Dogma

I waded into the deep waters of ranting about the way interest in education in a renaissance manner seems to have waned the other day and now I find a book review from Powell's that has this interesting muse on problems with teaching in the sciences and its tendency to value rules and formulas rather than the much more exciting parts of the sciences. (Certainly one of my fav high school moments in such subjects was when a calculus teacher made us figure out how to get the area under a curve on our own. I lost the race for the answer by one second, or because I was in the back of the class and the teacher didn't see me, to a dork who lives in Boston now.)

I like to illustrate this with an event in my own daughter's education. She came back furious one day from her very good (and very expensive) school, announcing she was fed up with science. I asked why. Apparently the class had been told to solve some equations governing the motion of the pendulum. In particular they had been told to use the equation of potential energy at the top of the swing with kinetic energy at the bottom, to calculate the velocity at the bottom of the swing. I asked what the problem was. She said she didn't see what this so-called energy was. I asked if she had raised this with the teacher. She said she had, and had been told to get on and solve the equations. She never pursued any science again.

Yet if you look at the history of the pendulum from Galileo's work at the end of the sixteenth century, you will find a wonderful story of ingenuity, of mathematics, of contested observations, of problems of trade and the need to find the longitude, of the gradual evolution of the calculus, of debates about whether "force" should be thought of as proportional to velocity or square velocity (which set Newton and Leibniz at each other's throats). A century later there were yet more disputes, involving Carnot, Joule, and Helmholtz, about the relationship between work, heat, and energy. You do not find the conservation law in the form of the equation that was tossed at my daughter until the 1860s. And as an aside, it is a pretty silly place to start in explaining anything about the pendulum, since energy depends on mass, and Galileo asserted, right at the beginning, that the period and the velocity of the pendulum are independent of its mass.

Such dogmatic, stupid teaching not only loses bright children to science. It also means that the ones who remain have been spoon-fed a bunch of results and techniques with no understanding of how they were hammered out, of what their birth pangs were. This disqualifies students from understanding the epistemology of science, and therefore of engaging effectively with doubters and deniers, whether the issue is one of the age of the earth or the measurement of its temperature. Either they go off science with a shudder, or (if they stick with it) they know only to mock anyone who cannot see why, for instance, energy might not be proportional to velocity, without themselves knowing why. Or they suppose that science speaks with one voice, and the only dissenters must be Luddites such as the notorious Cardinal Bellarmine, who allegedly refused to look through Galileo's telescope, whereas the truth is that many of Galileo's assertions, including those about the pendulum, were contested by careful observers, including Descartes and Mersenne, probably the leading physicists of the time. And if peoples' miseducation in science has simply taught them to be dogmatists, they can hardly complain if those on the outside can see only dogmatism. But the reality is that science is a human activity, not an abstract calculus, and this properly makes its great achievements a subject of pride and awe, not suspicion and skepticism. It should also make us aware of its desperate fragility, and the hostile cultural forces that it constantly has to overcome.

Yes! The review, by the way, is talking about a collection of essays by Alan Sokal that cluster around issues that touch on the wake of his hoax on Social Text, where he got the magazine to publish a bs paper that ostensibly provided scientific backing for some rather tenuous postmodern concepts. Simon Blackburn deals admirably with the book (and the hoax), but the review is more interesting for its comments on the way truth and epistomolgy operate as battlegrounds in the sciences and our culture generally.

I'll give anyone who reads my blog one guess where this link comes from...I love 3 quarks, though they also annoyed me today becuase they posted an article from Scientific American about the slim differences between our brains and those of primates that I have had in the queue to post. Blargh. I lose because of procrastination once again. The article is great, though.