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Volume 1 |
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A Reconnaissance |
I would like to say a word or two about words and definitions, because it is necessary to learn the words. It is not science. That doesn't mean just because it is not science that we don't have to teach the words. We are not talking about what to teach; we are talking about what science is. It is not science to know how to change Centigrade to Fahrenheit. It's necessary, but it is not exactly science. In the same sense, if you were discussing what art is, you wouldn't say art is the knowledge of the fact that a 3-B pencil is softer than a 2-H pencil. It's a distinct difference. That doesn't mean an artist gets along very well if he doesn't know that. (Actually you can find out in a minute by trying it, but that's a scientific way that art teachers may not think of explaining.)
In order to talk to each other, we have to have words and that's all right. It's a good idea to try to see the difference, and it's a good idea to know when we are teaching the tools of science, such as words, and when are teaching science itself.
To make my point still clearer, I shall pick out a certain science book to criticize unfavorably, which is unfair, because I am sure that with little ingenuity, I can find equally unfavorable things to say about others.
There is a first-grade science book which, in the first lesson of the first grade, begins in an unfortunate manner to teach science, because it starts off on the wrong idea of what science is. There is a picture of a dog, a windable toy dog, and a hand comes to the winder, and then the dog is able to move. Under the last picture, it says "What makes it move?" Later on, there is a picture of a real dog and the question "What makes it move?" Then there is a picture of a motor bike and the question "What makes it move?" and so on.
I thought at first they were getting ready to tell what science was going to be about: physics, biology, chemistry. But that wasn't it. The answer was in the teacher edition of the book; the answer I was trying to learn is that "energy makes it move."
Now energy is a very subtle concept. It is very, very difficult to get right. What I mean by that it is not easy to understand energy well enough to use it right, so that you can deduce something correctly, using the energy idea. It is beyond the first grade. It would be equally well to say that "God makes it move," or "spirit makes it move" or "movability makes it move." (In fact one could equally well say "energy makes it stop.")
Look at it this way. That's only the definition of energy. It should be reversed. We might say when something can move that it has energy in it, but not "what makes it move is energy." This is a very subtle difference. It's the same with this inertia proposition. Perhaps I can make the difference a little clearer this way:
If you ask a child what makes the toy dog move, you should think about what an ordinary human being would answer. The answer is that you wound up the spring; it tries to unwind and pushes the gear around. What a good way to begin a science course. Take apart the toy; see how it works. See the cleverness of the gears; see the ratchets. Learn something about the toy, the way the toy is put together, the ingenuity of the people devising the ratchets, and other things. That's good. The question is fine. The answer is a little unfortunate, because what they were trying to do is teach a definition of what is energy. But nothing whatever is learned.
Suppose a student would say, "I don't think energy makes it move." Where does the discussion go from there?
I finally figured out a way to test whether you have taught an idea or you have only taught a definition. Test it this way: You say, "Without using the new word which you have just learned, try to rephrase what you have just learned in your own language." Without using the word "energy," tell me what you know now about the dog's motion." You cannot. So you learned nothing about science. That may be all right. You may not want to learn something about science right away. You have to learn definitions. But for the very first lesson is that not possibly destructive?
I think, for lesson number one, to learn a mystic formula for answering questions is very bad. The book has some others---"gravity makes it fall," "the soles of your shoes wear out because of friction." Shoe leather wears out because it rubs against the sidewalk and the little notches and bumps on the sidewalk grab pieces and pull them off. To simply say it is because of friction, is sad, because it's not science.
I went to MIT. I went to Princeton. I came home, and he (my father) said, "Now you've got a science education. I have always wanted to know something that I have never understood; and so my son, I want you to explain to me." I said yes.
He said, "I understand that they say that light is emitted from an atom when it goes from one state to another, from an excited state to a state of lower energy."
I said, "That's right."
"And light is a kind of particle, a photon, I think they call it."
"Yes."
"So if the photon comes out of the atom when it goes from the exited
to the lower state, the photon must have been in the atom in the
excited state."
I said, "Well, no."
He said, "Well, how do you look at it so you can think of a particle photon coming out without it having been in there in the excited state?"
I thought a few minutes, and I said, "I'm sorry, I don't know. I can't explain it to you."
He was very disappointed after all these years and years of trying to teach me something that it came out with such poor results.
What science is, I think may be something like this: There was on this planet an evolution of life in a stage that there were evolved animals, which are intelligent. I don't mean just human beings, but animals which play and which can learn something from experience (like cats). But at this stage each animal would have to learn from its own experience. They gradually develop, until some animal could learn from experience more rapidly and could even learn from another's experience by watching, or one could show the other, or he say what the other one did. So there came a possibility that all might learn it, but the transmission was inefficient and they would die, and maybe the one who learned it died too, before he could pass it on to others.
The world looks so different after learning science. For example, trees are made of air, primarily. When they are burned, they go back to air, in the the flaming heat is released the flaming heat of the sun which was bound in to convert the air into tree, and in the ash is the small remnant of the part which did not come from air, that came from the solid earth, instead.
These are beautiful things, and the content of science is wonderfully full of them. They are very inspiring, and they can be used to inspire others.
Another of the qualities of science is that it teaches the value of rational thought, as well as the importance of freedom of thought; the positive results that come from doubting that the lessons are all true. You must here distinguish---especially in teaching---the science from the forms or procedures that are sometimes used in developing science. It is easy to say, "We write, experiment, and observe, and do this or that." You can copy that form exactly. But great religions are dissipated by following form without remembering the direct content of the teaching of the great leaders. In the same way, it is possible to follow from and call it science, but that is pseudoscience. In this way, we all suffer from the kind of tyranny we have today in the many institutions that have come under the influence of pseudoscientific advisors.
When someone says, "Science teaches such and such," he is using the word incorrectly. Science doesn't teach anything; experience teaches it. If they say to you, "Science has shown such and such," you might ask, "How does science show it? How did the scientists find out? How? What? Where?" It should not be "science has shown,", but "this experiment, this effect, has shown." And you have as much right as anyone else, upon hearing about the experiments (but be patient and listen to all the evidence) to judge whether a sensible conclusion has been arrived at.
It is necessary to teach both to accept and to reject the past with a kind of balance that takes considerable skill. Science alone of all the subjects contains within itself the lesson of the danger of belief in the infallibility of the greatest teachers of the preceding generation. So carry on.