Check out the cover story on today's Parade Magazine, titled "The Secrets of Dark Energy." Some time on Tuesday, the full text becomes available on Parade's website; clicking here will take you to it. (Yes, I will leave the blog open for comments thru the school's 3 p.m. Wednesday deadline for seniors to turn in work.)
Questions & issues to consider:
•Melanie specifically points out the following quote from the author of the article, Meg Urry:
What excites me personally is how the discovery of Dark Energy illustrates that science is not a set of beliefs that one constructs. Instead, scientists observe nature, then develop theories that describe their observations. Science is driven by nature itself, and nature gives us no choice. It is what it is.
This quote raises connections to several readings and discussion topics from this year:
A) How might the author of the reading, "Ten Things We Think We Know About Science," regard or respond to this quote? Would he say it is consistent with an accurate understanding of science, or another example of where science education falls short?
B) During the mathematics unit, we briefly touched on the question of whether mathematics are discovered or created. And for those who attended the lecture on Kurt Gödel's incompleteness theorem, the speaker raised this issue again, indicating Gödel's position on the issue. Use this quote as a springboard to compare and contrast the natures of science and mathematics to one another, particularly with respect to the philosophical question of discovered or created.
C) Dr. Urry's quote and the issue raised in B above become still more interesting when considered in light of the nature of the very close relationship between science and mathematics. Take a look back at the 3 articles we read as a jigsaw activity in class about that relationship (one article had the clever title, "Math has π on its face"), then comment on Dr. Urry's quote.
•The article is filled with knowledge claims about "dark energy" -- its impact on the universe, its place in science history, and its potential economic uses and impact. And yet, ironically, the caption to an accompanying picture of the author includes this quote, "Dark Energy makes up two-thirds of the universe -- and we don't know what it is." The article itself includes this paragraph:
But first, we have to figure out what exactly Dark Energy is. So far, we know only that it causes the expansion of the universe to speed up. We call it 'dark' because we don't directly see it. 'Dark' is code for 'we have absolutely no clue what it is!'(Emphases in each quote added.) It seems rather ironic to have so many knowledge claims about something the author says we know so little about. What is your response to this irony? How do you reconcile these seemingly conflicting comments?
•Immediately after the quote that Melanie pointed out, Dr. Urry writes: "As new facts emerge, scientific theories can be proved wrong or in need of modification, but scientists cannot ignore them. Eventually the facts will lead to the right theory."
A) To reprise some questions I raised in an earlier post: What is a "fact?" We've spent a lot of time this year wrestling with the concepts of "knowledge," "truth," and "belief," but we've never discussed the term "fact." What do we mean by that term? What makes something a "fact?" How is a fact different from knowledge, truth, and belief? Or is it different from any one of those?
B) And as I asked about another quote above: How might the author of the reading, "Ten Things We Think We Know About Science," regard or respond to this quote? Would he say it is consistent with an accurate understanding of science, or another example of where science education falls short?
•Consider the knowledge claims contained in this quote from the article's concluding paragraph: "The answers are there, and I have no doubt that we will figure them out with the contributions of the smart young people now taking high school physics...." Consider and comment on the nature (psychological, epistemic) and intensity of the certainty expressed in that statement. What bases, what justifications do you think Dr. Urry might point to in support of her expressed certainty and knowledge claims?
9 comments:
she claims that we will figure all the answers out and that she has no doubt becuase kids are physics in highschool know. though why would that matter she thinks that we will know all the answers but as history has told use about knowledge is that it is always changing. although we may think that we know every answer to it, the answers may change the next 20 years.
I think its really interesting how we know so little about "dark energy" but we claim to know so much. i think its natural for people to want to have a explanation for everything so that they have some comfort. i dont think being accurate is as important to people as feeling like thier in control.The auther also talks about how soon we will know all the answers because kids these day are so inteligent..well this issue has been ongoing for many years so does that mean the people making up theories and explanations for it are incorrect? or is it that as the year go by, kids beocme smarter and the old explanations are no longer neccesary? how can you eve be sure which is more accurate? science is based so much on proof ad facts and with an issue like this these things are hard to come by. I guess only time will tell.
How can scientist determine that two-thirds of our universe is "dark energy", when we cannot see it? The article stated that the reason it was called dark energy was because we could not see it. This reminds me of the invisible elephant in the room theory. Just because we don't see it, does it mean that it is not there? How would we know if dark energy even exist and what if is not dark energy, but something else that was making our universe expand? This article really just makes me think of more questions than statements.
Evidently we must at all times observe nature and make deductions based on the changes. But wait a minute, if we want to know the truth, the “real” truth, and we want evidence to back it up. And so OF COUSE truth will always be susceptible to change. Why are scientific theories proven wrong or are in need of modification? Well because they were false to begin with! And if so, why are we so convinced that our newfound theories are more accurate? We are OK with modifying them when something more appeal emerges. Maybe we are jumping from theory to theory because there is no right answer (that the author of the articles refers to), or maybe there is a right answer but we are unable to find or fathom it with our minds. I think we are convinced that each is the real through because it encompasses in itself something not yet explored. To put it simply, we feel like we are making progress in some way, where as the author points out all that we have discovered has been there, hidden maybe, but there. The wording of our theories is changing, new basis are adopted, but so what? If history is to repeat itself over and over again, none what we discover will ever be creditable permanent as truth is. We are in a perpetual vertex of knowledge.....my take on all of this.
Agreeing with Sally, the author contidicts him/herself when stating the Dark is something we cant see, so if we CANT SEE it then how the heck do we know its there? I also agree with what a Oluchi says about people searching for some kind of explanation as some sort of comfort, just give us something that sort of makes sence and we will believe it because we seem to get scared or worried about things we know nothing about. Until we know more about this Dark thing, i see it is as Dark something we can not see.
As Mr. Currier pointed out, the author refers to facts and their role in developing theories. When I think fact, I think absolute truth. Whether or not you know it, or believe it, it still stands, it still is. It is strange that scientists can develop these theories about dark energy and claim that 2/3 of the universe is dark energy as a fact when "we have absolutely no clue what it is!" If they don't know what it is, then how do they know that 2/3 of the universe they are counting as dark energy is dark energy. How do they know it just isn't something else, or nothing at all. Maybe we can't see it because it doesn't actually exist. How can they claim it as fact, if they don't even know it. And here comes the problem with fact. Does it become a fact when we discover it is a fact? Or was it already a fact and we just didn't know about it. And how do we know it is a fact. This is why the dictionary wasn't written by philosophers. The word fact could have an entire book defining it and analyzing it. So for now I just say fact is absolute, free standing, truth.
As with our dinosaur post, you have to take this scientific data with a grain of salt. Very good article Melanie. Since they don't know if it will cause the Big-Rip, Big-Crunch, the Big-Squeeze, the Big-Hug, I can't really put a lot of faith into it until I see more data and more certainty from the scientists concerning this mysterious darkness. I wonder if the people 10,000 years from now will know, unless they were unable to read our obvious cave-man like drawings, set off the nuclear site, and exploded. How do we know that it makes up 2/3 of the universe if we don't the size of the universe and/or the mysterious darkness in the first place?! That data is off the wall nutty, I think the scientists thought we would be suckered in, but we're onto them...
I think that this article would be an interesting idea on which to base a discussion about whether science and math are discovered or created. From what Dr. Urry writes in the article, it seems like it's a mix of both. They discover natural phenomena and then create theories to explain them. I suppose that in this sense, you can say that science is man-made and created because these theories are those upon which we base our understanding and education about science and the world in which we live. However, it is inevitable that some percentage of these theories are true, in which case we could be discovering something that was naturally created. Often, we are unsure of what we are discovering in nature, which gives our science a weaker stand in terms of certainty. The scientists in this article seem to have discovered something, but they don't know what it is. So have they really discovered anything that could be currently be regarded as "scientific"?
I think reason has a lot to do with this article. The scientists used reason to come to the discovery of dark energy. They saw that the galaxies were moving faster and faster away from each other which is contradictory to what we would think should happen. Because there's no know source of energy that can do this, they reasoned that there must be a source of energy that they haven't discovered yet. Most of these knowledge claims will probably be proven wrong in the future, but that seems to be the nature of sciene-it's always changing. no matter how hard we try to get it right the first time, there's probably something we missed. As for us highschoolers being the generation to figure this out, I think that might be able to work because we can build off of what people are doing right now instead of discovering it for ourselves.
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