| Why Science? James Trefil New York: Teachers College Press, October 2008 |
Rating: 4.5 High |
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| ISBN-13 978-0-8077-4831-2 | ||||
| ISBN 0-8077-4831-5 | 208pp. | HC/GSI | $52.00? | |
| Page 10: | "Look at is this way: Every scientific idea starts out in the mind of a specific individual somewhere in the world." |
| S/B "it". |
| Page 31: | "'The harder you push on something, the faster it goes' is a good enough rendering of this law for the purposes of scientific literacy. You really don't need the math." |
| True, you don't need the math. But I would have added "And the heavier the something, the harder it is to move." |
| Page 31: | "'What came before the big bang?' is a good (and frequently asked) question of this type." |
| Since it is a proper name, S/B "Big Bang". |
| Page 31: | "(The question is equivalent to asking, 'What's north of the North Pole?' The problem isn't that there is nothing north of the North Pole; it's that there is not even nothing north of the North Pole.)" |
| I don't regard it as equivalent to asking what came before the Big Bang. We can describe what's north of the North Pole, although it's not rock, water or ice; it's atmosphere shading off into vacuum, with sleets of charged particles above it and, a long way off, the star Polaris. |
| Page 32: | "'The instructors realized that their goal was to help students like me deepen their experience of music and art, not produce it." |
| Garbled referent: S/B "not produce music or art" or something similar. |
| Page 36: | "The countless 'Hello Dolly' headlines reflected the fact that, although this process had been known to work on amphibianssuch as frogs, Dolly was the frst clone of a mammal." |
| Missing space: S/B "amphibians such". |
| Page 38: | "What do you say when someone asks, "How old are you?' when the answer varies from organ to organ?" |
| No problem: You give your chronological age. Physiological and emotional age have been understood to be distinct from this for generations. |
| Page 53: | "Because scientists form their own community, there are also internal constraints on research within each discipline, constraints that often have little to do with the requirements of the science itself. In the early twenty-first century, for example, it became almost impossible for scientists who were skeptical of the global warming orthodoxy to get their work published in major journals. The general attitude was that expressing doubt about widely publicized predictions was playing into the hands of politicians who wanted to ignore the warnings of mainstream researchers. And while I personally find this kind of behavior on the part of editors disgraceful, in the long run it tends to backfire. One of the great joys of the scientific life is to see a major journal forced to change its policies in the face of overwhelming data. In the end the editors are scientists, and like all scientists they will eventually accept, however grudgingly, the verdict of the natural world." |
| I'm not disputing this, but I find it hard to believe. Dr. Trefil provides no sources.1 |
| Pages 74-5: | "Turn the telescopes out past our cozy little home system and we find filmy chains of galaxies flung halfway across the universe, with exploding stars and newborn galaxies sending out imaginable bursts of energy." |
| An error, I imagine... |
| Page 80: | "Participants were asked to talk about four issues that were current at the time: fluoridation of water (who can remember that?), strontium-90 (a product of atmospheric nuclear weapons tests), polio vaccine (then newly introduced)), and space satellites (a rarity at the time). The problem with this kind of survey, of course, is that today's burning issues quickly become yesterday's headlines. No one would bring up issues like fluoridation and strontium-90 today, and satellites and vaccines are so commonplace that they scarcely enter the modern consciousness." |
| I beg to differ. Fluoridation of water supplies is still contested, although not by many. Helen Caldicott and others keep alive the debate over strontium-90 and nuclear technology generally. The whole question of childhood vaccination has flared up in relation to autism. But I'll give Dr. Trefil this: space satellites do not generate headlines except when they re-enter the atmosphere, as one is about to do.2 |
| Page 91: | "The reason for this is that on multiple-choice or true-false tests, someone guessing at random will get correct answers a certain percent of the time." |
| Usage: S/B "a certain percentage". |
| Page 117: | "The first school devoted to the study of science and technology was Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York, an institution that enjoyed then, as it enjoys now, a well-deserved reputation in engineering and applied science." |
| I note that Trefil doesn't specify what kind of reputation. Nor does he say when RPI was founded. |
| Page 125: | "Following Bjorn Lomborg in his book The Skeptical Environmentalist, I will call this sort of argument The Litany." |
| It may well be a litany — that is, an orthodoxy oft-repeated but wrong. Yet I would call following Bjorn Lomborg wrong; and I am not alone in that. |
| Page 125: | "One amusing feature of The Litany is that over the time the primary foreign competitor—the bête noir of American science, if you will—has changed." |
| Extra word: S/B "over time". |
| Page 127: | "I am indebted to a group of scholars in the Master of Engineering Management program at Duke University, under the guidance of Gary Gereffi and Vivek Madhwa, for taking a close look at these statistics..." |
| This 2005 work is not cited in the notes — but it does appear in the references list, where a URL for it is given. Also, there is an updated version.3 |
| Page 150: | "Nobel laureate Sir Peter Medawar wrote the following in his 1982 book, Pluto's Republic:" |
| I thought this was a typo for "Plato's Republic". I was wrong; the title is accurate. See Rafe Champion's review of Pluto's Republic. |
| Page 154: | "Carl Weisman, then at the National Instutute of Standards and Technology in Boulder and now at the University of British Columbia..." |
| Spelling: S/B "Institute". |
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