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Yes, Wendy, I have a pet "late night dorm room conversation" theory that the history of science in the past few centuries can be described as overturning general intuition.  From astronomy to chemistry to radiation to natural selection all the way through the multiverse, intuition is proving to be both a major stumbling block for public acceptance of modern science and a terrible guide to understanding how the world works.

Feynman does a great job of describing this in I think his first caltech physics lecture.

eric siegel

On Jan 22, 2014, at 3:07 PM, Wendy Pollock <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

> ISEN-ASTC-L is a service of the Association of Science-Technology Centers
> Incorporated, a worldwide network of science museums and related institutions.
> *****************************************************************************
> 
> Speaking of the counter-intuitive nature of science - and how we grok it or
> start to wonder about it - Adam Gopnik made an interesting observation
> recently in a piece called "Cold Days/Hot Planet." In spite of what climate
> deniers would have us believe, he points out, we can't tell that climate is
> changing by looking out the window.  It's "an essential, if painful, fact,"
> he writes:
> "Strong scientific theories are, whatever we might like to think, more
> often counterintuitive than self-evident. We teach science, we
> *talk*science, as though it were the triumph of the self-evident over
> the
> obscure, the empirical over the occult. This is a good propaganda
> technique—'Just look with your own eyes!' we say—until it isn’t. Five
> hundred years after Copernicus, it sure still *looks* as if the sun is
> going around the earth. The evidence for global warming is not, or not
> primarily, experiential. It is cumulative, statistical, and
> inferential—just like the evidence for biological evolution, ever-improving
> I.Q.s, and the Higgs boson. Cold days don’t disprove it, and hot spells in
> summer don’t show it’s true either. It first has to be grasped as an
> abstract concept, albeit one with real and scary effects."
> Something for informal science educators to consider.
> Source:
> http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/comment/2014/01/cold-days-hot-planet.html
> 
> _________________________
> Wendy Pollock
> Evanston, Illinois
> truthabouttrees.org
> 
> 
> On Wed, Jan 22, 2014 at 1:49 PM, Alan Friedman <[log in to unmask]>wrote:
> 
>> ISEN-ASTC-L is a service of the Association of Science-Technology Centers
>> Incorporated, a worldwide network of science museums and related
>> institutions.
>> 
>> *****************************************************************************
>> 
>> Bill Aldridge at NSTA used the phrase "tiny epiphany," to describe
>> learning moments.  I find that language more modest, accurate, and
>> inspiring than saying a visitor "groks" an exhibit.  I liked Heinlein too,
>> when I was very young, but for both me and "groks," that was a brief period
>> in cultural history.
>> 
>> Even "tiny epiphany" may be too strong a description for what really
>> happens for visitors on a good day.  How often does anyone fully comprehend
>> a good exhibit, say a Bernoulli blower?  A lot is going on there.  So I
>> think we find in visitors'  experiences at exhibitions delight, surprise,
>> wonder, a glimpse of something grand, but almost always well short of total
>> comprehension or grokiness.
>> 
>> Consider this notion, often attributed to Isaac Asimov:  "The most
>> exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries,
>> is not 'Eureka!' but 'That's funny…."  "That's funny... describes the kind
>> of visitor experience I think our exhibits and programs can reasonably hope
>> to engender often.
>> 
>> I wish I knew if Asimov actually said that.  Like many quotations
>> attributed to somebody on the web, there are hundreds or thousands of
>> attributions, all without citing a source.  I actually thought it was
>> something I had heard from Dennis Flanagan, the great editor of Scientific
>> American and a member of the NYSCI Board of Trustees for many years.  If
>> anybody has an actual citation, please share!
>> 
>> Cheers,
>> Alan
>> ____________________________________
>> Alan J. Friedman, Ph.D.
>> Consultant for Museum Development and Science Communication
>> 29 West 10th Street
>> New York, New York 10011 USA
>> T  +1 917 882-6671
>> E   [log in to unmask]
>> W www.FriedmanConsults.com
>> 
>> a member of The Museum Group
>> www.museumgroup.com
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> 
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