When they broke open molecules, they found they were only stuffed with atoms, but when they broke open atoms, they found them stuffed with explosions.

Rainbows are just to look at, not to really understand.

South America has cold summers and hot winters, but somehow they still manage.

A vibration is a motion that can’t make up its mind which way it wants to go.

Lime is a green-tasting rock.

Many dead animals in the past changed to fossils while others preferred to be oil.

Genetics explain why you look like your father and if you don’t why you should.

Vacuums are nothings. We only mention them to let them know we know they’re there.

I am not sure how clouds get formed. But the clouds know how to do it, and that is the important thing.

Clouds just keep circling the earth around and around and around. There is not much else to do.

Humidity is the experience of looking for air and finding water.

A blizzard is when it snows sideways.

A hurricane is a breeze of a bigly size.

The wind is like the air, only pushier.

It is so hot in some places that the people there have to live in other places.

In the NYT, David Pogue interviews E.O. Wilson, the great biologist and unrivalled ant-man, about his new project , nothing less than a complete online descriptive catalogue of every single one of the 1.8 million species so far discovered and named. (There are probably another 8 million still to discover.) Its working title is the Encyclopaedia of Life.

I liked this bit:

The world is full of amateurs: gifted amateurs, devoted amateurs. You can pick almost any group that has any kind of intrinsic interest in it, from dragonflies to pill bugs to orb-weaving spiders. Anybody can pick up information in interesting places, find new species or rediscover what was thought to be a vanished species, or some new biological fact about a species already known, and can provide that right into The Encyclopedia of Life.

These are the successors to those 18th century clergymen who spent their spare time with newts and daisies.

John Connell reckons Reiss has a point but argues for an aggressive approach: let’s shine a light into these poor kids’ darkness. I think not, not out of respect for creationism – we are not called upon to respect wearily-familiar folly, except in blood relations – but because faith thrives on direct attack. Every well-brought-up fundamentalist has been taught what sorts of things the wicked world will say. Best not to buy the script. Some kids will get the real science, others won’t, most will learn both how to pass biology and please the parents.

Meanwhile over at the Institute of Education where Professor Reiss puts in some time, the matter is turned into flummery, like this:

Here we would want to acknowledge that in science classrooms in both schools and universities, there is a diversity of social, cultural and faith groups. Teachers and academics need to be aware of this diversity to develop appropriate and inclusive practices, whether natural or social scientists.

Doesn’t that sound nice?

Professor Reiss, a Church of England clergyman, said: ?Just because something lacks scientific support doesn?t seem to me a sufficient reason to omit it from a science lesson.”

Expect astrology soon, and lab sessions in casting the runes and an incursion of witches. Ridiculous, you say and you’d be right, because there’s no influential, well-funded and in the Muslim case, scary lobby group pushing for them.

“Learning the stuff of which the stars are made ?” It sounds as if it ought to be exciting enough, but – and this is something many academics find difficult to grasp – bare facts do not speak except to those already in possession of a context and able to grasp their significance. (CRICK: “It’s a double helix!” WATSON: “Call Stockholm!”)

Gustav Kirchoff is certainly not a name like Albert Einstein or James B. Watson. He was however, a very distinguished scientist indeed. This is a piece of the Wikipedia article.

Gustav Robert Kirchhoff (March 12, 1824 ? October 17, 1887) was a German physicist who contributed to the fundamental understanding of electrical circuits, spectroscopy, and the emission of black-body radiation by heated objects. He coined the term “black body” radiation in 1862, and two sets of independent concepts in both circuit theory and thermal emission are named “Kirchhoff’s laws” after him.

But the article as a whole does nothing to inspire readers or lead them to see why Kirchoff’s spectrocopy laws opened up the universe. For that you need context, you need eloquence, and you need a rhetoric that bridges the gap between the scientific and the general reader. On my shelf are two recent general histories of science, John Gribbin’s Science: a History 1543-2001 (2002) and Bill Bryson’s A Short History of Nearly Everything (2003). Neither delivers. Bryson has nothing on Kirchoff himself and nothing, even, on spectroscopy. Gribbin covers Kirchoff, but the detail of finding sodium on the sun is just another detail in an evenly-paced exposition.

The moral is simple: we need someone to write up the story of how we discovered what the stars are made of – and the cultural story, for there’s bound to be one – of how the new knowledge was received in the period. Did it just add weight to the story of a mechanistic universe that unfolded from Newton on? I guess Kolb’s own book is the first place to go.

I don’t mean to find fault with either history, just to note that in a very small sample of widely-available readings (I roamed around the Web, as well) there’s nothing to bring a sparkle to our Italian lady’s eyes.

By 1859 Kirchoff knew enough about the spectra of gases from laboratory studies to identify the chemical elements in the Sun responsible for the dark lines in the solar spectrum. Thus, on the basis of experiments done on Earth, he could discern that the Sun is not made of any heavenly substance like quintessence [as hypothesized by Aristotle] but of everyday earthly elements.

I often wonder why history doesn’t take more notice of Kirchoff’s accomplishment. The idea that we learned what the Sun and the stars are made of would have astonished the ancients: it still astonishes me. Some philosophers and historians are so alienated from science that the significance of the discovery is hardly mentioned.

This was made painfully clear to me one spring day in 1989, when, during a banquet at a physics conference in Rome, I found myself sitting next to a physicist’s spouse who happened to be a historian at the University of Rome. Although astronomy is a highly specialized profession, I am always amazed by the degree of specialization in other fields. She was an expert on European history of the year 1859 (presumably the university has one hundred nineteenth-century European historians). In a clumsy attempt at polite dinner conversation, I asked why she happened to concentrate on that year. With a “surely you must know” tone, she replied that it was a very significant year because of the development of a remarkable idea. I made the mistake of asking if she was referring to Kirchoff’s discovery of the chemical composition of the Sun. She stared at me so long, with such a curious expression on her face, that I thought surely I must have linguini stuck to my chin. But no, she was simply amazed by the naivete of my question. Finally, she informed me that the significant event of the year 1859 was the publication of A Critique of Political Economy, by Karl Marx.

I further compounded my errors by asking how a mere economic theory could be compared to the discovery of the composition of the stars. I suppose that a biologist might ask why she considered Marx’s book more important than another book published in 1859, On the Origin of Species, by Charles Darwin. After another long stare, with a sigh of exasperation she turned to the person sitting on her other side, presumably searching for more enlightened conversation. I am embarrassed to admit that in the intervening years I still haven’t understood why the development of a (since discredited) economic theory is of more lasting importance than learning the stuff of which the stars are made. Perhaps one day I will.

The original source is Edward W. “Rocky” Kolb’s Blind Watchers of the Skies (1996)

I put aside (with some reluctance) explanations that include the words arrogance, educated imbecility, Italian bourgeois manners and ideology. Say instead that the lady evidently lacked intellectual imagination.

I mean the capacity to appreciate the significance of discoveries in another discipline, not to understand them technically, but to grasp what they mean for our general, shared picture of the world. Some other, more recent discoveries of a like kind within my lifetime: Chomsky’s proposal (with the neurological evidence) that the human mind is ‘wired for language’; the platelet movement of the earth’s crust and of course, the cracking of the DNA code by Crick and Watson. Not to know something of discoveries of this magnitude, not to want to understand their consequences for our general outlook is surely to be disqualified from seriousness.

I have reservations about the presiding spirit over at Edge, web organ of the ‘third culture’ but its distinguished contributors make it essential reading.

Suppose we asked a group of Presidential candidates if they believed in the existence of atoms, and a third of them said “no”? That would be a truly appalling show of scientific illiteracy, would it not? And all the more shocking coming from those who aspire to run a technologically sophisticated nation.

Yet something like this happened a week ago during the Republican presidential debate. When the moderator asked nine candidates to raise their hands if they “didn’t believe in evolution,” three hands went into the air-those of Senator Sam Brownback, Governor Mike Huckabee, and Representative Tom Tancredo.

I don’t know whether to attribute the show of hands to the candidates’ ignorance of the mountain of evidence for evolution, or to a cynical desire to pander to a public that largely rejects evolution (more than half of Americans do). But I do know that it means that our country is in trouble. As science becomes more and more important in dealing with the world’s problems, Americans are falling farther and farther behind in scientific literacy. Among citizens of industrialized nations, Americans rank near the bottom in their understanding of math and science. Over half of all Americans don’t know that the Earth orbits the Sun once a year, and nearly half think that humans once lived, Flintstone-like, alongside dinosaurs.

Thus biologist Jerry Coyne at The Edge

While we’re having fun, let me add something I read lately, source now forgotten. To shore up the Flintstone thesis, which of course is contradicted by the fossil record, creationists now argue that God so really, really didn’t love the world that after the Flood had stifled the sinners, he proceeded to extirpate every last trace of them, right down to the atoms of which they were composed.

It’s not exactly fun, is it, when we recall just how many people voted for Huckabee? Is it really so melodramatic to claim that in the US, the values we inherit from the Enlightenment are threatened?

Couldn’t happen here? Well no, not in that form. But consider:

• decreasing enrolments in engineering, science and applied technologies
• no improvement in the standards of science journalism – and very few courses in it
• the option of avoiding science and mathematics earlier and earlier in the school curriculum
• education and humanities faculties riddled with the social-constructivist virus (‘science-just-another-story’)
• a strong and increasing tendency in both main political parties to a crude majoritarian approach to policy
• new generations convinced that in the broadest sense of the word, the only culture is ‘popular’ culture, in which, as Neil Postman said, thou shalt have no prerequisites.

I brood. And read Voltaire.