How important is gravity?
By joel on Monday, March 17th, 2008 at 10:44 pm.You drop a pen on the moon. Does the pen
a) float off into space,
b) float where it is, or
c) fall down?
Disturbingly, a majority answers either a or b. When asked, as a follow up, why astronauts don’t float when they’re on the moon, the majority answer is “because they have heavy boots.”
If you have a hard time believing this, I encourage you to start asking around. I asked some educated teenagers I know, and the first three of them answered either a or b.
“And why don’t astronauts float on the moon?”
“Special equipment.”
“Heavy boots.”
“Heavy boots.”
I mention this because a theme of SciBarCamp was “10 Things Everyone Should Know About Science”. This was motivated by organizer Eva Amsen’s recently surveying a number of people about to receive PhDs, and finding that none of them knew what a gene is. She felt strongly that everyone should know that genes are segments of DNA that code for proteins, and started to wonder what else everyone should know. We all made suggestions on a large poster board at the Friday reception, and then had a panel and heated discussion on the subject Sunday morning. Eva has promised to post the results on her blog.
Strangely (and somewhat embarrassingly) there was not a single scientific fact on the list. Everything was about the process of science, the purpose of science, the practice of science, etc. In everyone’s defense, these are important topics that are fun to argue about. Passionate on the subject, I used my turn to speak about infant behavior as a model of inquiry. But, given the chance at a do-over, would anyone disagree that gravity deserves a spot in the top 10? In fact, shouldn’t it be number 1?
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March 18th, 2008 at 12:22 pm
Were you the one that wrote “You can’t “escape” gravity” on the poster, or “g=(GM1M2/r2)”?
There were a few scientific facts on the big list, but because most things on the poster were not facts, I grouped them under “basic scientific facts” as one of the nine statements. There were two votes for gravity, three for evolution, one for DNA, and one other fact that I forgot right now.
Based on various discussions online before SciBarCamp, and things that people told me during SciBarCamp, it sees that the “Basic Scientific Facts” issue should really be seen separately, and we ended up mostly talking about the process of science in the discussion. If we take it separately, then gravity wass the second-most popular scientfic fact people at SciBarCamp should know about, after evolution. However, this is a bit biased: most scientists at SciBarCamp were (molecular) biologists or (astro)physicists. There were no chemists - does that mean nobody should know about molecules and atoms? The other side of the discussion, focusing on the practice of science, had more “experts” in the room, because you can talk about it more generally. (Yeah, I’ll work on that sentence before typing up my final report on the whole session)
March 25th, 2008 at 10:15 am
Hi Eva,
Thanks for the amazing meeting.
I voted for “You can’t escape gravity”, and then added g=(GM1M2/r^2) since I love the way it looks.
One issue with treating scientific facts on a separate list is that it leaves the “process of science” list without any context. Despite the widely divergent opinions expressed in the discussion, I think everyone was attempting descriptive, rather than prescriptive definitions of science. So for these definitions to resonate, they should be motivated by the examples from which they’re abstracted.
For example, rather than start with the assertion that “there is no one scientific method”, I think it makes sense to draw that conclusion from a survey of scientific achievements.
Also, it seems that it’s had to agree on 10 meta-principles of science.
March 25th, 2008 at 10:55 am
I like the balance achieved by Chet Raymo’s list - a small handful of things we should know, and an even smaller discussion of what it means to know something. (Chet’s list doesn’t deal with *how* we come to know things, and so would be nicely complimented by a synopsis of the SciBarCamp discussion. Chet buillds a classroom activity around everything on his list - I wonder what activities could be built around the SciBarCamp list elements.)