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Science a Mystery to U.S. Citizens
maddugan writes "CNN and probably others are posting their synopses of the National Science Foundation's biennial report on the state of science understanding in the US. Sixty percent of those surveyed believe in ESP, psychic power, and alien abduction."
It is typical of left-brain geekdom and sadly inaccurate to suggest that belief in the possibility of ESP, psychic powers, alien abduction et al demonstrates a fundamental misunderstanding of the concepts of science -- particularly when reputable scientific research explores some of these possibilities quite directly.
Princeton Engineering Anomolies Research (PEAR) is an excellent place for subscribers of the Sceptical Enquirer to visit to learn a smidgen of open mindedness:
http://www.princeton.edu/~pear/
Also, I would also suggest the Complete Works of Charles Fort. Fort was an American empiricist and philosopher of science.
I'm honestly a logical man, but I do belive that aliens exist (whether humans have encountered them is a different matter) and that psychic powers are not impossible. Brainwaves will be able to be captured and used as a communication form and as energy, but can the brain do it naturally?
Take a look at Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One's Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments for an interesting look at why results like that are to be expected.
Sure, I suppose the reviewers for a journal could conspire to knowlingly let a fraudulent paper through, or suppress a valid one with interesting results that go against the accepted theories. In the first case, the bad science would inevitably be noticed by the journal's readers (other professional scientists, after all), and the editors would be disgraced. In the second case, some other journal's editors would accept and publish the paper, "scooping" journal #1 and claiming the glory of publishing the groundbreaking new research.
Like all self-policing systems, it has flaws, but by and large it works fantastically well, uncovering charlatans and incompetents, and allowing the dissemination of well-validated new information to the scientific world. It's not physically possible to verify everything in life yourself, which is why you sometimes have to trust others to properly verify things for you. But that trust cannot be blind, nor based on "faith". This holds as true for your doctor or auto mechanic as for the editors of a journal.
Freedom: "I won't!"
But when you ask them concerning God, they say "pfft. The world was created by billions of particles interacting randomly". Umm, yeah, whatever.
Funny how people would believe all these stories about alien abductions and believe what their Grade 10 Science teacher told them about evolution. Yet when you ask them to look at our world and how on earth do billions of random particles over billions of years == one human race out of a billion species capable of very high level understanding(i.e. we can build skyscrapers but dogs can't even build a dog house). Or if we follow their logic, why create new technology, when all you need to do is throw some random elements in a jar and shake it for a million years. Out will come a missile, a jet, skyscraper, and probably even a brand new Pentium 5. Sound crazy? I thought so.
You want my opinion? Three words: Education, Education, Education! The Irish Constitution, like the US Constitution, mandates freedom of religion, and I take that to mean that people are free to do without religion. So, why are schoolchildren taught to believe in unprovable assertions? From theistic religion to aliens and ESP is but a short step, if you do not have a grounding in scientific principles.
(this is not a
(I'm not going to post a link to one bookstore and thus give it more hits - your own favorite bookstore should have it.) Alternatively, if your attention span doesn't allow for the absorption of an entire book, at least go and rent "Contact". After all, if there weren't other civilizations out there, it would be an awful waste of space...
(this is not a
Actually, this is a reasonable request. The way you explain quicksort without math is to build a physical model, and then do a walk-through of hwo the code would execute. To you, with the way you think, that might be clumsy. But it would communicate in a way than an innumerate person could understand.
I have found that I need to accept that about 1/4 of all people are basically, rather than just functionally, innumerate. That the only way that they can handle numbers is with a sort of kinethetic muscle twitch reasoning. This can be more accurate than one would expect, remember our basic idea of how numbers work comes from babylonians who did arithemetic by juggling weights on a balance (which is what the "=" represents: a pair of scales). But it doesn't deal exactly with large numbers. OTOH, it's a lot quicker, which often more than repays for the loss of exactness.
Gyroscopes are a more difficult problem, I admit. OTOH, it's been so long since I worked out the exact way that a gyroscope stabilized itself, that I probably don't know any more. So that's probably why I can't imagine how to create a useful physical model.
N.B.: Models won't reach everyone. But they will reach almost all people who are innumerate. (The ones who are both innumerate and not reachable by models probably aren't interested in gyroscopes anyway. They would be more interested in motivating people to achieve goals. And it you wanted to explain gyroscopes to them it would need to be in terms of motivations and goals... I couldn't do that, as that an area where I am quite weak myself.)
Also: patterns of thought are independant of intelligence. Some innumerate folk are quite intelligent. And some quite intelligent people are totally incapable of motivating other people. People have a strong tendency to only notice the kinds of intelligence that are commensurate with their own, but there's always at least one variety that isn't. (It's the invisible bedrock on which ones own mind is built. Picture a hand trying to bandage itself, or an eye trying to see itself. Now imagine an axiom trying to justify itself... [no circular reasoning!]
The language depends on the compiler (or interpreter).
The compiler depends on the bootstrap compiler.
The bootstrap compiler depends on the assembler...
But at some point we must switch from logic to hardware.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
*Uh, not true - as the "explanation" states this is mearly popular scientific theory and NOT a fact.
The word 'theory' is misused by the general population. In common use, it's used as a synonym for 'hypothesis' or 'good guess'. In a scientific context, 'A set of statements or principles devised to explain a group of facts or phenomena, especially one that has been repeatedly tested and can be used to make predictions about natural phenomena' is the definition.
These 'theories' are as close to 'fact' as it gets.
Just follow the day, and reach fo