Month: November 2007

The Physics of Christmas

Related Links, courtesy of the PTNC forum

Is Santa Real?
A scientific debate which looks at both sides

Star of Bethlemen
What are the possible explanations? (in swf format)

Noradsanta
Ian Robertson has provided the following nugget:
At xmas every year for some 24 hours by far the busiest website in the world far is Norad Santa . Here the men and women of the North American Aerospace Defense Command behind the strongest doors in the world protecting their command centre under Cheyenne mountain use a range of surveillance technology to track Santa’s sleigh.
Kicks off in December.
Santa 2025
An uptodate activity (you need to register):
Santa is planning ahead for when humans colonise the rest of the Solar System – he may decide to move to another planet! In this fun activity pupils analyse planetary data to find which planet best satisfies Santa’s future requirements.

They then e-mail Santa to advise him of their decision, and – if you wish – design a Christmas card to show why this planet is such a great place to spend Christmas.

Science and Religion

Today Mr Dungan’s Leaving Cert Religion class joined our Applied Maths class for a discussion on Religion and Science. It started off very slowly but got a little heated before too long and the feedback was fairly positive with most students hoping we would repeat the exercise later in the year, but possibly in a more structured format.

I said I would post up relevant links, so here they are. The first two are the ones I showed on the day:

Richard Feynman on Religion & Mysticism

Uncertainty about the Big Bang
(I paused the clip when the scientists started going into detail on String Theory)

John Polkinghorne discusses Science and Religion here
Steven Weinberg discusses Science and Religion here

I think if we’re running this again two issues we might look at are
1.   free will
2. Creationism and Evolution (just enter “Ceationism and evolution” in a youtube search) but be wary, there are lots.

Uncertainty in Science

Possibly one of the most important concepts that should come out of a Science Education course is that Science does not provide certainty – it simply can’t. It’s all about probability.

The experiment we do in school to ‘prove’ that solids expand when heated, does nothing of the sort. We take one metal ball and show that it passes through a ring when cold but not when hot. Now explaining why this is not a proof is a nice excercise in itself. Initially students are slow to come up with any reason. To be honest they just don’t know what I’m on about. but then you give them a couple of examples: it’s only one metal, it’s only being heated over a rather narrow temperature range etc, and they quickly get the idea and can apply it to other experiments.

Why is this important?
To take one example, the whole notion of theory versus fact versus hypothesis is very ambiguous, but yet these words often get thrown around when knocking the theory of evolution. The implication is that because it is a ‘theory’ it is not well accepted in the scientific community; the word has a different meaning in common parlance than it has in the science world.

Secondly, scientists are often pilloried because they won’t state categorically that powerlines / mobile phones / radiated foods are safe. the implication is that if these were safe then science could prove it and say so. the reality is that you can never prove anything to be absolutely safe (life is carcinogenic) and we need to bear this in mind when weighing up the evidence.

The American physicist Richard Feynman talks about uncertainty in science – albeit in relation to his views on religion – in this clip from youtube.

So you would think this concept of uncertainty in science would get mentioned somewhere in the syllabus – at Junior or Senior Level.

But not a dickie

What’s the story with poor pay for science-related jobs?

Last Friday’s Irish Times (9/11/07) did a special supplement on “Jobs in Science”. They included the results of a survey carried out last month of salaries in the pharmaceutical and medical devices market. The results were (to my mind at least) surprising.

They listed thirteen categories and looked at the lower, mid and top entry level.

The average mid-entry level was about 29K and the average top level salary was about 45.5K. It was a little unclear because many of the top salaries were listed as 50,000+ and the + wasn’t specified.

I’ve been teaching full-time for ten years so presumably am at the lower end of mid-entry and my basic salary is about 52K.

There is no  secret here (why are people slow to say how much they get paid?) – all union journals list the salary scales for teachers. Almost all teachers with the same experience are on the same pay, although there are extra payments if you teach in a gaeltacht area, or in a school for the blind etc.

There are of course are all sorts of extras available, from correcting exam papers, to supervising exams to giving grinds.
Supervision and Substitution is another chore most teachers sign up to, covering absent teachers for a couple of periods a week for (I think) about 1500 to 2000 euro.

Starting salary for a secondary teacher (full-time) is about 37K, although the hard part is getting that coveted full-time position.

The holidays aren’t bad either.

And anyway, how are people paying big mortgages on these science-job salaries? Something seems decidely odd.
I know I wouldn’t be rushing to sign up to a science course in college based on this report.

Secondary level teacher salary scale here

It’s Science Week again! wa bloody hay

Science Week (or should that be Leo Enright Week?) tends to bring out the cynic in me.
For a full week we get bombarded with media-bytes about how great Science is, how much fun it is, and how the drop in the number of students taking up Science is nothing short of a national tragedy.
It fact let’s call a spade a spade here; students who are capable of doing Science but who instead choose a more glamorous career (in business!) are just downright selfish and unpatriotic.

But Science IS boring, – at least the way it’s presented in textbooks. And it is bloody hard. And no amount of exploding-custard tricks is going to change that.
I’ve no doubt students are delighted to be going to all these demonstration lectures – I would be too if it was going to get me off double Irish followed by Maths and Religion.

But has there been any research which shows that these lectures are actually leading to the desired outcome – and what is the desired outcome? Who gets to check? Who gets to decide whether too much (or too little) money is being spend on this?

And is it fair to portray only the fun side of Science when all around us are examples of Science gone wrong? We emphasise that it is Science which gives us our high standard of living, but when it comes to the negative applications of Science (military arms, etc.) we simply wash our hands of this and declare that this isn’t Science – it’s Technology.

And we hope nobody asks any awkward questions in these shows; why would they – it’s not like any of these more important issues get covered in their Science Classes in school – is it?

Science Week Ireland 11 to 18 November. Coming soon to a college near you.