1.4: Teaching and Learning Science

Science involves the reconciliation of new observations and ideas with those previously established. This process can lead to conclusions that appear strange, counterintuitive, and sometimes disconcerting but that are nevertheless logically unavoidable. It is now accepted that the Earth rotates around its axis and travels around the sun, which itself is moving around the center of the Milky Way galaxy, and that the Universe as a whole is expanding at what appears to be an ever increasing rate. At the same time, none of these facts are immediately obvious. Relatively few people can explain exactly how we have come to know that these ideas accurately reflect the way the universe works (or at least how it appears to work). At the same time, when these conclusions were first developed they conflicted with the assumption that the Earth is stationary (which it appears to be) and sits at the center of a static Universe. New ideas about the Earth’s actual position in the Universe could be seen as a threat to the sociopolitical and religious order. In fact, a number of people were persecuted for holding “heretical” views on the topic. Most famously, the mystic Giordano Bruno (1548-1600) was burnt at the stake for promoting these and other ideas. Galileo Galilei (1564-1642) one of the founders of modern physics, was arrested in 1633, tried by the Roman Catholic Inquisition, forced to publicly recant his views on the relative position of the Sun and Earth, and spent the rest of his life under house arrest.^[40] In 1616 the Church placed Galileo’s book, which held that the sun was the center of the solar system, on the list of forbidden books – it remained there until 1835.

The idea that we are standing on the surface of a planet that is rotating at ~1000 miles an hour and flying through space at ~67,000 miles per hour is, understandably, difficult to reconcile with our everyday experience, yet science continues to generate, and provide confirmatory evidence for much weirder ideas. Based on various observations, it appears that the Universe arose from “nothing” ~13.8 billion years ago^[41] and will continue to expand forever. Einstein's theory of general relativity implies that matter distorts space-time, which is really one rather than two discrete entities, and that this distortion produces gravity and black holes. A range of observations indicate that all organisms are derived from a single type of ancestral uni-cellular organism (LUCA) that arose from non-living material between ~3.5 to 4 billion years ago. There appears to be an uninterrupted link between LUCA and every cell in your body, and to the cells within every other living organism, including microbes that live in your gut. You yourself are a staggeringly complex collection of cells. Your brain and its associated sensory organs generate consciousness and self-consciousness. Your nervous system contains ~86 billion neurons as well as a similar number of non-neuronal (glial) cells. These cells interact with one another through ~1.5 x 10¹⁴ connections, known as synapses.^[42] How exactly such a system produces thoughts, ideas, dreams, feelings, and self-awareness remains obscure, but it appears that these "emergent" behaviors arise from this staggeringly complex natural system. Scientific ideas, however weird, arise from the interactions between the physical world, our brains, and the social system of science that rigorously tests ideas based on their ability to explain and predict the behaviors of the observable universe.

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