Via Sheril, I see that the National Science Board has released a report on Science and Engineering Indicators 2008. It’s chock full of useful and interesting information, particularly if you start poking around with the tables and figures, which are available for download.
This ought to produce all sorts of discussion around here, especially given that only 43% of respondants to a public survey correctly responded that humans evolved from other animals. This will undoubtedly be seen as evidence that the creationists are winning, and we must redouble our efforts to call them idiots on the Internet before theocracy arrives.
However, I would like to note that the 43% of people who correctly understand evolution is nearly identical to the 45% of the population who have the piercing intellect to discern that lasers don’t use sound. 53% of the public also thinks that electrons are at least the same size as atoms, and only 55% knew that the Earth requires one year to complete an orbit around the Sun.
The wrong answers to all these questions are idiotic, but they’re not idiotic in a religious way, unless I’ve been missing the public lobbying from the First Church of the Acousto-Optic God. The problem isn’t religion, or political lobbying, or idiot celebrities peddling quackery– the problem is that we do a piss-poor job of teaching science, period. All fields, all areas, people are not getting the science education they need.
Of course, on the positive side, I’d like to draw attention to the figure at right, showing the number of correct answers on this test over time. Which is, well, pretty much flat. Actually, there’s a tiny upward trend– slop of 0.035 answers/year, according to Excel. So, hey, 28 years from now, we’ll have a public that can answer one more question correctly, on average, than today.
I know which one I’d pick. Lasers work by focussing sound, my ass. Everybody knows, the key to laser operation is the metabolism of liver proteins from frikkin’ sharks…
Seriously, the main thing I take away from this report is that the answers haven’t budged in the last sixteen years. They didn’t have a question-by-question breakdown by year, that I saw, but I’d bet that the distribution of answers hasn’t done much, either.
This is, believe it or not, modestly positive news, at least to me. As much as it may sometimes feel like we’re fighting a hopeless rear-guard action against creeping ignorance, here, in fact, things haven’t gotten significantly worse. They haven’t gotten significantly better, either, which is cause for concern, given the increasing importance of science issues, but at least we’re not looking at a situation where public knowledge of science is in free fall.
It’s a small comfort, but that’s all I’ve got to offer.
(Also, for the excessively literal: “LASER” is actually an acronym, for Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation. A laser works by pumping energy into a gain medium to create an excess population of electrons in excited states, which are then stimulated to return to a lower-energy state, emitting light in the process. The emitted light bounces back and forth in a cavity stimulating more emission, and building up a more intense coherent beam. No sharks are involved in the process.
(They’re ill-tempered sea bass.)
I really wonder if the creationist assault might not be more at fault for the poor showing than seems apparent at first. If a school board is science-averse enough to water down or eliminate evolution-based teaching standards, what are the chances it’s going to be a good steward of physics, chemistry, geology, ecology, etc.? In any case, it’s clear we haven’t done a good job of teaching science to students for some time, and it will take a lot of effort to make a dent in this (especially with the current emphasis on teaching students a narrow range of knowledge focused on high-stakes tests that only test some aspects of reading and mathematics).
From the early 19th to the early 21st century the Official public education dropout rate remained steady at ~35%. One third of everybody is not up to academic standards in any era. Tradesmen or Fine Artists are not lesser beings – but voters who cannot extrapolate a balanced household budget deciding national policy… are empirical disasters.
Real world 21st century dropout rate is closer to 50%. No Child Left Behind legislation renders accurate reportage lethal. Micromanagement is improved means to deteriorated ends.
If you go to the year-by-year data for the scientific literacy questions (an appendix in the report), you’ll see that two of the questions show a steady increase in correct responses over time. The laser question goes from 36 to 45, which I think is because more people actually see lasers in their daily lives. The antibiotic question goes from 26 to 56, which I think is a sign of hope. The message that antibiotics don’t work against viruses is being repeated in press, public campaigns and by interaction with the public by medical personnel. This shows that people can be reached, with the caution that this takes a tremendous amount of work, and that this subject is perceived as important in most peoples’ lives.
Roast Beef is right:
What We Need More Of Is Science
But, every Starwars fan knows that laser blasters make sound, and laser beams make sound traveling through the vacuum of space. A lot of things are learned by experience. And for us modernists who’ve all had lots of experience watching fiction, much of that experience is just plain wrong. I used to make this argument about seatbelt usage. Every movie goer has experienced a zillion times, that the guy not wearing his seatbelt can jump out of the vehicle, while the poor guy belted up is burned up in the crash. Many of the myths that are perpetrated in the name of a good plot are in real life destructive.
Okay, I’d like to have a professional explain to me which is bigger, an electron or an atom. (By the way, I prefer working in momentum space, LOL.)
Carl, here’s a non-professional explanation: An atom is like the solar system. The planets are the electrons. The sun is the nucleus. Vastly oversimplified, but then, so am I.
(If any professional wants to tear my explanation apart, have at it!)
Ooooh, I posted before checking out your blog, Carl. Here is an invitation for you to be the first to trash my explanation. I think I’ll just shut up now…
I expect there are exactly zero fields of knowledge in which the specialists think the general population understands the field sufficiently.
Can anyone explain in simple terms what size means for a photon?
Why can’t a microwave photon go through a hole in the metal view screen?
Doesn’t this say something about size?
thanks
A modest proposal: revert to calling Lasers what they were originally called: optical masers. I confess to being old enough to remember the change in nomenclature.
One of my wife’s most favorably reviewed papers was on a problem with teaching college Physics that Feynman had discussed. We know how to teach something in Physics to people who don’t know it. What’s harder is to teach something in Physics to people who think they know it, but are wrong.
Bad high school teachers and bad high school textbooks are more to blame than Star Wars.
Also, Chad, your Dr. Evil joke (and where was he a postdoc?) is not as idiotic as some people may have assumed. My evidence:
Quantum Zeno Effect Underpinning the Radical-Ion-Pair Mechanism of Avian Magnetoreception
Authors: I. K. Kominis
Comments: 21 pages, 3 figures
Subjects: Biomolecules (q-bio.BM); Quantum Physics (quant-ph)
Abstract:
The intricate biochemical processes underlying avian magnetoreception, the sensory ability of migratory birds to navigate using earths magnetic field, have been narrowed down to spin-dependent recombination of radical-ion pairs to be found in avian species retinal proteins. The avian magnetic field detection is governed by the interplay between magnetic interactions of the radicals unpaired electrons and the radicals recombination dynamics. Critical to this mechanism is the long lifetime of the radical-pair spin coherence, so that the weak geomagnetic field will have a chance to signal its presence. It is here shown that a fundamental quantum phenomenon, the quantum Zeno effect, is at the basis of the radical-ion-pair magnetoreception mechanism. The quantum Zeno effect naturally leads to long spin coherence lifetimes, without any constraints on the systems physical parameters, ensuring the robustness of this sensory mechanism. Basic experimental observations regarding avian magnetic sensitivity are seamlessly derived. These include the magnetic sensitivity functional window and the heading error of oriented bird ensembles, which so far evaded theoretical justification. The findings presented here could be highly relevant to similar mechanisms at work in photosynthetic reactions. They also trigger fundamental questions about the evolutionary mechanisms that enabled avian species to make optimal use of quantum measurement laws.
If I’m not mistaken, these are results from asking adults questions. So if what happens in schools has any affect on this survey, then that would be delayed by a number of years.
(mean age of people asked minus school leaving age, if the variance is low enough, I guess)