Apollo Astronauts Didn't Need Heavy Boots
phys.ufl.edu
phys.ufl.edu
"Does the Earth go around the Sun,
or the Sun go around the Earth?"
"How long does it take?"
I have a mental model of how this can happen. For ordinary people on the street, the Sun goes around the Earth and it takes about a day. That's what they see, that's what they experience, and to them, that's what matter. Moreover, using the Earth as your frame of reference, they're right.
However, it's been drilled into them as an unattached, unassociated, irrelevant-to-them "fact" that the Earth goes around the Sun. When presented with the first question, then, they parrot that answer, with no idea of what that actually means.
This doesn't, therefore, mean they're stupid. It just means that they have a mental model of the world that works perfectly well for them, and they've been confused by "facts" that have no use.
I'm not arguing it's good, or right, but at least it helps me understand how otherwise perfectly functional people can appear so stupid and irrational.
http://arxiv.org/abs/physics/0512158
"1.4 Heavier objects fall faster
The classic Aristotelian belief is that heavier objects fall faster than lighter objects. Surely three hundred years after Galileo showed otherwise, students no longer share this belief? Unfortunately, many do, but the belief shows up only in novel situations. Students know that if a stone and a cannonball fall, they should say that both objects hit the ground ‘at the same time’; if they have been carefully taught, they might even say ‘roughly at the same time’. They also know what to say about two objects sliding down an incline, that mass is irrelevant. However, when the problem includes the novel effect of rolling (yet more trouble with circular motion!), many students have no practiced Newtonian answer to quote, and reveal their gut-level Aristotelian belief. For example, in Problem 23, about objects rolling down a plane, some students reasoned that an object with a large moment of inertia, such as a disc, rolls faster than an object with a small moment of inertia, such as a solid sphere. Two students argued that ‘moment of inertia is analogous to mass, and heavier objects fall faster than lighter objects’! I could not agree with the analogy, but I admired its boldness.
The way that rehearsal hides this misconception reminds me of the theory of the English accent: that if you step on an Englishman’s toes in the middle of the night, he’ll shout at you in an American accent. On this view, the one true accent is American. An English accent is just an act, a mask dropped upon surprise. Similarly, the students’ response that ‘all objects fall at the same speed’ is carefully rehearsed. It falls away when we step on their toes by asking about it in a novel context, whereupon they reveal their true belief, that heavier objects fall faster.""
—from Jumpers5, a play by Tom Stoppard.
That the earth goes around the sun is a pretty good approximation of the actual phenomenon, sure, but the approximation, in it's wrongness, loses the power of the real answer to actually explain what's happening.
Pedantry perhaps, but If we want people to have a better model, let's make it the right one.
All models are wrong, some models are useful. The model that the Sun goes around the Earth is perfectly adequate for most people.
I'm not saying this is good, or that people shouldn't learn about things, but realising that other people have different priorities from mine was a big step in my life. For many people, their model is good enough.
"We've arranged a civilization in which most crucial elements profoundly depend on science and technology. We have also arranged things so that almost no one understands science and technology. This is a prescription for disaster. We might get away with it for a while, but sooner or later this combustible mixture of ignorance and power is going to blow up in our faces."
- Carl Sagan, interview with Anne Kalosh, 1995Amazon link: http://www.amazon.com/Dark-Age-Ahead-Jane-Jacobs/dp/14000623...
It's a tradeoff.
I agree it's inefficient for everybody to learn advanced science; but basic science? Gravity for Newton's sake? Don't people spend around 10 years going through basic education? What are they learning in those 10 years if they can't even understand a tiny bit of how the world that we live in functions?
Also, if you have read the article it's not just a failure to understand gravity, there was a severe lack of ability to apply logic (even by the TA that was teaching logic!). Well that says something about the education system.
I would argue that everyone should learn at least the basics of science, and appreciate the fact that this marvelous civilization that we are living in is shaped by the very science that they don't fully comprehend.
What people should learn is the scientific process, how does science advance, how do we know the things we know. And they should learn how much we owe the scientific method, people should know that if not for science we would still be freezing, starving and dying of easily preventable diseases, that the comfortable lives we live today is a result of scientific thinking.
And "God Strikes Back" parts in 'The Genius of Darwin' documentary: Many schools, public funded to a large extent, dump evolution in favor of 'Creationism'. A science teacher, who was interviewed believes that the Earth is less than a ten thousand years old, because God said so in that holy book.
I didn't claim that God said so. I just quoted the science teacher that was interviewed. Go watch the video and wonder why Governments and parents are allowing these kind of morons to teach science.
Moreover my point was not about how to interpret a particular event described in a particular book; far from it. I was expressing outrage at the fact that a science teacher would believe that the Earth is just a few thousand years old, throwing all the science in the dust bin. More importantly he is teaching the same thing to children and is getting away with it.
PS: through the revealed preference of coming into the defense of the book, though I didn't find faults with it, you gave out a lot about why you made the comment. But I'm going to pass over it.
PS: You can't claim to pass over something while talking about it in a PS.
I'm in grad school and people still ask this question after tests. Many of my peers expect only to be asked questions that have already been asked during the course of instruction, or at least ones that resemble them very closely. I think this is pretty good evidence that people are only in school for the degree and not for the skills and practice of thinking/wondering/exploring on their own.
This might have something to do with our generally rather antiquated public educational system that basically beats "wondering" out of students heads in favor of industrial education.*
*This is not true of all teachers or all schools systems, but it applies to much of my experience.
Much of what I am learning I could learn on my own by studying the books and thinkers my peers and I have studied in the classroom setting this semester; I know this to be true. The draw of graduate work (and any post secondary education as far as I'm concerned) is the opportunity to think alongside professors with a wealth of accumulated knowledge and wisdom in their particular field, and to think and discuss with classmates who share a similar passion to one's own. Learning completely on your own doesn't come close to the experience of learning from and with people who share one's passion for a particular subject.
So it's pretty disappointing when a rather large chunk of those peers don't seem to care one way or the other about real learning and application of knowledge, but only seem to care about the grade.
I have to admit: sometimes it takes me weeks (or even months) to realize that someone I know is a complete idiot. The problem is that day-to-day interaction is so scripted that there is no opportunity for them to reveal how stupid they really are. But as soon as you deviate from the script and try to work together on a real problem or argue about something it becomes embarrassingly evident.
I've starting trying to provoke little academic arguments with new people just as a quick intelligence test (this seems marginally more socially acceptable than trying to unearth some other proxies for intelligence).
In all seriousness, can you give me an example of the sorts of arguments you start?
In a more idealistic phase of my life, I used to start political arguments at the drop of a hat. Not to verify someone's political leanings were like mine, but to instead verify that they had thought about (the) issue(s), and developed any opinion at all.
Now I just sigh when people say they don't take an interest in some topic I think is generally applicable to their lives.
No offense, but you have absolutely no business deciding what's applicable to someone else's life. Just because it's interesting to you doesn't mean it has to be for others. And if it isn't, it's still perfectly acceptable.
I sigh when people judge others for not caring about things that they themselves care about.
You may disagree with me, but I think there is some political, social-economical, geo-political or even local-government topics that effect everyone. Or rather, there is at least one topic that effects every single person, whether they think it or not.
That was more what I was getting at.
"It has been said that man is a rational animal. All my life I have been searching for evidence which could support this." – Bertrand Russell
"Never try to teach a pig to sing; it wastes your time and it annoys the pig."
-- Robert Heinlein
Much 'education', classroom and otherwise, falls into this category. Not to mention that much of it is done by people who can't sing, anyway, or are teaching atonal "music".
And the consequences are not tragic, either. Does anyone have scientific proof of the contrary ?
(No, I'm not a drop-out - that's why I know ;-)
P.S. nazgulnarsil nailed it (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=580529 ). Neatly put, sir.
Maybe there is some kind of cognitive bias in the heads of some that makes them think Earth is different from the rest of the universe because we happen to live here. But that the TA did not apply Occams Razor to this problem seems weird; since he knew Descartes' philosophy, he should not have held this aristotelian world view.
snarkier:
Why not? Most people can probably get through life just fine telling other people nonsense about how gravity works at non-earth locations.
I personally like the whole anti-theory about gravity being produced by vacuums, because when you argue it against someone unknowlegable it makes pseudo-sense. However anyone with any clue of physics knows this is the easiest debunked theory in the world. I mean vacuum tube factories would have exploded in anti-gravity force.
That's why I am an agnostic, I am not entirely sure of the existence of God, but I am reasonably sure that he/she doesn't exist!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_effect
I bet we'll keep on muddling through.
As much as any such observation may have been measured correctly, it doesn't logically follow that intelligence itself is increasing, because of a variety of factors. The link you posted provides some of them.
http://yalepress.yale.edu/yupbooks/book.asp?isbn=97803001238...
http://www.amazon.com/What-Intelligence-Tests-Miss-Psycholog...
nor is it the same thing as wisdom, as James R. Flynn himself says.
http://www.amazon.com/What-Intelligence-Beyond-Flynn-Effect/...
Now I was 14, and it would still be a few years before I first would read 'A Brief History of Time' and so I knew nothing of string theory, but, I somehow knew, on some basic instinctual level that I was being misled in that moment, that just because the teacher could not "imagine" higher dimensions did not in and of itself mean that there could not possibly be higher dimensions in theory. Looking back, that was the start of a distrust in me with regards to the academic "establishment" which has continued in varying degrees to this very day. It is one of those epistemological moments of clarity: once one realizes it is possible to be misled by a teacher, which one naturally is conditioned to trust, then really who else could possibly mislead one? What sources can after all be trusted? Once one realizes the inherent fallibility of everyone, including one's teachers, then things just are not quite the same ever again, there is a certain loss of innocence there which can never be gotten back.