How do we integrate science into our lives? This is not really a scientific question but has to with the nature and purpose of human existence. It presupposes an answer to the question “How shall we live?”

It sounds like Brian Greene is peddling some kind of materialist philosophy under the guise of science.

Science is a way of life? I’m afraid not. What we call the scientific method is a powerful tool for answering a limited range of questions and they are not the most important questions. The scientists I know are no more successful as human beings than the plumbers that I know.

Speaking as someone with over 15 years of experience playing music, I’ve had the experience of playing the same piece of music several years apart at very different levels of skill, and each time I’ve gotten much more from playing it when I was more skilled and could bring the music to life.

Now, I’m not sure the metaphor of music teaching transfers terribly well to science because of the amount of muscle memory involved in performing music, but even in science I’ve found that laying a groundwork of a few basic understandings is what leads to curiosity. Finding that groundwork and presenting it effectively is the challenge.

Simple. Tell the teacher what they’re doing now isn’t any good, until they change and students develop a sense of wonder. (A variant on the “beatings will continue until morale improves” idea).

I suspect that a lot of modern societal trends (like the pressure to be “cool”) kind of works against students being induced to develop “wonder” if they don’t already have it.

I don’t know…I tend to agree with Jeff the Baptist on this. It’s after I learn some of the basic facts about something that I tend to get to the “wonderment” part. When I’m still ignorant about it, either it’s hard for me to care, or else I’m so lost that wonderment makes no sense.

And I am a scientist…

What an interesting statement. Didn’t the Red Queen say something like this?

All Greene is arguing for, I think, is a balance of theory, practice and wonder.

The trouble is I think in teaching wonder. He doesn’t lay out any process for how a teacher can induce wonder in their students.

http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/070702_mm_big_bang.html

All Greene is arguing for, I think, is a balance of theory, practice and wonder. The problem is the same with all education: you have to engage the student, not merely manage their time. Good teachers in science are just harder to find, I think, because they have to clear two hurdles: the difficulty of teaching well and the difficulty of mastering their subject domain (which is constantly changing in a way that math and literature, for example, are not).

The above bit about CSI worries me, though. While CSI may use the scientific method, much of the actual science is just made-up crap. It’s good to show hot young people doing science, I suppose, but real crime scene investigators laugh out loud at the show.

I thought science didn’t yet have the answer to these questions. Indeed, last time I checked, the scientific answer to “what happened a second before the Big Bang” was “that question is meaningless. Time started with the Big Bang”.

And quite frankly, how many scientists spend their days playing around with those sorts of big questions? My friends who have done PhDs in the science subjects have spent their time on things like “Are streams of metorites random or do they have order?” or “Can I synthesis this naturally-occurring chemical in a lab?” or “How do bats interact with cultivated pine forests?”

Science is the process that takes us from confusion to understanding in a manner that’s precise, predictive and reliable

Yeah right. Science is a mess. Every now and then someone has an insight that turns a bit more of life into being precise, predictive and reliable. But far more often, science just raises more questions. Sometimes science destroys understanding and replaces it with confusion. Who was the physcist who said that if you think you understand quantum mechanics you don’t understand it?

The problem is that you have to practice your scales before you can ever learn to play the masterpieces. Otherwise you don’t have the fundamental ability to play them. High school (and even most college undergraduate) science is, by necessity, scale playing. It is basic facts and concepts. Moreover it is fundamental reasoning and problem solving. You can’t go straight to the origins of the universe because, among other things, the students don’t have the conceptual and mathematical background to understand what you’re showing them.

I recall my high school pre-calculus teacher showing us a physics problem related to hitting a baseball and seeing if it was a home run. It was a trajectory equation in multiple dimensions with some additional things thrown in. At the time I could barely grasp it. It was too big and I was intimidated. By the time I finished my first year of college, I looked back on it and realized it was just a set of simultaneous equations. I’d wear out a notepad solving it by hand, but it wasn’t actually hard.