Stewart, Cohen and Pratchett "The Science of Disc World"

 

It is almost impossible to communicate any more. 

So, as tempted to apologize as I was… (and I didn’t).  Today I told some JMU senior biology students who were beginning some of their very first field work, exactly what I tell my 5^th graders:  “Write it down.  Write it all down.”  These students, 20 or so of them, were about to wander around on some of my 100 acre scruffy Appalachian forest.  They were being professorially directed to begin a wide open, perhaps, ill defined, (that’s science: asking questions; not necessarily expecting the answers that you want) exercise in field data collection in my woods.  As to whether or not they were well prepared….  I cannot say.  I will say that two young women were unprepared to meet their individual digestive bodily functions without the use of our toilet about a ¼ mile away.    Anyway. 

 

I have told my 5^th graders this.  I told freshmen biology 001 students 40 years ago, and I’ve tried to tell any number of people that I am acquainted with, just what “science” is.  It is observation at the most precise and obsessive level that you can imagine… and it is recording those observations as obsessively as you can imagine… and if it can’t be measured in some way; then you have to be even more obsessive and precise as possible.  So, write it down, write it all down.   You will NOT remember enough otherwise. 

 

 Have you ever read about Charles Darwin’s decade of studying barnacles?  You have no idea of what “obsessive” means.  And sometimes it leads to nothing more than:   “THAT DIDN’T WORK.”   

 

Negative results; It isn’t THIS, but at least I know it isn’t THAT.  

It's the opposite of "God is always right".