Science Works, Part I
(The first in what I hope will be an occasional series of essays on this topic.)
I recall sitting with my kids in the car years ago, listening to a radio preacher thundering that dinosaurs never existed. Sure, he said, scientists find big bones in the ground, but guess what, there are animals with big bones that live today; you’ve got your hippos, you’ve got your rhinos, you’ve got your giraffes... You could put their bones together to make a skeleton of whatever fanciful creature you want. The preacher said, and I quote: Scientists have never proved anything. Unquote.
Hmm, I thought. In order for this gentleman to broadcast this enlightenment to us on the car radio, from a studio hundreds of miles away, someone had to discover “the light we cannot see,” i.e. electromagnetic radiation1.
As I said to the kids: Someone had to invent a radio transmitter and a radio receiver. Someone had to invent a battery, so we could sit in the car with the engine turned off and still listen to the sermon. How do those discoveries jibe with the idea that scientists have never proven anything?
The clear subtext of the sermon was that evolution didn’t happen. Hmm, again. Evolution happens all around us all the time, and this can be proven easily. Here is a marvelous speeded-up video showing E. coli bacteria evolving in 11 days, developing resistance enabling them to live in a culture with 1,000 times the dose of antibiotic that would have been lethal to them at the beginning of the experiment. <
Now, years later, after decades teaching science to middle schoolers, I’m retired. My kids are now parents themselves. I no longer hold a lot of certainties, but here is one thing about which I am completely sure: that preacher was dead wrong. Science has changed the world, and scientific thinking is the most powerful tool humans will ever wield. (Also, dinosaurs were real.)
The discovery of EM radiation is an amazing story in itself, one I intend to come back to in this series.