Assignment 3

Why do people lose interest in science? I think the answer to that is pretty easy: math. When I learned science in second grade I learned about birds and mammals and dinosaurs and planets and oceans and other incredible concepts. They are concepts that captured my imagination and feed into my imagination. I loved planes and trains as a little kid. I still do. They are massive hunks of metal that can carry thousands of tons of cargo or break the sound barrier or drop bombs on targets the size of a 55-gallon drum from several thousand feet. What isn't incredible about those things?

The answer lies in how we learn science. By the time we reach high school the magic is taken away from science and broken down into meaningless numbers. Yes, sound travels at 340 m/s, but when in physics class do we discuss how absolutely incredible it is that a sound traveling through a fluid can reach our ears and be distinguishable as a syllable or word? Sure, a strong acid has a pH of 1, but can we discuss what that kind of acid can do to metal or your hand? That's what people want to hear. Nobody cares about numbers unless they are given context (except mathematicians, which is good for them, but not the point I am trying to make here).

Once kids struggle through high school chemistry it is no wonder they have an aversion to the sciences. In five years from graduation all they will remember from that class is they received a C+ and their teacher was a real jerk. They won't be able to describe a molecule or the ideal gas law because those concepts were broken down and spoon-fed to them as definitions and numbers. It's a shame. Numbers can be interesting when we take the time to understand what they mean.

As science writers it is our job to get people re-interested in science. We can't just bring science to people. They need incredible science; the kind of science that makes you take a moment and say, "Holy shit, they can do that?" In my opinion nobody does this better than Radio Lab on NPR. They take cutting edge science and make an hour of easily-understood, yet shocking, break through science. We need to make it clear as science writers that sea floor spreading is not just a calculable rate of rock movement across the ocean floor. No, we need to tell them that the very living rock of this planet is not stationary. Even the earth, our most solid and unmoving of objects, is not static. That's amazing.

So as a writer of science we cannot report on boring crap, nor can we report on exciting things and turn them into boring crap. It is our job as writers of science to take the unfathomable world of science and make it enthralling. We need to make it great, make it fun, and make it interesting. Our education system and textbooks have done enough damage to science so we must take great caution to not cause any further aversions to the incredible discoveries that our scientists make. Our job is to make science interesting by removing the numbers and formulas and, instead, illuminate the incredible discoveries of our scientific discoveries.