1 SMS SMS-100 100 Class 3 Class 3 Tuesday Tuesday September September 9, 2014 9, 2014 Prof. Carl Sagan Prof. Carl Sagan “We risk becoming “We risk becoming a nation of suckers” a nation of suckers” See: See: Sagan, Carl. 1996. Sagan, Carl. 1996. The Demon The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark. . Ballentine Ballentine Press, 475 pp. Press, 475 pp.
Tuesday Tuesday September September 9, 20149, 2014
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“We risk becoming “We risk becoming a nation of suckers”a nation of suckers”
See: See: Sagan, Carl. 1996. Sagan, Carl. 1996. The DemonThe Demon--Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the DarkHaunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark. . BallentineBallentinePress, 475 pp. Press, 475 pp.
Zachary Fisher
Notes for9/9/14Homework is available Thursday after class
Zachary Fisher
Without education we are fed what we should hear by congress.
Zachary Fisher
About 5% of americans are scientifically literate at the rudimentary level and half of bills in congress are related to science and technology.
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Technology and Science are not one and the same;
See: Wolpert, L. 1992. The Unnatural Nature of Science. Harvard Univ. Press. 191 pp.
• The organized quest to understandthe natural world…
Science:
Thales of Miletos: Invented
• There are laws controlling nature;• Those laws can be discovered.
Thales of Miletos: Invented (discovered) Science ca. 600 B.C.
Zachary Fisher
Technology is all around us. It is concerned with the production of useful products and practical problem solving.
Zachary Fisher
Technology is older than science.Perhaps the most important, weapons.
Zachary Fisher
Science is much younger than technology. Invented or discovered by Thales of Miletos.The first to attempt to explain the laws of nature through reasonable ways. There is no monetary reward in science like there is in technology. Science and common sense are not always compatible. Our common sense is always changing.
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To “do science”, we must break out of our natural, common sense way of thinking!
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Present this to child. Put in skinnier glass that rises glass more.Children will always believe the second glass is more full.This is because common sense has failed the child because they are young.
Zachary Fisher
55 gallon oil drum. Cirumfrerence is 75 inches. Insulated with 6 inch foam. The question is how much longer does it have to be? It turns out to be about 36 inches longer.Do the same with the earth. The answer remains 36”. It does not matter what the radius is. Only what the delta radius is. This shows that we must open our minds to perform science.
“Scientists cannot “Scientists cannot proveprove a a theory; they can only theory; they can only falsify itfalsify it, by finding a , by finding a contradiction.”contradiction.”
Karl Popper(1902-1994)
Zachary Fisher
Aristotle said things will fall at a speed proportionate to their size. A big rock falls faster than a smaller rock.What would happen if you tied them together?No one tested it for 1900 years until Galileo.
Creator of the Scientific MethodLived in a time when the world was rampant in pseudoscience.Psychology of Freud was becoming accpetable. Learned Einstein’s theory of relativity as a child. Scientists can never prove something to be true. They can only falsify it. A good scientist is a skeptic.
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/HZLV�:ROSHUWAs Wolpert reminds us, it is important to k dkeep an open mind, but, he argues:
“What a man sees depends both upon what he looks at and also what his visual conceptual
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“…Perceptual Gestalt…”& Paradigm Shifts
experience has taught him to see. In the absence of such training, there can only be … a bloomin’ buzzin’ confusion.”
Kuhn, Thomas, S. 1970. (2nd Edition). The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Chicago Univ. Press, 210 pp.
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Zachary Fisher
To do science we must grow and learn. MAIN POINT: There is much more to science than the scientific method. There is exploration and discovery. Science requires us to ahve an imagination.
Zachary Fisher
The way you can identify family and friends with little facial analyzation. Music can look at music and hear it by sight. Paradigm shifts, once our perception changes, we never see the world in the same way again. There are some fields of science such as ocean science that do not rely on Scientific method as much.
Zachary Fisher
Lemataitre- The Big Bang TheoryHubble- Examined that the universe is expanding through red shift.
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Zachary Fisher
Galaxy is moving toward us, the wavelengths become compressed, the light looks bluer. This is blue shift. The opposite happens when the galaxy is moving away. A red shift.Once thought this would all continue until we eventually all come back together.Recently we discovered not only is the universe expanding, but the rate of expansion is accelerating. One of the biggest mysteries of science.
Zachary Fisher
This lead to theory of dark matter. A big search is out for dark matter. This means over time the light from stars will go black because the red shift will go out of visible light. Hydrogen and helium were created first. They began to condense. The gravity would overcome the electrostatic charges and put so many atoms together it created stars. The gravity at the center morphed two hydrogens in to helium in a process of fusion releasing a ton of energy.
Zachary Fisher
A star looks like its out of focus. Thats not a star, thats a nebula.
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Spiral Spiral Galaxy Galaxy (“Messier 101”, similar (“Messier 101”, similar to our to our Milky Way Galaxy)Milky Way Galaxy)
As seen by the As seen by the Hubble Space Hubble Space TelescopeTelescope
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Zachary Fisher
The Orion Nebula close up. Every molecule and every atom in your body except for helium and hydrogen were formed in stars.
Zachary Fisher
We can’t take a picture of our own glaxy because we’re in it. We really have no idea what our own galaxy looks like.
Zachary Fisher
200-400 billion stars in the galaxy. In 1996, the hubble space telescope
They kept zooming in on one of the darkest regions of space.
Zachary Fisher
Hella damn das a lot of glaxies. Its equivelant to looking at a period on a piece of paper held at arms length.
Zachary Fisher
The hubble ultradeep field shows some 10000 galaxies just in this one area. There are 4 x 10^22 stars in the universe.There are more stars in the universe than there are grains of sand on all the world’s beaches. 7 x 10^17There are 6000x more stars!!One gram of hydrogen atoms= 6.02 x10^23There are more H atoms in one gram than stars in the universe.
Once thought that the oceans came from comets. Now we see that it only could have been 10% at most.
Zachary Fisher
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Zachary Fisher
WIhotu water on Earth we could not have had life on Earth. Spontaneous generation must have happened at least once. But it is now impossible as there is now O2 in the atmosphere. Haldene radiation and lightning could have acted in molocules to create the complex moolecules needed for life.
ProtoplanetaryProtoplanetary DisksDisksin the Orion Nebulain the Orion Nebula
Zachary Fisher
Created the conditions of primitive Earth to see if life might generate.After a few days if was discovered that amino acids WERE formed. (The building blocks of proteins.) More than likely life on Earth started in deep sea vents. Life has changed Earth’s atmosphere. Another theory believes life was brought to Earth from elsewhere.
Zachary Fisher
NASA has been actively searching for planets.1516 planets have been found so far. Around Orions nebula you can see bout 153 planetary discs, the building blocks for planets.
