Don't Get Confused by Science

I came across an interesting article at The Best Article Every Day. A Physics guy posts about an incident that occurred when he was in a philosophy class in college at UW-Madison.

[The Teaching Assistant] was trying to show how things don’t always happen the way we think they will and explained that, while a pen always falls when you drop it on Earth, it would just float away if you let go of it on the Moon. My jaw dropped a little. I blurted “What?!” Looking around the room, I saw that only my friend Mark and one other student looked confused by the TA’s statement. The other 17 people just looked at me like “What’s your problem?” “But a pen would fall if you dropped it on the Moon, just more slowly.” I protested.

“No it wouldn’t.” the TA explained calmly, “because you’re too far away from the Earth’s gravity.” Think. Think. Aha! “You saw the APOLLO astronauts walking around on the Moon, didn’t you?”

I countered, “why didn’t they float away?”

“Because they were wearing heavy boots.” he responded

He goes on to explain how he has since tested that question and discovered that surprising number of non-science people agree with the TA and not the science. I am not a science person by profession, but I admit to being a science geek, so I knew that the TA was in the realm of alchemy and magic- not real science. Gravity is a property of the Universe (so to speak) and not just of the earth.

But a couple things stick out. First, the unwillingness of the TA to see that there might be another answer and that his was definitely about as thin as atmosphere on the moon.

Second, the amazing ignorance of some basic science concepts. Heavy boots???? Crazy. They may have added weight, but gravity did the work. The facts of science would only get in the way of his explanation, hence ignore them.

Which leads to the third- and extrapolated- observation. With these kinds of approaches to not-understanding science is it any wonder that people won't believe that global climate change is real (in spite of chunks of Antarctica floating away) or that evolution is bad science and intelligent design is good science?