Facts you should know
A bunch of scientists were asked to give one fact every high school graduate should know. I got the numbers ones approximately right (except the extra-credit bonus one, which I knew the exact answer to in part due to a -10C[1] salty water fight we had in high school chemistry once: that is *cold* water), but otherwise knew all the answers to them! I’d say go me except, you know, these aren’t really hard questions.
c/o Ms. Frizzle
[1] I know this is not the exact answer.
April 25th, 2006 at 11:45 am
Fun quiz. I was at least heartened by the stat that 90% of the survey respondents claimed to be interested in science.
One annoyance: “Why does a year consist of 365 days, and a day of 24 hours?” Ummm, the answer given has NOTHING to do with why a day has 24 hours. A day itself is a natural division, so 365 days in a year makes sense, but the hour is an arbitrary time division, leading to a(n?) historical answer.
Ok, a second annoyance. At least one other answer (from my approximate field) there was so facile as to not even make any sense to me.
April 25th, 2006 at 12:02 pm
I understood that the question meant “what is behind the length of a year and of a day”? (After all, not all calendars have years of 365 days — even our calendar has to deal with leap years.)
The second annoyance is the curse of too much knowledge. *All* the answers are super facile, except the numbers ones. For instance, the bonus question’s answer is wrong: salt doesn’t reduce freezing point by adding molecules (an ice cube freezes at the same 0 as a bucketful of water).
April 25th, 2006 at 2:27 pm
I got almost all of them right, or close to right. The only one I had no clue about was the age of the oldest fossils. But I’m not sure I really know all of this stuff. For example, I have been told that the sky is blue because blue light diffuses more than red light, and I can recite that fact on command, but I don’t really understand it. I don’t know how diffused sky radiation works, so I have no idea why some wavelengths diffuse more than others, so basically what I know about the colour of the sky works out to “the sky is blue because the sky is blue.” I can’t do anything with this alleged knowledge; I couldn’t, for example, make any prediction about what colour the sky would be if we had a different sort of atmosphere.
April 25th, 2006 at 3:20 pm
Q, as far as I recall, it’s about Rayleigh scattering, which is very wavelength dependent (1/wavelength^4) — blue is a shorter wavelength, so it’s scattered more (we don’t pick up indigo/purple as well as we do blue).
But lots of the results are sort of factoid knowledge things — you know that water covers about 3/4 of the earth.
The only one that seems useful is the salt and water one, which is necessary for making good ice cream. (Though of course you don’t need to put *salt* in the water, you could put in sugar, say.)
April 25th, 2006 at 3:49 pm
It would be more accurate to say simply because air is blue. It’s so faintly tinted that you have to look through miles of it to see a strong color, but that’s why the sky is blue. Of course it’s also because air preferentially scatters a band of frequencies, but that applies to every other colored substance too. That’s one of those stock factoids like “every snowflake is different” that doesn’t bear up under any examination at all.
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There are numerous correct answers to 8. What is it that makes diseases caused by viruses and bacteria hard to treat?
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In general, these are not what I would consider the most important science facts that everybody needs to know. If somebody is off on the age of the oldest fossils by a couple of billion years, so what? The whole article looks like a space filler to me….
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I guess the purpose of articles like that is to give people like me the chance to point out the errors and feel superior, and also to give those who don’t know any better the chance to parrot what the article said to their friends and relations and feel superior, and their friends and relations can go on to parrot what they were told and they get to feel superior too, and it goes on and on getting more and more distorted with every iteration but everybody gets to feel superior, everybody wins nobody loses….
April 25th, 2006 at 4:51 pm
The “air is blue” explanation falls apart if you try to explain sunsets, the color of the sky near the sun in the middle of the day, and why the sky is bluer the farther away from the sun you look.
The evolution explanation is simplified to the point being wrong, and as you said, wolfangel, the freezing point explanation is just plain wrong.
Still, it depends on what one is thinking about when one says “need to know”. From a practical point of view, does one use knowledge about dinosaurs, evolution, or blue sky on a day-to-day basis? Not so much. Better to know how an internal combustion engine works, why things rust, or why do we need vitamins and minerals, if one is considering purely pragmatic knowledge.
April 25th, 2006 at 5:49 pm
Well, no, the air is blue is fine, but seriously limited — then again, how many kinds of scatterings should high school students know? Probably it’s in there because everyone comes across kids who ask it. The evolution one is poor, yes — both of them are, really.
I will claim forever that living where I do, the salt one is important, and if you live elsewhere, it’s important for ice cream, as I explained above. I mean, really.
I admit I don’t really know how an internal combustion engine works anymore. I know how fridges and air conditioners work! I know how an MRI works! I remember words like ‘colligative’ (see salt example again: vague memory of colligative properties and maybe Gibbs free energy to derive the equations? Argh, cannot recall).
And Cougar, you can keep going. Why do we even see this band of wavelengths? Blah blah. They’re fun to pick on, the questions, and the article pretty much sucks, but I think the idea isn’t as terrible as all that.
Actually, I can argue for the utility of some of these. Timeframes for fossils and dinos and people are crucial for people to really understand evolution: my father was against it in part because he thought the times were many orders of magnitude shorter. Of course I can as well argue for other things — but I think that most of these are good representations of general knowledge in science. (The answers aren’t.) You know, like being able to recognise random quotes from literature, or know how many wives Henry VIII had (not 8! and he only beheaded 2), or know where Mauritius is, or whatever shows you had a reasonably broad education.
April 25th, 2006 at 6:59 pm
Oh, my argument wasn’t that kids (or people in general) need to know about all kinds of light scattering. It’s perfectly fine to say something like “blue light reflects more strongly than other colors” and just stop there. I’m all in favor of the lies-to-children approach, but I think it’s also important to not shorten the phrase “lies-to-children”.
I was mostly being argumentative. Why does any random non-life scientist need to know about evolution at all? I’m thinking specifically here, not in a general kind of “science literacy” sort of way. The same could be asked of the blue sky. It’s hard to imagine how that piece of knowledge could be useful to most people.
April 25th, 2006 at 9:00 pm
Argumentative is good! We like argumentative.
But I would make a case for being generally informed. This is why we make people take classes in English and history and geography and math and science, even though most people will not need to graph hyperbolas or [whatever].
What does *anyone* need to know about [field not theirs] — well, for one thing, you don’t know what you might want to do if you don’t know about these things; for another, these things are important in current politics. Physics and chemistry impact the global warming and peak oil debates, debates about hunger. Evolution and other fields in bio impact debates over GM foods, reproductive technologies, abortion. All of these impact pharmaceutical issues. If you don’t know science, you say stupid shit like “I like organic food because it doesn’t have any chemicals” (or marginally less stupid stuff like ” . . . doesn’t have pesticides”).
Any of these specific pieces of knowledge ( . . . except the salt one) aren’t directly useful, but I think they make a good test case for science literacy. And very few specific pieces of knowledge are directly useful. I mean, if I know who the first PM of Australia was, so what?
Understanding some of them suggests you might sort of understand the process of science, too, which is good.
Re: evolution specifically? Well, if you don’t, you might be more amenable to teaching religion in biology classes. (That’s something people don’t have good backgrounds in: religious beliefs, and religious history, especially of anything other than Christianity with a small side of Judaism and Islam, plus whatever your family’s background was. Ah, for good religion classes.)
April 25th, 2006 at 10:41 pm
the only one I got wrong was the fossil question, which I was off by about 3.4 billion years (ouch!).
The 365/24 question had me confused as to what they were trying to get at. The 365 is obvious. But I was thinking the historical reasons for the day being divided into 24.
I read a book in college that talked all about the origin of our current method of keep time globally, but this was not related to the 24 hour thing, but rather different towns and countries etc. syncing their clocks so everyone was sort on the same field, which if I remember correctly became important when train systems started to get in place….
And I am all for general knowledge of all sorts of things. I mean, how else can you win trivial pursuit or a game show?
April 25th, 2006 at 11:39 pm
No, I get the general literacy argument and the fact that you never know which of the random bits of knowledge will be important. Given that, though, it seems pretty arbitrary to pick out a few facts as ones that everyone should know.
It’s not necessary to believe in evolution to be against teaching creationism in schools. All it takes is either a principled belief in separation of church and state (which is rather farcical in general, but still) or an acknowledgement that unverifiable “theories” should not be taught in a science class.
April 26th, 2006 at 11:38 am
If I were to make up a test of science that every high school graduate should know it wouldn’t be about conclusions; it would be about method. Every high school graduate should understand what the scientific method is, and how to apply it himself. They should understand that science is not a matter of deciding what you would like to believe, or what seems reasonable to believe, or what prominent men of the past believed.
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Then they can figure things out for themselves, even things they didn’t get an opportunity to memorize in school, things like Why is the roof leaking? Why does gasoline keep getting more expensive? Will that trend continue?
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By the way it enrages me when an authorative voice on television says, “Most scientists believe …” That’s no different from “Most clergymen agree” or “Most biblical scholars say.” Yeah, I know there isn’t always time to go into the whole thing, but if you have to summarize how about “Most of the evidence seems to indicate”? The point is science isn’t a matter of listening to authority, or counting votes either — it’s a matter of looking at the evidence.
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Of course everybody here understands that, but it seems to me an unfortunately large number of people haven’t really mastered that concept. I see people in their daily lives still applying the Aristotelian method of thinking about a question until they come up with an idea that sounds reasonable, and deciding that must be the answer.
April 26th, 2006 at 3:19 pm
Jesse, I also read something about how we got to standardised times (and the fights between London and Paris about GMT), and it was really interesting. The hours are arbitrary in a way that no larger time period is. (Weeks are, a little. And of course once you get into decades etc it’s only arbitrary in the way our counting system is.) But it was interesting. I also learned about why we decided to change the day at midnight instead of sunset, or any other more obvious time.
I will grant that for an argument for general scientific literacy, some specific subset of facts is unlikely to be useful (except, of course, the one about salt: people, just agree with me that understanding the salt/water issue is crucial, whether for melty or ice creamy purposes). But people like lists.
Sheepish, no, you don’t need to think evolution was correct to want to avoid teachign creationism in school. However, you do have to believe that your creation story is a myth, not a literal verifiable fact. (Well, not necessarily: you can also believe that it’s true AND that religion should only be taught at home or in a place of worship.) Though if you think evolution is wrong, you’re unlikely to support it being taught in school, and without some being taught evolution, you may or may not think it makes sense. I am simplifying but: evolution is important to be taught for a number of reasons, in part because it *is* a nice example of scientific process in action, at a level that people without advanced degrees can understand.