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Is "Understanding Science" a Joke?
By Nicholas Horton | March 20th 2009 01:14 PM | 5 comments | Print | E-mail | Track Comments
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About Nicholas Horton

I'm a graduate student in mathematics at Portland State University. My areas of study are Quantum Game theory and Mathematical Biology with a focus in Evolution.

Outside of Math, my science interests... Full Bio

John Hawks is not happy with it.

I clicked on this John Timmer story about the new website, “Understanding Science”, directed toward the public and K-12 educators. What I found staring at me was a giant picture of a 27-step flowchart.I’m not going to reproduce it. 

You can go over there and look if you must. I’m not kidding: “The Scientific Process” has 27 steps arranged in four interacting vortices. If you have trouble envisioning how this works, you can go to the “Understanding Science” site, and the Flash animation will helpfully take you through the 55 steps in the flowchart that Walter Alvarez used to come up with the Cretaceous impact hypothesis.

Now, if you can think of a picture to make the public and high school kids less likely to think science is something they can understand, let me know.


Science is scary!  Look:

VS.




Comments

adaptivecomplexity's picture
The flow chart is ridiculous, but there are some decent, non-flow-chart pages with basic information. Some of that material would make a good resource for school kids working on a science project - I judged a couple of science fairs recently, and many of the kids could have used a decent intro to science.

Michael White | 03/20/09 | 16:27 PM
Hank's picture
We've talked enough about improving science education for kids that a short while back we started doing something about it.   

As of this moment, this URL is just a placeholder but over the next two weeks it will go from the mockup here to a real site.    So by all means when it is in beta you guys can put up the kind of content you want kids to find .



Hank Campbell | 03/20/09 | 17:10 PM
adaptivecomplexity's picture
Wow, that's excellent. I can't wait to see it when it's up.

Michael White | 03/20/09 | 17:13 PM
logicman's picture
Great idea! 

We can teach kids what 'positive correlation' means by showing them uniform colours against death rates in Star Trek.

More seriously, I'd love to do something on language studies.

Patrick Lockerby | 03/20/09 | 17:32 PM
logicman's picture
The flow chart is ridiculous

I agree.

Science  101

A - Observe an event.
B - Make an educated guess as to what chain of causality might have caused the observed event.
C - Test the educated guess by intelligent observation to see if the chain breaks.
D - If the guessed chain appears unbroken, invite all comers to try to break it.
E - If any one intelligent observation shows how the chain may be broken, either
F - go back to step B, inviting all comers to join in, and make a new or revised guess, or
G - insist that you must be right and reject all contrary opinions.
Popper's corrolary to steps A through F:  step G is both redundant and deprecated.

Proviso:  the above is intended only for the teaching of science at an elementary level.  Practicing scientists, being adults, may continue to adopt rule G if they so wish.  :)

Patrick Lockerby | 03/20/09 | 17:18 PM

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