[Phys-L] Re: god friendly science

["Daryl L. Taylor" <Daryl@DARYLSCIENCE.COM>]

John states:
"I had a student who asked how we know that the stars and galaxies are real
and not just painted on the sky.  He had read books that discussed them, but
never brought out the idea that you can actually measure the distances by
various clever schemes.  So much of our scientific literature never brings
out the evidence, and concentrates on the results that students just
memorize the magic ideas.  No wonder people do not believe many ideas in
science."

Great point! Kids are trained all too often for "just the facts, Ma'am".
Facts are good things if your last name is Jennings and you happen to be on
Jeopardy. For the rest of us, it's much more important and meaningful to
understand *why* we think we 'know' something. I also agree that if more of
us understood the Why's and How's, this religious argument wouldn't be an
argument at all.

Semi-Humorous aside : I had the privilege of teaching a 9th grade PhySci
class once. (Operative word here is ONCE.) We were discussing the scale of
the solar system and one kid, let's call him BoBo, asked a fabulous
question, "HOW do we know how far the sun is if we've never been there?"
Well, I jumped all over that. Went into a quick Physics-Teacher dissertation
of Kepler's Laws, Newton's Law of Univ Grav, angular displacement of the sun
vs moon, . . . On and on. After a mind-boggling 10 or so minutes, the same
kid said, "I don't get it. How do we know all that?" This procedure
duplicated itself 2 or 3 more times. I finally, in frustration and just
before the bell rang for end of class, decided to 'lie' and relayed the
story of how "a few hundred years ago, NASA shot a rocket to the sun.
Attached to it was a long string on a spool. When the rocket hit the sun,
NASA pulled in the string and measured it." The kid was too quick for this,
however. He shot back, "But wouldn't the string burn up?" To which, as the
bell rang, I replied, "Nope, they did it at night". He said, "Oh. Thanks."
(Don't jump down my throat for lying to a kid. Do it all the time. Leads
into some of the best student-teacher dialogue you could imagine. We did
eventually attack the 'true' answers to that kids questions...)

Daryl L. Taylor, Fizzix Guy
Greenwich HS, CT
PAEMST '96
International Internet Educator of the Year '03
NASA SEU Educator Ambassador
www.DarylScience.com

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-----Original Message-----
From: Forum for Physics Educators [mailto:PHYS-L@list1.ucc.nau.edu]On
Behalf Of John Clement
Sent: Friday, May 20, 2005 7:36 AM
To: PHYS-L@LISTS.NAU.EDU
Subject: Re: god friendly science


> In science class, truth is hard to come by. Generally,
> we are happy with models that make predictions that
> can be tested. Models whose predictions come out right
> are considered good models, and models whose
> predictions come out wrong are not so good models.
> Maybe even wrong.
This statement is the key to defusing the difficulty the religious right has
with evolution.  As I have been saying, it is a model.  By avoiding the word
theory the problem with common usage is avoided.  The idea of a model based
on physical evidence means it can not admit a supernatural explanation.  It
is a construct of our own minds which allows making a coherent explanation,
and which can be used for prediction.  And by explanation we only mean that
the explanation adheres to the rules that we have created to make the data
coherent.

Anyone who claims that it is scientifically proven that life is too complex
to be created by an evolutionary mechanism should be challenged to come up
with a strong statistical analysis based on data.  Of course this can not be
done.

I had a student who asked how we know that the stars and galaxies are real
and not just painted on the sky.  He had read books that discussed them, but
never brought out the idea that you can actually measure the distances by
various clever schemes.  So much of our scientific literature never brings
out the evidence, and concentrates on the results that students just
memorize the magic ideas.  No wonder people do not believe many ideas in
science.  They never consider that geologists use the idea of change over
time and are successful in finding useful resources.

John M. Clement
Houston, TX
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