How To Make Science Popular Again?

Ars Technica has an interesting look at the recent book Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens Our Future, a collaboration between Chris Mooney, writer and author of The Republican War on Science, and scientist Sheril Kirshenbaum. While it seems the book's substance is somewhat lacking it raises an interesting point; how can science be better integrated with mainstream culture for greater understanding and acceptance? "We must all rally toward a single goal: without sacrificing the growth of knowledge or scientific innovation, we must invest in a sweeping project to make science relevant to the whole of America's citizenry. We recognize there are many heroes out there already toiling toward this end and launching promising initiatives, ranging from the Year of Science to the World Science Festival to ScienceDebate. But what we need — and currently lack — is the systematic acceptance of the idea that these actions are integral parts of the job description of scientists themselves. Not just their delegates, or surrogates, in the media or the classrooms."

Comments

simple

[acomj]

Become Neil Degrasse Tyson's facebook friend. He's making science interesting again, especially with Nova Science Nows profiles on science. If science oriented kids knew there a lot of people like them, they'd be more likely to pursue it as a career.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/sciencenow/cosmic/

Anti-Christian Zealot Wrong Yet Again

[RobotRunAmok]

Christianity demands reason being left at the door. There are some things you just don't question. Period. The bible is true - period. The world is 6000 years old - period.

And you're wrong. Period. The percentage of overall Christian sects which are biblical fundamentalists is small. And I'm not even including the non-fundie Roman Catholicism, which is the largest Christian denomination by far.

But don't let the truth stand in the way of your bigotry.

 

Certainly not like this

[stefaanh]

http://libwww.freelibrary.org/closing/
Quote:

All Free Library of Philadelphia Customers,

We deeply regret to inform you that without the necessary budgetary legislation by the State Legislature in Harrisburg, the City of Philadelphia will not have the funds to operate our neighborhood branch libraries, regional libraries, or the Parkway Central Library after October 2, 2009.

Re:Republicans?

[sexconker]

Not to add to what is sure to be an offtopic flamewar, but IQ tests are certainly not culturally biased.

Unless, of course, you think logic, math, and spatial recognition are culturally biased.

Protip: The "FREE IQ TEST" you took online is not a real IQ test.

Re:More media attention for Academic Decathlon

[cashman73]

I don't know how much glamour you can put on an Academic Decathlon team, but Dean Kamen has had some success with making science and engineering seem a bit more fun with the FIRST Robotics competition. Some high school teams are actually bringing cheerleaders and cheering sections to the event, and there are starting to turn up more local events as well.

Thanks for perfectly illustrating my point

[copponex]

http://www.gallup.com/poll/14107/Third-Americans-Say-Evidence-Has-Supported-Darwins-Evolution-Theory.aspx

The poll shows that almost half of the U.S. population believes that human beings did not evolve, but instead were created by God -- as stated in the Bible -- essentially in their current form about 10,000 years ago...

A segmentation of Americans based on their responses to the questions about creationism and biblical literacy finds that a quarter of Americans can be considered to be true literalists -- believing not only in the literal interpretation of the Bible, but also in the creationist view of the origin of humans.

Of course you don't believe there are many creationists out there, because you're not a creationist. I have trouble imagining how many people accept this ridiculous idea myself. But there the numbers are.

Re:Wrong question

[citizenr]

I believe that Science (like many other things) has been hi-jacked by politics.

It has been hijacked by dump people. If I turn on TV right now and switch to Discovery Ill probably see LA Ink, Most Haunted or other REALITY TV crap :(

Re:Science =! Public Policy

[joocemann]

You missed the point.

Try not being oversensitive to the facts that question your own belief system -- it is forcing you to miss the actual point -- a point that you have given clues to actually understanding (that all major media in the US, but most largely Fox, is full of b.s. to control perception).

Go back, quit being defensive, and read. This is an amazing post and its a shame you got so upset simply because a part of you was a part of it.

Our first response to someone calling us an asshole is to get angry; it would be nice if instead it was to say 'why?'

Galileo Galilei

[je ne sais quoi]

The GP makes it sound like a disbelief in Science is a new thing, but that's not right. As you say: disbelief in correct, but inconvenient, things is as old as humanity. For proof, look at the trial of Galileo for his support of Copernican Astronomy. Still, nearly 400 years after the event, the Pope is still quoting people who said

The Church at the time of Galileo kept much more closely to reason than did Galileo himself, and she took into consideration the ethical and social consequences of Galileo's teaching too. Her verdict against Galileo was rational and just, and the revision of this verdict can be justified only on the grounds of what is politically opportune.

Sure, Galileo, Hansen and Gore can be criticized and torn apart for their flaws and missteps, but in the end, the only thing that matters is if they were right or not. 400 years from now, I don't think anyone who is mentally well will be claiming that anthropogenic climate change isn't a fact, just as in the present day they don't claim now that the Sun goes around the Earth. Anthropogenic climate change essentially proven at this point, the only matter of debate is how quickly the system responds and the magnitude of the change.

Re:Galileo Galilei

[Estanislao Mart�nez]

The GP makes it sound like a disbelief in Science is a new thing, but that's not right. As you say: disbelief in correct, but inconvenient, things is as old as humanity. For proof, look at the trial of Galileo for his support of Copernican Astronomy. Still, nearly 400 years after the event, the Pope is still quoting people who said:

The Church at the time of Galileo kept much more closely to reason than did Galileo himself, and she took into consideration the ethical and social consequences of Galileo's teaching too. Her verdict against Galileo was rational and just, and the revision of this verdict can be justified only on the grounds of what is politically opportune.

Ah, that's a Feyerabend quote--and probably the worst of his otherwise excellent Against Method. Feyerabend is very worth reading, but let it be said that he is somewhat of a troll.

Sure, Galileo, Hansen and Gore can be criticized and torn apart for their flaws and missteps, but in the end, the only thing that matters is if they were right or not.

Um, do you seriously think that Galileo's contemporaries ought to have judged his theory on the basis of evidence that wouldn't be discovered until at least one hundred years later (like stellar aberration or observation of stellar parallax), not to mention a theory of mechanics that hadn't yet been invented?

Science-infatuated people today have a very unfortunate tendency to overstate Galileo's scientific case, and understate the objections of his contemporary astronomer colleagues--which were very good objections, when judged by contemporary standards. The aforementioned book by Feyerabend goes at length about this; Galileo needed to overturn Aristotelian mechanics to really win the scientific contest, and he didn't manage to overturn it.

The Church's treatment of Galileo, also, was more politically and personally motivated than scientifically so: the church authorities initially protected him from his conservative opponents within it, and then he went and wrote a book making fun of the pope. The Galileo affair is certainly a textbook case for separation of church and state. It's hard to conclude much more beyond that--and do we really need to? Again, there's a point that Feyerabend makes that is crucial here: the Copernican system only overcame the Ptolemaic one after being developed for at least 200 years, over which there were all kinds of serious objections that needed to be overcome.

Not that I want to make the parallel case about human-induced climate change, though.

Re:Galileo Galilei

[ObsessiveMathsFreak]

Science-infatuated people today have a very unfortunate tendency to overstate Galileo's scientific case, and understate the objections of his contemporary astronomer colleagues--which were very good objections, when judged by contemporary standards. The aforementioned book by Feyerabend goes at length about this; Galileo needed to overturn Aristotelian mechanics to really win the scientific contest, and he didn't manage to overturn it.

Horseshit. You've been drinking Feyerabend's Kool aid too much.

Galileo's observation of the phases of Venus alone was enough to disprove the Ptolemic system , or at the very least, cause it to be modified into something like the Tychonic system. Once Jupiter's moons had been observed, another pillar of the Ptolemic and indeed human thought had been broken. There are celestial bodies that can orbit other celestial bodies. Boom. Blown, out of the water. The rest was just maths. The main work had already been done.

Again, there's a point that Feyerabend makes that is crucial here: the Copernican system only overcame the Ptolemaic one after being developed for at least 200 years, over which there were all kinds of serious objections that needed to be overcome.

There were fuck all serious objections to be overcome. The Ptolemic system hadn't a leg to stand on. This wasn't even the first time a Heliocentric model had been proposed. The only thing holding it up was tradition and deference to the church (who employed too many astronomers). Keeping the whole rotten structure aloft required torturous, torturous intellectual atrocities like the Tychonic model. You didn't have to be an astronomer to see what was going on, even in those days.

The Copernican system was published in 1543. In 1609 Kepler dropped the intellectual equivalent of the atomic bomb in the form of his first two laws of planetary motion in the Astronomia Nova. That's 66 years, not 200. Unless you want to include the publishing for the third law in 1619. That gives you 76 years. The Ptolmeic system toppled before Galileo was even....

Holy Presentation Order Batman!! Turns out Galileo was tried and found guilty of heresy in 1633, a full 24 years after Kepler published his laws of motion for planets. What a kick in the balls. Not only did his theory have observational evidence, but it even had scientific data backing it up. Pity those churchmen were so keen on reason and justice in their verdicts, eh? Oh well, at least they didn't, you know, burn him at the stake or anything. No, they were far too enlightened for anything like that.

Yeah, maybe Galileo was a bit of a jerk. Kind of like how I'm being a bit of a jerk right now. But that doesn't change the fact that he was scientifically and ethically justified both his heliocentric theories and methods, and that the church was a dogmatic, intolerant and tyrannical censor, prepared to use any means to stifle progress it saw as unfit. And it also doesn't change the fact that both Feyerabend and yourself are gross historical revisionists with an axe to grind against the honest and correct assessment of what happened to Galileo and its meaning for the interface of science, religion and politics.

Stellar parallax....? Some people spend too much time on Wikipedia.

Re:Easy!

[mdarksbane]

In many schools, football pays for itself and the entire rest of the extracurricular budget. They aren't taking away from science at all to field a football team - they're giving the nerds (at least, those of you who seem to hate your bodies enough to not enjoy sports) a big concert venue for the band and funding for other extracurriculars.

Re:Thank you for identifying part of the problem

[Abies Bracteata]

This is the right-wing smear machine at work. The hockey-stick was not "made up" -- in spite of the attacks on it, the original 1998 version was a reasonably good "first crack" at reconstructing past temperatures from proxy data. It was a "first of its kind" effort with plenty of room for improvement, but in no way was it fraudulent or "made up. Followup research using improved techniques refined and improved on the original hockey-stick, but in no way debunked it. And that's exactly the way science works: Pioneering research is published, and if this pioneering research has real scientific validity, followup research that builds upon and improves the original work will be published. And that's exactly what happened here -- the first hockey-stick paper spawned a bunch of additional temperature reconstruction papers that improved on that original work. In fact, one of the original hockey-stick authors just published an improved version of the hockey-stick last year in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The right-wing's attack on the hockey-stick research has been consistently rude, stupid, and offensive. The wingnuts who led the political attacks on the hockey-stick researchers are all disgusting pieces of work.

Re:Thank you for identifying part of the problem

[chrb]

Wrong. Climate myths: The 'hockey stick' graph has been proven wrong, quote:

The conclusion that we are making the world warmer certainly does not depend on reconstructions of temperature prior to direct records.

Most researchers would agree that while the original hockey stick can - and has - been improved in a number of ways, it was not far off the mark. Most later temperature reconstructions fall within the error bars of the original hockey stick. Some show far more variability leading up to the 20th century than the hockey stick, but none suggest that it has been warmer at any time in the past 1000 years than in the last part of the 20th century.

The "Hockey Stick" was investigated by the 2006 report of the US National Academy of Science, which found:

the key conclusion is the same: it's hotter now than it has been for at least 1000 years.