Articles for November 2015

Learning the stories

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Using words instead of math

Here on the 100th birthday of General Relativity our science consultants were pondering why Relativity and Quantum Mechanics were so easy for them to accept but so hard for people a century ago.  Certainly it’s not because we’re more insightful or brighter scientists–quite the opposite.  Nor is it that we’re better at math; again the opposite is true, and these are highly mathematical subjects.  We finally concluded that we’re comfortable with the theories because we were told the stories, word-descriptions of what the math means, from an early stage and so the theories never seemed impossibly strange.  The stories are important.  But it’s also important for both scientists and laymen to understand their limitations.

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But why pictures?

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A photographer explores the ubiquity of images

pix4Fooling around with a certain bit of relatively recent technology prompted our photographer to ask the question: why are there so many pictures? Our main way of capturing reality, that great manifold of experiences, is still the two-dimensional image. Being a scientist he then sought an answer (where a philosopher might instead have fallen into existential doubt). It’s not so hard to work out, really, but does highlight something important about our memories, and how technology is changing them.

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Don’t know much geometry

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Why are we forced to learn what we’ll only forget?

geo3While attending to his regular workout in the Five Colors S&T exercise room, our astronomer was reminded of his High School geometry class.  (We’ll explain the connection later; it has nothing to do with the angles at which his various muscles were applying force.)  Everyone was required to take geometry (and pass it), and most were required to do the same with algebra.  Yet it’s a truism that very few people actually use those subjects later on, and most forget them immediately.  Why, then, do we bother with teaching and learning them?  There are several possible answers, to which we’ll add one of our own.

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It’s about time

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Not about saving daylight

watchWe’ve just gone through the annual ritual of Falling Back, shifting our clocks by an hour to conform to Standard Time. It’s the regular opportunity for scientists to point out, with either smugness or exasperation, that all summer we haven’t really been Saving Daylight; that there is exactly the same amount of daylight regardless of what our clocks read. Sometimes they wander off into explanations of Local Solar Time, Standard Time Zones and, if not quickly stopped, bring up atomic clocks.

Here we will avoid that sort of thing. In the interests of understanding other people, or at least building character, we’ll look at time from the standpoint of non-scientists. It’s not the same time as we understand, and translation is in order.

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