Tag: science

Animals are using Colorado’s wildlife crossings, reducing collisions, CDOT says

typhlonectes:

The five underpasses and two overpasses that cross Colorado 9 south
of Kremmling have reduced wildlife related crashes by almost 90 percent,
Lisa Schwantes communications manager for CDOT said Thursday.

There are more than 30 passages, which vary in construction, across
the state of Colorado, only two of them cross over the highway.

“They’re extremely important,” Jeff Peterson, wildlife program
manager for CDOT, said. “When you get into conflicts with wildlife that
raises the issue.”

Statistics obtained by CDOT show that from 2006 to 2016 on U.S. 160,
in the area between Durango and Bayfield, there were 472 car-animal
collisions, a large number of them involving mule deer…

Animals are using Colorado’s wildlife crossings, reducing collisions, CDOT says

waluwadjet:

genatrius:

elodieunderglass:

jenroses:

andrusi:

downtroddendeity:

curlicuecal:

pts-m-d:

thetrippytrip:

dont you just love capitalism..  

Black Mirror predicted this we are all goona die

my god but I get mad when someone flippantly dismisses important scientific progress because you can make it sound dumb by framing it the right way.

For a start, of course a lot of science sounds dumb.  Science is all in the slogging through the minutiae, the failures, the tedious process of filling in the blank spaces on the map because it ain’t ’t glamorous, but if someone doesn’t do it, no one gets to know for sure what’s there.

Someone’s gotta spend their career measuring fly genitalia under a microscope. Frankly, I’m grateful to the person who is tackling that tedium, because if they didn’t, I might have to, and I don’t wanna.

But let’s talk about why we should care about this particular science and spend money on it. (And I’ll even answer without even glancing at the article.)

Off the top of my head?

  • -advances in robotics
  • -advances in miniature robotics
  • -advances in flight technology
  • -advantages in simulating and understanding the mechanics and programming of small intelligences
  • -ability to grow crops in places uninhabitable by insects (space? cold/hot? places where honeybees are non-native and detrimental to the ecosystem?)
  • -ability to improve productivity density of crops and feed more people
  • -less strain on bees, who do poorly when forced to pollinate monocultures of low nutrition plants
  • -ability to run tightly controlled experiments on pollination, on the effects of bees on plant physiology, on ecosystem dynamics, etc
  • -fucking robot bees, my friend
  • -hahaha think how confused those flowers must be

Also worth keeping in mind? People love, love, love framing science in condescending and silly sounding terms as an excuse to cut funding to vital programs. *Especially* if it’s also associated with something (gasp) ‘inappropriate’, like sex or ladyparts. This is why research for a lot of women’s issues, lgbtq+ issues, minorities’ issues, and vulnerable groups in general’s issues tends to lag so far behind the times. This is why some groups are pushing so hard to cut funding for climate change research these days.

Anything that’s acquired governmental funding has been through and intensely competitive, months-to-years long screening by EXPERTS IN THE FIELD who have a very good idea what research is likely to be most beneficial to that field and fill a needed gap.

Trust me.  The paperwork haunts my nightmares.

So, we had a joke in my lab: “Nice work, college boy.” It was the phrase for any project that you could spend years and years working on and end up with results that could be summed up on a single, pretty slide with an apparently obvious graph. The phrase was taken from something a grower said at a talk my advisor gave as a graduate student: “So you proved that plants grow better when they’re watered? Nice work, college boy.”

But like, the thing is? There’s always more details than that. And a lot of times it’s important that somebody questions our assumptions. 

A labmate of mine doing very similar research demonstrated that our assumptions about the effect of water stress on plant fitness have been wrong for years because *nobody had thought to separate out the different WAYS a plant can be water stressed.* (Continuously, in bursts, etc.). And it turns out these ways have *drastically different effects* with drastically different measures required for response to them to keep from losing lots of money and resources in agriculture.

Nice work, college boy. :p

Point the second: surprise! Anna Haldewang is an industrial design student.  She developed this in her product design class.  And, as far as I can tell, she has had no particular funding at all for this project, much less billions of dollars. 

‘grats, Anna, you FUCKING ROCK.

ps: On a lighter note, summarizing research to make it sound stupid is both easy AND fun. Check out @lolmythesis​ – I HIGHLY RECOMMEND. :33

@curlicuecal

I’d also like to chime in that a chunk of my family are apple farmers, and one thing I learned visiting them is that you can’t always let bees pollinate. With certain apple varieties, people have to go out with little paintbrushes to pollinate them by hand, because if they cross-pollinate with the wrong variety the apples won’t come out the same. Beebots could potentially be a huge time-saver at that task, because depending on how the algorithms work, you could just tell them “Don’t go into the Gala field next door” and let them do the job more efficiently than you without having to worry about getting weird mutant apples.

Also holy shit all science is not interchangeable.  Nobody got up one morning and said “instead of saving the bees I’m going to build a bee robot.”

The only problem with those robots is a marketing one. Make ‘em anthropomorphic, like pixies, and people would be all over that shit and want them as pets. 

I feel morally obligated to remind everyone, when I see discourse like this, that there are vested interests in destroying the public’s faith in

  • Evidence-based statements
  • Publicly-funded science
  • Critical examination of the media
  • Affection and investment for the natural world

And this is something I’ve been explaining for years.

And next thing you know it’s 2017 and everyone is surprised that the CDC has been told not to use the words “vulnerable” or “evidence-based” when writing their budgets. And the people running the world are able to deny the effects of climate change while the waters rise. This is how you get hurricanes while people tell you there aren’t any hurricanes. And how conspiracy theories are more attractive than the truth.

We got here on purpose because we wanted to be here. Because cynicism seemed cooler than wonder. Because of course the world is broken so why bother?

Because we didn’t want to be like those wide-eyed nerds and their silly robot bees.

I think I may have rebligged the root post before without particularly examining how counter to my values it is. Though, I do truly hope that scientific research can fix the woes of ailing bees before we have to implement any robot army based solutions.

every time i see this im reminded of the “shrimp on a treadmill” thing that people were lambasted for being a “waste of taxpayer money”. DESPITE the fact that it was like a few thousand dollars MAX and done by a student in university (with a grant provided BY THE UNIVERSITY) to study how the negative water quality in the gulf of mexico caused by the bp spill would affect oxygen processing in shrimp. 

which is a SIGNIFICANT part of the fishing industry down there and how some folks literally make their living. it also ties into ecology and conservation since you don’t want to overfish shrimp populations that arent going able to bounce back from it. you also dont want to start resorting to fishing methods that will do more harm to to the environment to try to get bigger hauls to hit basic demand if theres nothing there to catch.

my own research was mostly done out of pocket w a few hundred dollars grant despite the fact that it involved potentially an entirely new mode of sensory input as of yet undiscovered by science that had LOADS of potential applications in biology and robotics. but boil it down to “put a scorpion in a maze in the dark to see if it bumps into walls” on paper and people just kinda roll your eyes at you. hell, i even built my own lab apparatuses and paid for the materials with money from my food budget. (bulk dry spaghetti saved my life)

anytime you see a “lol this science was a waste of money” it’s almost always blatant propaganda to encourage the cutting back of research and the justification of budget cuts. dig a little deeper into “dumb studies” and there’s usually some very nifty applications or hypotheses being tested that have real world applications concerning problems that exist RIGHT NOW. 

not to say you shouldnt think critically about WHY something is being studied, but the studies you usually have to look out for are the ones privately funded by groups looking to push an agenda (ones from christian “family” groups on homosexuality/lgbt issues, stuff from people with connections to big oil/etc who do studies on global warming, or on the other end of the political spectrum something from pro-marijuana lobbyist about how marijuana will cure -insertailmenthere-). there could still be good raw data in these studies, assuming it hasnt been altered or data sets excluded, but it will be presented in such a way to make their point so you have to keep that in mind (as well as their methodology and things that could have been intentionally or unintentionally skewing the data, but that goes for any study)

typhlonectes:

Extremely Rare (and Peculiar) Fish Found Off Coast of Tasmania

The new population could double the known numbers of these oddball creatures

by Briget Katz

The red handfish is a funny little critter that uses its fins to scuttle along the rocky seafloor. Dwelling exclusively in the waters off Tasmania, it is also one of the rarest fish in the world. So researchers were excited to find an entirely new population of red handfish hiding amidst Tasmania’s reefs. As Calla Wahlquist reports for the Guardian, the discovery may double the number of known red handfish.

Previously, scientists were aware of only one red handfish population of between 20 and 40 individuals, which swim along a stretch of reef in the Frederick Henry Bay. But a member of the public recently reported seeing a little handfish in a nearby area. So seven divers from the University of Tasmania’s Institute for Marine and Antarctic Studies and the citizen science project Reef Life Survey set out to try and find these elusive marine creatures…

Read more: Smithsonian Magazine

This Lovely Little Milky Frog Will Someday Learn to “Fly”

typhlonectes:

This is the Annam flying frog (Rhacophorus annamensis), a
rare and hefty frog that lives in the lofty forest canopies of South
East Asia, and uses specialised skin flaps between its toes to fly from
tree to tree.

This particular frog is a juvenile – when Annam flying frogs are young, they take on a creamy white appearance, with rich brown Dalmatian-like splotches all over.

But as they grow older, they lose this colouration altogether, and
will either transition to light grey with speckles, or brown or dark red
all over, which isn’t quite so delicious.

You can’t tell from the pictures, but these frogs are bigger than you’d expect.

The females are typically larger than the males, and can grow to be
an impressive 10 cm long, which makes them slightly smaller than the
length of an iPhone 6…

This Lovely Little Milky Frog Will Someday Learn to “Fly”

Decolonising Science Reading List – Chanda Prescod-Weinstein – Medium

asshole-academic:

October 2016 Introduction

In April, 2015, one of the most visible topics of discussion in the Astronomy community was the planned Thirty Meter Telescope and protests against it from Native Hawaiians who didn’t want it built on Mauna Kea. I wrote a lot about this on social media, spending some significant time trying to contextualize the debate. This reading list was originally created in response to requests for where I was getting some of the information from. A lot of people asked me about what I’d been reading as reference points for my commentary on the relationship between colonialism and what we usually call “modern science.”

In August 2016 I updated to announce: I’m happy to report that Sarah Tuttleand I will be contributing to this list in future thanks to this FQXi grant that we are co-I/PI on: Epistemological Schemata of Astro|Physics: A Reconstruction of Observers. The grant proposal was based on a written adaptation of a speech I gave at the Inclusive Astronomy conference, Intersectionality as a Blueprint for Postcolonial Scientific Community Building.

As part of this work, I’ve continued to expand the reading list, which seems to have become a global resource for people interested in science and colonialism. As I originally said, I make no claims about completeness, about updating it regularly, or even ever coming up with a system for organizing it that I find to be satisfactory. You’ll find texts that range from personal testimony to Indigenous cosmology to anthropology, to history to sociology to education research. All are key to the process of decolonising science, which is a pedagogical, cultural, and intellectual set of interlocking structures, ideas, and practices. This reading list functions on the premise that there is value in considering the ways in which science and society co-construct. It is stuff that I have read all or part of and saw some value in sharing with others.

I am especially indebted to the #WeAreMaunaKea movement for educating me and spurring me to educate myself.

Original April 2015 Commentary

There are two different angles at play in the discussion about colonialism and science. First is what constitutes scientific epistemology and what its origins are. As a physicist, I was taught that physics began with the Greeks and later Europeans inherited their ideas and expanded on them. In this narrative, people of African descent and others are now relative newcomers to science, and questions of inclusion and diversity in science are related back to “bringing science to underrepresented minority and people of color communities.” The problem with this narrative is that it isn’t true. For example, many of those “Greeks” were actually Egyptians and Mesopotamians under Greek rule. So, even though for the last 500 years or so science has largely been developed by Europeans, the roots of its methodology and epistemology are not European. Science, as scientists understand it, is not fundamentally European in origin. This complicates both racist narratives about people of color and innovation as well as discourse around whether science is fundamentally wedded to Euro-American operating principles of colonialism, imperialism and domination for the purpose of resource extraction.

This leads me to the second angle at play: Europeans have engaged what is called “internalist” science very seriously over the last 500 years and often in service and tandem with colonialism and white supremacy. For example, Huygens and Cassini facilitated and directed astronomical observation missions in order to help the French better determine the location of St. Domingue, the island that houses the modern nations of Haiti and the Dominican Republic. Why? Because this would help make the delivery of slaves and export of the products of their labor more efficient. That is just one example, which stuck out to me because I am a descendant of the Caribbean part of the Atlantic Slave Trade, and I also have two degrees in astronomy (and two in physics).

There is a lot that has been hidden from mainstream narratives about the history of astronomy, including 20th century history. Where has the colonial legacy of astronomy taken us? From Europe to Haiti to now Hawai’i. Hawai’i is the flash point for this conversation now, even though the story goes beyond Hawai’i. If we are going to understand the context of what is happening in Hawai’i with the Thirty Meter Telescope, we must understand that Hawai’i is not the first or only place where astronomers used and benefited from colonialism. And in connection, we have to understand Hawai’ian history. Thus, my reading list also includes important materials about Hawai’i’s history.

tl;dr: science has roots outside of the Eurasian peninsula known as Europe, it likely has its limitations as one of multiple ontologies of the world, it has been used in really grotesque ways, and we must understand all of these threads to truly contextualize the discourse in Hawai’i around science, Hawaiian epistemologies and who gets to determine what constitutes “truth” and “fact” when it comes to Mauna a Wakea.

Finally, I believe science need not be inextricably tied to commodification and colonialism. The discourse around “diversity, equity and inclusion” in science, technology, engineering and mathematics must be viewed as a reclamation project for people of color. Euro-American imperialism and colonialism has had its (often unfortunate) moment with science, and it’s time for the rest of us to reclaim our heritage for the sake of ourselves and the next seven generations.

Note: this reading list is woefully low on materials about science in the pre-European contact Americas, Southeast Asia and parts of Australasia. I’m probably missing some stuff, but I think it signals a problem with research in the history of science too. Also I make no claims about completeness or a commitment to regularly updating it with my newest finds. Also see A U.S./Canadian Race & Racism Reading List.

May 2017 edit: I also just learned that there is a Reading List on Modern and Colonial Science in the Middle East.

The List

Intersectionality as a Blueprint for Postcolonial Scientific Community Building by Chanda Prescod-Weinstein

Women in Astronomy: Ain’t I a woman? Living at the intersection of gender, race, and sexuality by Chanda Prescod-Weinstein

African Cultural Astronomy: Current Archaeoastronomy and Ethnoastronomy Research in Africa eds. Jarita C. Holbrook, Johnson O. Urama, and R. Thebe Medupe

Pursuing Intersectionality, Unsettling Dominant Imaginaries by Vivian May

Against Purity: Living Ethically in Compromised Times by Alexis Shotwell

The Crest of the Peacock: The Non-European Roots of Mathematics by George Gheverghese Joseph; Many thanks to Archishman Raju for sending me the following significant caveat about this book: I just wanted to bring to your attention that there is a strong charge on G. Joseph for appropriating information amounting to plagiarism (I think). (See http://ckraju.net/Joseph/Complaint-about-Joseph-to-Manchester.pdf , and attachments http://ckraju.net/Joseph/Annexures-Manchester.pdf ). It is particularly ironic in this context that someone from University of Manchester would take credit for ideas developed in India. Addendum from Chanda: the link in the letter to the advertised PhD position is available on the Wayback Machine.

Science, Colonialism and Indigenous Peoples: The Cultural Politics of Law and Knowledge by Laurelyn Whitt

Beyond Banneker: Black Mathematicians and the Paths to Excellence by Erica N. Walker

Einstein on Race and Racism by Fred Jerome and Rodger Taylor

Epistemic Injustice by Miranda Fricker

Has Feminism Changed Physics? by Amy Grave (neé Bug)

(Baby Steps) Toward a Feminist Physics by Barbara Whitten

Has Feminism Changed Science? by Londa Schiebinger

Knowing Otherwise: Race, Gender, and Implicit Understanding by Alexis Shotwell

Cognitive Repression in Contemporary Physics by Evelyn Fox Keller

Academic Articles on race and genetics by A.A. M’charek

Language, Identity, and Ideology: High-Achieving Scholarship Women(South African context) by Y. Dominguez-Whitehead, S. Liccardo, and H. Botsis

Conceptualising transformation and interrogating elitism: The Bale scholarship programme (South African context) by H. Botsis, Y. Dominguez-Whitehead, and S. Liccardo

Beyond South Africa’s ‘indigenous knowledge — science’ wars by Lesley J.F. Green

Decolonizing Science and Science Education in a Postcolonial Space (Trinidad, a Developing Caribbean Nation, Illustrates) by Laila Boisselle caveat from Chanda: I *hate* the use of “developing nation” here. It’s a colonialist term.

Women, Science, and Technology: A Reader in Feminist Science Studies eds. Mary Wyer, Mary Barbercheck, Donna Cookmeyer, Hatice Ozturk, and Marta Wayne

Ghost Stories for Darwin: The Science of Variation and the Politics of Diversityby Banu Subramaniam

The Eastern Origins of Western Civilisation by John M. Hobson

Interrogating Whiteness and Relinquishing Power: White Faculty’s Commitment to Racial Consciousness in STEM Classrooms eds. Nicole Joseph, Chayla Haynes, Floyd Cobb

On the possibility of a feminist philosophy of physics by Maralee Harrell

Multicultural settler colonialism and indigenous struggle in Hawai’i: The politics of astronomy on Mauna a Wakea a dissertation by Joseph Salazar (available on ProQuest)

Challenging epistemologies: Exploring knowledge practices in Palikur astronomy by Lesley J.F. Green

‘Indigenous Knowledge’ and ‘Science’: Reframing the Debate on Knowledge Diversity by Lesley J.F. Green

The Rain Stars, the World’s River, the Horizon and the Sun ’s Path: Astronomy along the Rio Urucauá, Amapá, Brazil by Lesley Green and David Green

Colonialism & Science: Saint Domingue in the Old Regime by James E. McClellan III

Is Science Multicultural? Postcolonialisms, Feminisms, and Epistemologies by Sandra Harding

Whose Science? Whose Knowledge?: Thinking from Women’s Lives by Sandra Harding

The ‘Racial’ Economy of Science: Toward a Democratic Future ed. by Sandra Harding

Science and Other Cultures: Issues in Philosophies of Science and Technologyed. Sandra Harding with Robert Figueroa

Science and Social Inequality: Feminist and Postcolonial Issues by Sandra Harding

Sciences From Below: Feminisms, Postcolonialities, and Modernities by Sandra Harding

The Postcolonial Science and Technology Studies Reader ed. by Sandra Harding

Hating Empire Properly: The Two Indies and the Limits of Enlightenment Anticolonialism by Sunil M. Agnani

Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature by Donna J. Haraway

Beamtimes and Lifetimes: The World of High Energy Physics by Sharon Traweek

The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas S. Kuhn

A People’s History of Science: Miners, Midwives, and Low Mechanicks by Clifford D. Connor

Why I Am Not A Scientist: Anthropology and Modern Science by Jonathan M. Marks

Notes on Dialectics by C.L.R. James (available scanned here.)

Science and Technology in Korea: Traditional Instruments and Techniques by Sang-woon Jeon

The Ursula Franklin Reader: Pacifism as a Map

Daughters of Alchemy: Women and Scientific Culture in Italy by Meredith K. Ray

People’s Science: Bodies and Rights on the Stem Cell Frontier by Ruha Benjamin

The World and Africa: An inquiry into the part which Africa has played in world history by W.E. Burghardt Du Bois

The Social Life of DNA: Race, Reparations, and Reconciliation After the Genomeby Alondra Nelson

Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present by Harriet A. Washington

Wikipedia entry on Alhazen

Wikipedia entry on History of Scientific Method

Wikipedia entry on Physics in the medieval Islamic World

Tribal peoples have crucial role to play in global conservation Guardian Op-Ed

We Live In the Future. Come Join Us. by Bryan Kamaoli Kuwada

Protecting Mauna A Wakea: The Space Between Science and Spirituality by Keolu Fox

Aloha Betrayed: Native Hawaiian Resistance to American Colonialism by Noenoe K. Silva

A Nation Rising: Hawaiian Movements for Life, Land and Sovereignty, Noelani Goodyear-Ka’opua, Ikaika Hussey, and Erin Kahunawaika’ala Wright, editors

voices of fire: reweaving the literary lei of pele and hi’iaka by ku’ualohoa ho’omanawanui

Decolonising Science Reading List – Chanda Prescod-Weinstein – Medium

angryfishtrap:

christophoronomicon:

glitchystardust:

antisanity:

carryonmysociallyawkwardson:

jamesbarns:

i hate when scientists are like ‘this planet cant have aliens on it because there’s no water! the atmosphere is wrong! theres not enough heat to sustain life!’ because dude theyre aliens, nobodys saying they need any of those things to exist

we’re so humanocentric it’s infuriating. just because we can’t live there doesn’t mean nothing can! like, never mind aliens, we do this with our own fucking planet! scientists used to think nothing could possibly live at the bottom of the oceans, because “all life needs sunlight to survive, of course!” yet what did we find when we invented submarines that could go deep enough? the barren wasteland the scientists were expecting? fuck no! the bottom of the sea is teeming with all sorts of weird and wonderful creatures even wackier than anything they ever came up with in star trek!

when we discover aliens, we probably won’t even fucking realise it, because they’ll be so different from what we’re used to as ‘life’, we won’t even recognise them as living beings

things are  heating up in the alien fandom

Another thing that bothers me is when scientists stumble upon a huge black hole or something and say shit like “it’s impossible, it shouldn’t exist, it breaks the laws of physics”…Buddy, do you know who made the laws of physics? HUMANS. HUMANS WHO HAVE NEVER EVEN LEFT THE SOLAR SYSTEM. It isn’t “breaking” anything. Maybe instead of saying it’s impossible to exist, you should look at these old laws from a different perspective. Science is an ever-changing field that’s full of discovery, but sometimes scientists are SO STUBBORN! I understand not wanting to have to rethink years of research but COME ON.

The problem with this discussion is that it’s based on false premises, i.e. that scientists are conservative people who view physics laws as religion and anything contradicting them as heresy. That’s a popular view often shown in fiction and in the popular press, and tends to make non-scientists feel good about themselves (”I may not know as much as them, but at least I’m not as close-minded”). It’s also a very inaccurate and insulting view of scientists.

While one can never generalise things across an entire group of people, and there are indeed scientists out there who are somewhat ossified (and in the end of the 19th century, it’s true that the science field in general was rather calcified. The public has just failed to notice scientists have moved on from this point of view), the vast majority are extremely forward-thinking and would like nothing better than being proven wrong in some cases. Science advances as much through its failures as through its successes, and it’s in fact the very basis of the scientific method to be ready to expose oneself to being proven wrong (that’s the meaning of having falsifiable theories: a theory is scientific only if it contains the seeds of its own potential destruction). When a scientist sees something incompatible with their previous knowledge, they don’t exclaim “that’s impossible!” but “that’s curious…”. Cracks in current theories are usually where new knowledge is hidden, so scientists actually actively look for them.

What the general audience mistakes as conservatism is actually a combination of traits that are vital for scientists to be able to do actual scientific work:

  • The threshold of proof is very high in science. Humans can easily be misled, our brains are specialists in fooling themselves, anecdote is not data, so don’t expect a scientist to take your tall tale at face value. To be worthy of scientific examination, a phenomenon must be repeatable, independent from the observer, and if possible noticeable in controlled conditions. While it’s true that some discoveries (like some animal species) have started as hearsay, a typical scientist will need more before they go on a wild goose chase for the Yeti;
  • Our current scientific theories (with “theory” used in its scientific meaning, which is “a
    well-substantiated explanation of some aspect of the natural world that is acquired through the scientific method and repeatedly tested and confirmed through observation and experimentation”, i.e. quite the opposite of a hunch or hypothesis) are extremely successful and have large amounts of data backing them up. This is especially true of General Relativity, Quantum Field Theory, and the Theory of Evolution by Natural Selection. These theories have been repeatedly tested and found correct, sometimes down to 10 figures or more after the decimal, both through observation and experimentation. If you want to claim that one of these theories is wrong, the quality of the evidence you are going to have to give will have to match the quality of the evidence in favour of these theories. And if the only evidence against them is your misguided ideas about how the world should be, whether due to religious belief or plain ignorance, don’t expect scientists to have a lot of patience listening to you;
  • While scientists value imagination, they are careful with trying to extrapolate too far from what is already known, and wild speculation is frowned upon, as it’s far too easy to fool oneself into expecting things that won’t happen. Scientific research is like walking in the dark: you make small steps and try to feel your way around. You don’t make long jumps and hope not to hit a wall or fall into a hole. Unless you have good reason, based on previous knowledge (like moving in an area you already know), to know that the direction you’re going is the right one.

So to take again the examples shown by the previous rebloggers, a scientist will never say: “this planet cant have aliens on it because there’s no water! the atmosphere is wrong! theres not enough heat to sustain life!“. At most, they will say: “This planet cannot support life as we know it (i.e. carbon-based water-dependent life)“, and that’s a perfectly correct statement. Could it support other types of life? Who knows? So far, we haven’t observed any other type of life, so it’s impossible to actually answer the question without a fair amount of speculation, and as I wrote, scientists prefer to leave speculation to others.

As for the “it’s impossible, it shouldn’t exist, it breaks the laws of physics“, it’s actually laughable that anyone could think a scientist would ever say that! Maybe in a bad Hollywood movie, but in real life? In real life, cosmologists and particle physicists are actually eager to observe stuff that cannot be explained by their current theories. General Relativity and Quantum Field Theory (and in particular the Standard Model) are extremely successful, but also desperately incomplete (and in the case of the Standard Model, rather inelegant), and actually completely incompatible with each other. Which is a shame, as some of the things we’d like to know depend on having a theory to bridge the two. That’s why scientists are eager to discover something that cannot appropriately be explained by these two theories. Such a crack, as I wrote above, would provide hints as to a better way to describe the universe.

So stop propagating this false image of the scientist as a kind of high priest that thinks they hold the truth in their hands and shout down any kind of alternative as heresy. That’s not how scientists are, that’s not how science works, and it reflects more on your own lack of understanding of science than on any imaginary scientist’s failings.

cracks in current theories are usually where new knowledge is hidden

flamethrowing-hurdy-gurdy:

elodieunderglass:

animatedamerican:

So @your-biology-is-wrong wrote this excellent post, which attracted some wrongheaded comments and a lengthy, well-documented, frankly stunning rebuttal by @millenniumvulcan.  I recommend you go read them.

But the whole conversation got me thinking.

I’ve been saying for some years now that we’re teaching science terribly wrong in schools, and quite possibly the wrongest thing we’re doing is making no distinction between “facts about the universe that we have observed” and “categories and models that we have constructed in order to organize the facts we have observed”.

Essentially, kids are being taught that “cats are mammals” is the same kind of scientific fact as “cats give birth to live young,” and it isn’t.  At all.

Which is why we get discussions like the one linked above.  Or like the ones about Pluto being declared a dwarf planet instead of a planet, where people assert that the change in nomenclature is because “we understand better now what a planet is” and not because we’ve chosen to narrow the definition to (disputably) better organize our constructed categories of Things In Space.  Or, for that matter, like the ones that call out “scientific error” in the Bible by citing references to calling a bat a “bird,” or calling a whale a “fish,” as though the classification system we use today is objective scientific fact instead of constructed model.

Because nobody is teaching kids how to tell the difference, or even that there is a difference.

“Science is traditionally taught by blowing the minds of students who struggle to understand the workings of pepper grinders, and leaving them to pick up the pieces for themselves. The students then reassemble the fragments of their minds incorrectly, retaining the sexy and surprising bit, and filling in the rest of the gaps with porridge before going out into the world and smugly misunderstanding everything they see in it. Naturally, what they observe in the world does not match the porridge in their heads. Sometimes the students reassess their minds and realize that the world is infinitely more complicated than porridge and that most of their education was a series of easy lies, in which case they are usually doomed to be writers or scientists. Conversely, if they insist that the world actually matches the composition of their porridge, such that the observable world is wrong, then they will go on to be successful and influential.”

– me in 2014 (”The Bowl, The Ram And The Folded Map: Navigating The Complicated World”)

Please click that link @elodieunderglass posted you will not regret it. I mean, you might, you might end up all emotional about Knowledge, that’s never easy to handle, but I posit that it’s worth it.