From an early age, over and over (at least, in my experience), students are taught that the "scientific method" consists of a set of specific steps which all experiments must adhere to: question, research, hypothesis, experiment, observations, repeat. You get a vague explanation of what all that means. The question is supposed to come from something you notice, the research is to see what experiments other people have done, the hypothesis is your guess as to what will happen, and the rest is pretty self-explanatory.
However, as a nine-year-old kid you don't fully understand all that. You just do what the teacher tells you and long for high school science classes where you honestly believe you'll get to blow stuff up every day. Eventually you come to grasp that a "hypothesis" isn't just a guess, but an educated guess. You learn that scientists in real life question things that haven't been answered. And finally, you get that testing a theory doesn't have to follow the rules that have been burned into your brain since the fourth grade.
Dr. Wendy Burns of the Chemistry and Physics department at Bellarmine says that she doesn't necessarily use the method that we're taught, but that she uses her own form of it. After seeing Dr. Burns's description of her method, though, we can sort of see a similar pattern, as such: get an idea of what to research, do the research in order to specify and perfect the question, and then design and perform an experiment, and of course, as all scientists are apt to do, observe and analyze the findings.
The real thing that's sort of surprising when you get older and start going into science classes that aren't simply a recap of what happened the year before is that scientists don't work alone. They depend on each other and the breakthroughs of the past so that they can make new discoveries and explain how the world works. The real-life method is Science = Teamwork. And that is a beautiful thing.
Tuesday, September 24, 2013
Monday, September 2, 2013
Tumblr's For Scientists, Too
After reading Adam Frank's essay "Welcome to the Age of Denial" in the New York Times, found here, I can't help but wonder why everything he says just strikes a nerve in me.
I suppose it has something to do with the presentation of his argument. Frank is a bit rude in his treatment of creationists, calling their belief system "silliness" and giving no second thought to their viewpoint. This is the opposite of open-minded, something all scientists should strive to be.
Deeper than his presentation, however, is the argument itself, full of transparent holes and little support from credibility. The very first paragraph's shocking statistics could have been pulled from thin air for all we know--and by the look of them, I would be inclined to think this is the case. In my personal experience, Americans today are skeptical of everything, religious ideas even more so than science. If the number of creationists in this country has increased by two percent over the past thirty years, I'll go without wi-fi. Seriously, if you prove that stat to me, I'll stay off of Tumblr for two whole days.
There's the rub, though; when Frank asserts that today's culture is "less engaged with science and technology" than in the past, one thing comes to my mind. What about all of those "science Twitter feeds and blogs" that exist, like this one? I can't tell you how many times I've come across a Tumblr post about the awesomeness of Carl Sagan or how "f***ing incredible" the cosmos is. (It's especially great when sci-fi fandoms bring real science into the picture, like with this particular post.) Pictures of nebulae and amazing insects and technologies blow our minds, and young people, at least the ones on Tumblr, eat all that up. To say that science in modern society is "broken and lost," as opposed to full of wonder, is simply a lie.
That's not to say that we don't sometimes need reminding of the amazing world we live in. This is one point on which Adam Frank and I can agree. Keeping science from the general populace is idiotic. The most prudent way to get people interested in science is to show them how their smartphones and medicines and cars work, not to mention cool discoveries like a planet where it rains glass.
I've rambled quite a bit here, and I'm gonna bring it to a close. But remember: just because science isn't in the forefront of politics, doesn't mean it's not important to American culture in the 2010s. Frank says that "science is a way of behaving in the world. It is, simply put, a tradition." As any young person of any era would probably say, traditions should change--and they will. That's probably the only real tradition that exists.
I suppose it has something to do with the presentation of his argument. Frank is a bit rude in his treatment of creationists, calling their belief system "silliness" and giving no second thought to their viewpoint. This is the opposite of open-minded, something all scientists should strive to be.
Deeper than his presentation, however, is the argument itself, full of transparent holes and little support from credibility. The very first paragraph's shocking statistics could have been pulled from thin air for all we know--and by the look of them, I would be inclined to think this is the case. In my personal experience, Americans today are skeptical of everything, religious ideas even more so than science. If the number of creationists in this country has increased by two percent over the past thirty years, I'll go without wi-fi. Seriously, if you prove that stat to me, I'll stay off of Tumblr for two whole days.
There's the rub, though; when Frank asserts that today's culture is "less engaged with science and technology" than in the past, one thing comes to my mind. What about all of those "science Twitter feeds and blogs" that exist, like this one? I can't tell you how many times I've come across a Tumblr post about the awesomeness of Carl Sagan or how "f***ing incredible" the cosmos is. (It's especially great when sci-fi fandoms bring real science into the picture, like with this particular post.) Pictures of nebulae and amazing insects and technologies blow our minds, and young people, at least the ones on Tumblr, eat all that up. To say that science in modern society is "broken and lost," as opposed to full of wonder, is simply a lie.
That's not to say that we don't sometimes need reminding of the amazing world we live in. This is one point on which Adam Frank and I can agree. Keeping science from the general populace is idiotic. The most prudent way to get people interested in science is to show them how their smartphones and medicines and cars work, not to mention cool discoveries like a planet where it rains glass.
I've rambled quite a bit here, and I'm gonna bring it to a close. But remember: just because science isn't in the forefront of politics, doesn't mean it's not important to American culture in the 2010s. Frank says that "science is a way of behaving in the world. It is, simply put, a tradition." As any young person of any era would probably say, traditions should change--and they will. That's probably the only real tradition that exists.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)