, awe inspiring. But I'm not sure that is entirely true for the non scientist. A rainbow perhaps yes, or other phenomena that you don't see often. But ripples, blue sky etc - do people try to look further than what they purely observe, is it taken on board that there's something sciencey behind all that? Or does it just need pointing out?
I found that the more layers of complexity that I uncovered, the more amazing all the really simple things became. Ad astra per aspera
A poet once said "The whole universe is in a glass of wine." We will probably never know in what sense he meant that, for poets do not write to be understood. But it is true that if we look at a glass closely enough we see the entire universe. There are the things of physics: the twisting liquid which evaporates depending on the wind and weather, the reflections in the glass, and our imaginations adds the atoms. The glass is a distillation of the Earth's rocks, and in its composition we see the secret of the universe's age, and the evolution of the stars. What strange array of chemicals are there in the wine? How did they come to be? There are the ferments, the enzymes, the substrates, and the products. There in wine is found the great generalization: all life is fermentation. Nobody can discover the chemistry of wine without discovering, as did Louis Pasteur, the cause of much disease. How vivid is the claret, pressing its existence into the consciousness that watches it! If our small minds, for some convenience, divide this glass of wine, this universe, into parts -- physics, biology, geology, astronomy, psychology, and so on -- remember that Nature does not know it! So let us put it all back together, not forgetting ultimately what it is for. Let it give us one more final pleasure: drink it and forget it all!
Poets say science takes away from the beauty of the stars -- mere globs of gas atoms. Nothing is "mere". I too can see the stars on a desert night, and feel them. But do I see less or more? The vastness of the heavens stretches my imagination -- stuck on this carousel my little eye can catch one-million-year-old light. A vast pattern -- of which I am a part... What is the pattern or the meaning or the why? It does not do harm to the mystery to know a little more about it. For far more marvelous is the truth than any artists of the past imagined it. Why do the poets of the present not speak of it? What men are poets who can speak of Jupiter if he were a man, but if he is an immense spinning sphere of methane and ammonia must be silent?
But the actual, math-laden practice of physics? Taking measurements and plugging them into equations? Bleah.
Yet, the really advanced stuff cannot really be properly understood any other way, as it is so beyond the normal realm of perception or experience. Quantum stuff is just strange. I can listen to explanations of it, but I do so in a manner that I might listen to a creation myth - I can see sub-atomic particles no better than I can see gods, and although one most definitely has a very important and profound influence on my very existence and on the existence of all matter, those actions are as completely invisible and imperceptible to the unaided eye as are the acts of mythological entities.
Now, if I were the sort of person who really got math, I could actually come to understand advanced physics on a real level, or at least as well as anyone out there does. But I'm not, and I'm hardly alone. It will always be something that I just have to take on faith.
Whether this is the cause or the effect of my disinterest I cannot say, but in any case, the problems of physics are not the ones that really interest me. I feel just fine taking the workings of the physical world for granted. What interests me is society, and how social groups work. Given that physical reality is, at the level I can percieve, pretty much the same for me as it is for anyone else on Earth, it's more the background against which we work than the substance of the problem that interests me.
If I may offer a suggestion, the next time you're in a bookstore see if they have a copy of Morris Kline's Mathematics for the Non-Mathematician, thumb through it, and see if floats your boat. It's a history of math from a Humanities POV. It was written as a textbook for college students who had primary interests other than math/techie/science. At 500 pages it's a bit of a slog but there's no reason not to skip around to find the bits one finds interesting.
What you find utterly fascinating is unknown to 75% of humanity(Category A); 15% think it is useless, boring, tedious, and dull (Category B); 9% actively despise it and hate the practitioners thereof (Category C); .999999999999999% admit it might have some use, some day and immediately tell you a long, pointless, anecdote (Category D); .000000000000001% are slightly interested (Category E). Corollary I: 98% of the people you meet in daily life will be Category C. Corollary II: Anytime you talk to people in Categories A, B, D, or E about your Disciplinary Entrancement they will immediately morph into Category C.
What you find utterly fascinating is unknown to 75% of humanity(Category A); 15% think it is useless, boring, tedious, and dull (Category B); 9% actively despise it and hate the practitioners thereof (Category C); .999999999999999% admit it might have some use, some day and immediately tell you a long, pointless, anecdote (Category D); .000000000000001% are slightly interested (Category E).
Seriously, if successful science learning depends on either having a one-in-a-million instructor or being a one-in-50,000 student, there would seem to be little hope of communicating meaningful science to the population at large.
If it is not possible for a curriculum to make a difference, we're left with little to talk about. The fact is that what we're experiencing right now is a top-down disaster. -Paul Krugman
But don't listen to me, my own science education was clearly an abysmal failure. Can the last politician to go out the revolving door please turn the lights off?
What I'd like to see is much more appreciation of critical thinking, trial and error - no, you don't get the answer right the first time - and the empirical method applied to processes and situations from everyday life, rather than being reserved for lab situations with ripple tanks and oscilloscopes and other doodads and thingummies.
Understanding science as policy direction is possibly more useful than optics to most people.
And (see Feyerabend) "the method" is not what elementary science books teach in their "scientific method" chapters (another example of good curriculum destroyed by rote and bad teaching) but rather a critical-thinking attitude to problem solving. Can the last politician to go out the revolving door please turn the lights off?
