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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.
>
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>
> 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
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> New York, New York 10011 USA
> T  +1 917 882-6671
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>
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>
>
>
>
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