The solar system scaled to our moon being 1 pixel in size
You can scroll left or right, or click on the symbols at the top and the site will scroll to that planet for you (but you’ll miss some commentary if you do that). Lots of empty space, and there’s even more empty outside the solar system.
First of a short series (I hope). Summary of and commentary on some talks at ScienceOnline 2014
“What is Science Literacy”
I had some high hopes for this session, since this is a topic I’ve discussed before and care about. Unfortunately (for me) a fair fraction of the talk was dominated by discussion of science engagement. This is no small matter, and I concede that if you can’t engage with an audience they won’t become literate in the first place, and also that the audience seemed to be interested in that discussion, but I was hoping for more discussion on what literacy actually is. If you haven’t defined the problem, it’s hard to come up with an answer. I was anticipating more discussion on science not being a list of facts to be memorized and literacy being a combination of knowledge and the ability to apply the knowledge, which only came up late in the session, and not in a lot of depth.
At the beginning, though, the problem was framed in terms of a discussion the moderator (David Ng from UBC) had had with an 8 year-old, who asked (1) are unicorns real, and when that got a “no”, asked (2) could they be real (again, no), and finally (3) what if you actually saw a unicorn anyway, leaping over a rainbow. How would that change your answer?
The questions were in the context of the mythical creatures, rather than horses that might have something growing out of their forehead, so even though there might be some creature that looks like a unicorn and biology doesn’t rule such an animal out, it’s the magical things they do that tell us that they don’t and could not exist (violation of conservation of energy was offered as a prominent reason).
But what about question 3? We never really got around to answering that, but here’s my take, which I covered just last week: extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. The non-existence of unicorns and the reasons for this are quite well-established. If anyone were to report seeing a unicorn, the general reaction would be that they were mistaken — their eyes were tricked, or their video was a fake — and what evidence they had would be closely scrutinized, because it contradicts a large volume of careful science that has already been done. And THAT is a bit of science literacy — an understanding of the process by which we accept things as true or not within science. It’s too bad we ran out of time before the discussion could go there.
One other bit that came up was that the true goal of literacy is to get more people thinking scientifically even if they aren’t scientists, something with which I agree and tends to get lost in discussions that are focused on how many scientists we may or may not need, and falsely assumes that science understanding is or should be an all-or-nothing affair.
A pretty good entry for this year’s Flame Challenge.
We don’t have spectrometers inside our eyes to measure wavelengths; instead, we see colors of light thanks to special cells in the back of our eyes that send a signal to our brain when they detect light.
I think Chad’s entry is better in breadth, depth and presentation than the winner from last year, but it’s also true that I thought last year’s question (What is time) was misguided. This year we’re back to asking about processes that can be broken down and explained.
I spent the last several days at the ScienceOnline conference in Raleigh, and I am exhausted. These conferences, even more than technical conferences I attend for work, require me to be “switched on” for most of my waking day — there is only one session each day that involves someone standing up and talking to you, for just an hour — the rest of the time you are engaged in a group discussion, or talking to people between those session. The energy is amazing, though and that, plus a good dose of caffeine kept me amped up until I crashed.
I got to meet quite a few people, and as always, they were all people working on impressive projects and programs. I always feel a bit overwhelmed, in an imposter-syndrome sort of way, finding out what everyone else is working on, though my line of “I build atomic clocks for the navy” usually elicits a “that’s cool” response, and I haven’t gotten tired of hearing it. Physics+astronomy was fairly well-represented — better than in previous years, from what I can tell. (We had a lunch group and filled up two tables (16 slots) of people talking physics).
I intend to write a few session summaries once I’ve recovered and when I get a little time in the next week.
Another great Veritasium video. I got to meek Derek at ScienceOnline this past week, and we were in the same dinner group one night but ended up at opposite ends of the table, so I didn’t get to chat as much as I would have liked.
The video shows a great example of how scientists have to not trick themselves by only doing tests that would confirm the mechanism of their hypothesis. You have to see if some other mechanism would work as well.