So science for third graders doing Calvert pretty much sucks if you know anything about science. So mom and dad got me a different curriculum for science. I wanted to study Physics but I couldn't do multiplication good enough to do the problems in a book that had science ideas I hadn't seen yet. My next choice was Biology.
Today in Biology we studied about what makes something alive, and the Scientific Method. I think that the section on what makes something alive sucked compared to other books I've read. What was cool was that it listed the six elements that must be present for something to be considered alive. Those are Hydrogen, Oxygen, Phosphorus, Nitrogen, Sulfur, and most important CARBON. Here's an interesting idea though, by most definitions of what makes something alive Fire is alive. The part on the scientific method was much better. I thought is was cool though that it talked about what happens if you don't do the process all the way, or don't like the results you get from your experiments. Dad said he hadn't seen a text book yet that admitted that researcher bias exists, but this one does. It makes me wonder how often people publish the actual honest data without changing it to make it fit their hypothesis.
3 comments:
It's interesting that by their definition fire would be alive. Hmm. I think what they meant was these elements are required for there to be life. Did your book list how to tell if something is alive? It should have things like growth, feeding, movement, reproducing, and so forth. Last I looked there were 10 requirements to be a live. It's tricky because it has to work for plants and animals. Let me know...
The interesting thing about the scientific method is that it describes what happens after it has happened. But in the middle of doing research there is a lot of wandering around thinking about things. At the end you do the steps, but in the middle it is a messy process. Old Guy and I have been writing a paper in engineering that has some of these ideas.
So Grandma I wondered that too. It said that it did all the things to be alive but wasn't. They said there was a criteria called the breath of life that it doesn't have. Dad's Biology book calls this idea molecular complexity. Fire isn't actually all that complex compared to the human body.
Have you and old guy published the paper. I had these thoughts too, but you need to sit down and figure out what your experiment is going to be...otherwise it won't work. So part of the process thing is true.
We have figured out our paper, but it takes a long time to write it. It's 6000 words.
What we're really interested in is how people think when they're doing something. The scientific method and the method for mechanical design talk about how people think about their thinking after they've done it. That's why the scientific method seems so organized. But what people think when they're actually doing the thinking is different. That thinking is really messy and disorganized. That kind of thinking is what we're writing the paper about (in part).
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