What makes a good science education? Yeah, there are those endless parades of theorems to prove, hordes of tricky word problems to solve, and flocks of laboratory experiments to perform.
But a bigger part, and far more important, are sweet little stories: just-so anecdotes that offer explanations for why things are the way they are, parables that link equations to physical systems. Some abridged examples:
- How do atoms work? — around a dense positively-charged center swirl light electrons; think of them as continuous probability-waves, moving in the electric field of the nucleus; the electrons can only reside in certain energy levels, absorb and emit light at certain wavelengths, and bind with other atoms in certain patterns....
- How does photography work? — take crystals of silver salt and focus light on them; the photons knock some electrons loose, which get caught out of place in defects; then later a developer reacts more quickly with crystals that have those kinds of charge dislocations and causes them to turn into tiny metallic grains....
- How does life work? — tiny wee boxes hold chemicals, some of which store and release energy, catalyze and regulate reactions, form persistent structures, and record detailed instructions for how to build new tiny wee copies of themselves....
- How do continents work? — rock islands float on the Earth's mantle; they cruise along, pushed by slowly-rising currents caused by radioactive decay's heat release in the planetary core....
- How do stars work? — gravity pulls a big ball of gas together; the density goes up and compression heats it near the middle, until nuclear fusion kicks in and holds it steady for a few billion years; when the hydrogen runs out things have to get hotter and denser to drive further reactions, making heavier and heavier elements; eventually there's nothing left to react, the sphere collapses, explodes, and scatters useful materials about to make planets and people out of....
- How does the universe work? — a Big Bang beginning is followed by expansion, cooling, formation of initial hydrogen and helium, then dust and gas clouds, stars, galaxies, clusters of galaxies....
All these fantasies, and others like them, are gross over-simplifications. But they serve to focus the mind on key pieces of evidence and highlight the dominant processes in a given situation. Most importantly, these fables motivate the math that makes possible accurate predictions — and thereby real understanding.
TopicScience - 2002-01-05
(correlates: HiStory, IllusionOfControl, RayDavis, ...)