Rewriting the textbooks: When science gets it wrong

Rewriting the textbooks: When science gets it wrong

Occasionally, the scientific community cannot help but drop back and punt. This is no defect of their character, it's just a function of the process of learning. As new data develops, new precision is achieved, new materials discoverd; things are bound to need 'tweaking.'

While I applaud the ability of science to adopt to change; I lament that the science we teach our children seems much less flexible to be updated. And sometimes, even when it is, it is updated to apper biased against or for new information, when neither is a certainty.

The source article is a great starting point for those who want to see how long it takes for our childrens science education to recognize and address these changes...

.....the sands of science are continually shifting in less dramatic ways. In the following, we focus on nine recent examples - a tweak of a definition here, a breaking or weakening of a once cast-iron concept there - that together form a snapshot of that process in action....

Rewriting the textbooks: The periodic turntable
Atoms don't always weigh the same

Periodic table

We like to think of the periodic table of the elements as immutable. It isn't....

Atomic weight expresses the average mass of an element's atoms relative to those of other elements. It is not to be confused with atomic number, the unvarying number of protons found in the nucleus of atoms of a particular element. The atomic weight adds the tally of neutrons to this, and that's where the problems start: elements may come in different forms, isotopes, whose atoms contain different numbers of neutrons.

Those who have claimed the authority to 'maintain' the officially sanctioned Periodic Table compensated for the natural variation by calculating an elements 'average' atomic weight based on the relative proportion of known isotopes of that atom.

The problem with this approach, says Tyler Coplen of the US Geological Survey's Reston Stable Isotope Laboratory in Virginia, is that it perpetuates a misconception. "Teachers are teaching their students that atomic weights are fundamental constants of nature," he says. They are not: the ratio of the different isotopes of a particular element depends on the processes that created, transported or aggregated the material of which it forms part.

Old-schoolers like me, may have learned to consider the Periodic table as set in stone by the hand of God (if you'll pardon the secular pun) but apparently, we haven't been reading too well up to this point. In fact, the tiny, but real, differences in atomic weight affects the distribution of elements on our planet, defying the periodic table. As a result...

As water vapour circulates through Earth's atmosphere from the equator to the poles, for example, molecules containing heavier isotopes of hydrogen fall back into the sea earlier. So the average weight of hydrogen atoms tends to be slightly higher in tropical waters than in seas near the poles. For different reasons, the average weight of the carbon atoms in a hydrocarbon called crocetane, seeping through the ocean floor off the coast of Alaska, is 0.01 per cent greater than the periodic table suggests it should be.

In December 2010 IUPAC stripped 10 of the most troublesome elements - including hydrogen, lithium, boron, carbon, sulphur and nitrogen - of their falsely precise atomic weights. Their weights now come as an upper and lower bound taking into account the spread in isotopic ratios in all known terrestrial samples. Hydrogen, for example, is "H [1.00784; 1.00811]"

Elements with only one known isotope will not be affected on the periodic table, the author declares; but I find myself questioning how much stress we should put on the word "known".


Rewriting the textbooks: No such thing as reptiles

Taxonomy is the science of classifying and categorizing all life as we understand it. It's opus magnus is the "tree of life" that many of us gloss over as we muse the contents of our local natural history museums...

In the world of vertebrates, this were, as the author describes them:

Vertebrates used to be so simple. They came in five common-sense categories: amphibians, birds, fish, mammals and reptiles. Birds were the winged and feathered ones, reptiles the scaly, cold-blooded ones. And so on. A place for everything and everything in its place.

Since the dawn of taxonomy, we have a new approach to this science, known as "cladistics". Each group is considered a "clade" (perhaps think of it as a bilogical "clan")

Cladistics is now the most commonly used method to classify organisms.... Well, it's obvious that a system of classification is needed. That is, we need words like beetle or conifer so that we can talk about many organisms at one time. In fact, the history of formal classification schemes in biology is long, dating from the 1700s, well before Darwin proposed his theory of natural selection. Today, cladistics is the method of choice for classifying life because it recognizes and employs evolutionary theory.

Three basic points justify the development and use of Cladistics.

• Cladistics is useful for creating systems of classification.
  
• Cladistics predicts the properties of organisms.
  
• Cladistics helps to elucidate mechanisms of evolution.
  

While the lineage of Mammals fits in neatly with this method, Reptiles like lizards, dragons, corocodiles, snakes, and tortoises are not a true "clade". They seem to have sprung from different branches within the system. Amphibians have fewer anomalies, but fish are equally spread in the new tree in unexpected ways.

Nowadays, biologists are sticking with traditional ways of refering to reptiles as a distinct group, although it might be more correct to refer to different reptiles as "non-avian" or "non-mammalian amniotes" since they appear in both evolutionary channels.

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Rewriting the textbooks: Confusion over nuclear fission

We've built the bomb. We've built the reactors that provide us with vast amounts of low-carbon power. If that seems remarkable, it becomes all the more so when you realise that the whole enterprise of nuclear fission is based on a misunderstanding.

...This much we thought we knew: when a susceptible element undergoes fission, it will split into roughly equal parts, and if it doesn't, it is down to "magic" numbers. These numbers spring from an elaborate, but slightly shaky, construction for understanding atomic nuclei....

Theoretical Nuclear Physics has approached the idea of atomic nuclei as akin to a "liquid drop" of viscous fluid. As it splits, it is imagined to 'prefer' equal distribution of component matter... but that is not the case.

Last year, these ideas were put to the test at ISOLDE, a facility for making rare radioactive isotopes at CERN near Geneva, Switzerland, to predict the outcome of fissioning mercury-180. Dividing mercury-180 evenly gives two zirconium-90 nuclei, which just happen to have a magic number of neutrons and an almost magic number of protons. Given all that, says Phil Walker of the University of Surrey in Guildford, UK, to expect exactly that outcome is "a no-brainer".

Sadly, mercury-180 doesn't play by the rules. It divides asymmetrically into the distinctly unmagical nuclei ruthenium-100 and krypton-80 (Physical Review Letters, vol 105, p 252502).

Physicists are inclined to think that it's a matter of time which factors into the uneven split, although the issue and it's mechanics have yet to be settled.


Rewriting the textbooks: Hydrogen bond in a bind

There is a reason why ice floats on water, and it is called the hydrogen bond. Whatever that is.

Nobel laureate Linus Pauling thought he knew. In fact, the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC), which concerns itself with such things, still bases its official definition on the one that appears in Pauling's classic 1939 book The Nature of the Chemical Bond.

(Pauling's book cites the support for his observations as a 1912 book, actually - but let's not split hairs)

Chemical bonding has been recognized as happening in multiple ways, a chemical bond is caused by the electromagnetic force attraction between opposite charges, either between electrons and nuclei, or as the result of a dipole attraction. The strength of chemical bonds varies considerably; there are "strong bonds" such as covalent or ionic bonds and "weak bonds" such as dipole-dipole interactions, the London dispersion force and hydrogen bonding.

Hydrogen bonding is particularly important to organic chemistry, and is sadi to be responsible for the specifics of how organic molecules, like DNA, behave. Yet there is a grat deal of supposition going on in this subject.

The common understanding is:

Ice is less dense than liquid water because, when water molecules are cold and still, weak hydrogen bonds between them keep them consistently at arm's length. In free-flowing water, however, the bonds are continually breaking and reforming, allowing the molecules to jostle closer together.

Yet there is a large amount of data which indicates that the given range of bonding-strength is not set.

IUPAC set up a committee to clear up the confusion. Its conclusion, set out in a seven-page draft redefinition published last year, is that the hydrogen bond is a far fuzzier entity than we thought. "It is not an interaction with sharp boundaries," says Gautam Desiraju from the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore

According to Desiraju, A new definition will counter a widespread misconception among chemists about when and where hydrogen bonds can occur, and encourage them to consider the bond's influence in new situations - for example, in allowing organic molecules to form and react in ways never thought possible...

The scope of the effect this could have affects many applied sciences; like materials sciences stubbornly struggling with exotic metals to achieve goals that might be possible with plentiful and non-toxic organics, like pharmaceutical development with it's long history on 'unanticipated and unwanted side-effects, or any other number of inductries who seek the cheapest and lest troublesome way to exploit new chemicals.

Rewriting the textbooks: When a gene isn't a gene

As Gregor Mendel showed in painstaking experiments on peas in the 19th century, many traits of living things are all or nothing. Seeds are either green or yellow, round or wrinkled, and so on. This led to the idea that an organism's characteristics are determined by discrete "particles" passed from one generation to the next: genes.

In the 1950's scientsts were elated to declare that the functuion of DNA, to serve as a sequence-encoder for genes, which instruct the cell how to make useful molecular structures for the processes of life.

It all became murky though, as discovery after discovery showed genes as far more complex than a 'sequence' in a DNA strand, and in fact, it's complexity increased by orders of magnitude when they began to include the factors of three-dimensional structures and overlapping strands in the spiral being responsible for other processes.

These days, then, what a gene is depends on who you ask. Gerstein has suggested it be defined, in simplified terms, as a union of sequences that encodes one or more "functional products". But he readily admits this is a fudge. "What is function?" he asks. "What does it mean?" A gene that is important for survival in one species may have become redundant in a closely related strain, for instance, even though the sequence is identical. Does that make it a gene in one species and not in the other?

Rewriting the textbooks: Microscopes without frontiers

Microscopes are good, but not that good. The view through them gets prohibitively fuzzy when you try to look at things smaller than half the wavelength of the light used for imaging; for visible light, that is anything below a few hundred nanometres. Many things we would like to see in intimate detail, such as the processes that sustain life, are at far smaller scales than that.

There is a fundamental maximum to the resolution of any wave-based measurement system which is due to diffraction.

We used to think of this "diffraction limit" as a fundamental physical barrier, caused by the bending and spreading out of light waves whenever they encounter an obstacle such as the lens of a microscope. Not any more.

For a time, electron microscopes ruled supreme at the nano-scale, with the unfortunate limitation of not being able to image living cells or structures, since they would die under the conditions needed to image them.

Now, there have been several developments which have allowed us to use light more effectively, allowing us to view structures down to the 5 nanometer range (just twice the width of DNA molecules.) even if the subject viewed is alive.

But let's not get too cocky, because we are approaching the point where quantum statiscics and uncertaintly will have a play in what we perceive... and no microscope alone will be able to remedy that.

Rewriting the textbooks: Noah's shrinking ark

Since the effort began in earnest, we have identified some 1.7 million species of the 30 million or so we believe reside here on Earth (not counting bacteria and viri) according to taxonomist gernerally.

That is almost certainly a huge overestimate. It dates from 1982, when Terry Erwin of the Smithsonian Institute in Washington DC took a headcount of beetles - Earth's most richly speciated group of animals - living in the canopy of a single type of tropical tree in Panama. He extrapolated his tally of 1143 species to arrive at a figure of 30 million tropical arthropods worldwide (The Coleopterist's Bulletin, vol 35, p 74). This phylum of invertebrates, which includes insects and spiders, is thought to account for around one-third of Earth's total species. So even if Erwin's number had been right, it should have translated into there being some 100 million species worldwide.

When considering the less presumptive assumptions... the real tally should be closer to 5.5 million species.

It will change a lot if we consider that we discover species at a much slower rate than they are said to become extinct.

Rewriting the textbooks: Magnetic north without south

It's been a long time argument, whether monopole particles exist....

"THERE ARE NO MAGNETIC MONOPOLES". The garish pink capitals in which the lecturer chalked those words up on the blackboard remain etched in my mind, an indelible memory from my first year as an undergraduate physicist. That was 1997. How the world has changed.

The search has continued; and continues, but as far as we have seen, all magnetic charges come in pairs, and no 'magnetic' charge particle has been discovered.... yet.

But it turns out we can make our own monopoles (New Scientist, 9 May 2009, p 29). If imbued with a quantum-mechanical property known as spin, individual atoms act as tiny bar magnets with north and south poles. Get the atoms' polar axes to align, and the material itself becomes magnetic.

Now here's the trick. At very low temperatures, a class of exotic materials known as spin ices exist in a "frustrated" magnetic state.

This may seem pointless to some... but then, centuries ago, the same was said of electricity....


Rewriting the textbooks: Einstein's cosmological fudge

Einstein had a problem, in 1915 while working on the theory of General Relativity, he found it necessary to add a 'cosmological constant' value to his equations to account for the common preumption that the universe neither expanded nor contracted. Professor Einstein jettisoned the constant shortly after in light of Edward Hubble's discovery that galaxies were in fact, receding from us.

But when 1998 rolled around, it was clear that these distant galaxies weren;t just receding from us, they were accelerating away; so Einstein's "cosmological constant" may have a been a prescient piece of intuitive methematics which was not far from correct.

Nowadays, scientist consider the possiblity of "dark matter" and "dark energy" to account for this accelerations, but the argument is on-going. If there's one thing that scientists tend to struggle against, it's unknowns. And no one yet has come up with a sample of dark matter to work with.

---------------------------------

I am hoping some of you see these and other advances written in your children's science books.... otherwise it will be up to them to keep current... or you.



I must commend the folks at the source site for a great little collection of articles.

reply to post by Maxmars


Explanation: S&F!

Personal Disclosure: Popper and Kuhn! The test for falsifications and the paradigm! Ultimately ..,.



Just because some thing happened in the past we cannot assume that it will happen again...

NO MATTER HOW MANY TIMES IT HAPPENS!

reply to post by Maxmars


Love it! Such an educational post...I really appreciate the good read!

THUMBS UP!!! ;-)

reply to post by Maxmars


i liked everything but this

"But let's not get too cocky, because we are approaching the point where quantum statiscics and uncertaintly will have a play in what we perceive... and no microscope alone will be able to remedy that."

the whole statement sounds like it has an alternate motive... kinda like all the "punting" you say education has done.

And another one....textbooks consider current to flow from the positive to the negative terminal, known to be the conventional method. Whereas the truth is, it's from the negative to the positive...and they still don't do anything to change it!

It's infuriating. We're getting taught false things.

reply to post by Maxmars


very interesting read

i wounder if the teachings of our children have more to do with the printed book and how long it takes to gain the amount of knowledge first to write teh book, have it printed, and then we are taught from the book.
when the internet came along the amount of time it takes for the knowledge to condensate into a text book was again shortened but the writting and printing of text books happen at yesterdays speed where as discoveries are happing so fast now that the text books contain errors before they are even finished being written, let alone printed and delivered to schools.

there is scientific advances in understanding that litterly happen so fast now that no written printed text book could ever be accurite enough and contain enought new information that it could survive for more than a few years

it amazing that the amount of time to double the amount of new information avaliable has been halving and will continue to do so untill new discoveries are outdated almost within months of publishing

this means that to use text books we recognise the information is already out dated by the time you read the text book

to be able to absorbe all the information as it changed and was updated would require all your time and effort just to scratch the surface.

this is where the internet comes in,
people used to have to wait for books to be printed and delivered,
now information flows accross the world in a day and can be reached by all not just the people who write text books.

there is about to be a revelution in astonomy, particle physics, nuclear chemistry, and a whole range of other feilds because the time to print is so fast.

star and flag for showing us the areas we need to work on

nobody is ever 100% correct foreva


xploder

Originally posted by BlackPoison94
And another one....textbooks consider current to flow from the positive to the negative terminal, known to be the conventional method. Whereas the truth is, it's from the negative to the positive...and they still don't do anything to change it!

It's infuriating. We're getting taught false things.

What ancient crypt did you find that textbook in? Electron flow has been fairly well understood since the days of the vacuum tube. The very principle of the vacuum tube requires that one understand the cathode as the emitter of electrons.

Now, however, once you get into semiconductor physics, everything starts to get turned on its side. "hole flow" and "electron flow" are two different - but very relevant, ways in which to look at a circuit.

Further, for functional purposes - a "ground" is the source of electrons, your common energy state (often shared with an earth-ground). "Back in the day" when devices operated on vacuum tubes and voltages high enough to kill service technicians - the "positive" was the "hot" side. It is fine to touch the ground with a bare hand. Touching the side lacking electrons will # you up - so it's generally not advised.

And that, to this day, is how electronics tend to work - even in your car. You ALWAYS connect your ground first when jumping or charging a vehicle (it is often recommended to attach to the chassis as the chassis is treated as a common ground). Then you connect to the "positive" side.

You can consider it right or wrong - from the technician's point of view - it's a functional way of looking at things. The positive side is the one that will kill you - even if the negative side is the source of electrons.

As to the whole point - this is really a product of nationalized standards of education. In order to remain accredited state-funded schools, you must be able to produce students capable of answering questions with a response considered to be correct.

I have hammered against this method for a while. The main problem is that it penalizes "I don't know." We are conditioned to have an answer for everything - even if we have to pull it out of our rectum. No points are awarded for honesty. In fact, you will fail most courses if you are honest and answer "I don't know" to as many questions as you -really- don't know the answer to - that, or you're some kind of human recording device (though that still won't save you from teachers that have questions on tests completely unrelated to the material covered).

This has a negative impact on our society as a whole. Now - I won't say that it is good for people to not know things - but it is even worse for people to be conditioned to lie and bear false testimony rather than admit they do not know.

It is also no service to condition people to provide a "correct" response - in science, especially. Everything is within the context of theories and subjective interpretation of the data. There is still considerable debate over the existence of particles (virtual versus real).

That said - the very fact we are finding "old views" to be incorrect or incomplete is testament to the fact that there are plenty of people out there continuing to research and push the boundaries of knowledge and understanding.

It may really come down to personality types. Some people are tools (not necessarily in a derogatory sense) - they know the jobs and functions they are taught and can be applied to certain tasks and functions. They are not so great, however, at thinking beyond what they are taught. They have no need to, and really no desire to. Whereas others are continually attempting to learn new things or re-invent old wheels - but they are not so great at "just doing a job" - and will never be satisfied in such positions.

In both cases - the outside world is not going to influence their natures to a great extent. The dreamers will dream and the workers will work. Dreamy workers will bridge the two and get the work done to bring the dreams to reality. Then science will spend the next 50 years debating how/why it works.

I love the post, but, I view it from an entirely different perspective.

Your headline should read
“Rewriting Textbooks: How Science Gets It Right.”

It is wonderful how, science, can in the presence of new facts be adjusted, rewritten or even change the commonly accepted conclusion others stated as fact and now confirmed wrong with new measurements, observations and other evidence. Those theories are thrown away for better models and theories and then worked out through a peer reviewed process. This is the beauty of gaining knowledge with a set method.

This scientific method

of inquiry must be based on gathering observable, empirical and measurable evidence subject to specific principles of reasoning. The Oxford English Dictionary says that scientific method is: "a method of procedure that has characterized natural science since the 17th century, consisting in systematic observation, measurement, and experiment, and the formulation, testing, and modification of hypotheses."

is an idea whose origin will never been known but written down as early as the Egyptians and used by the greats to understand the universe and what is around them like Jābir ibn Hayyān, Alkindus, Ibn al-Haytham, even people you would know of like Galileo, Francis Bacon, Rene Descartes and Isaac Newton.

This is why there is progress in science. You see other schools that do not conform to this rigorous standard do not progress on the same curve. Take the microchip, Gordon Moore in 1965 predicted the number of transistors per integrated circuit would double every 18-24 months and even to this day is correct, this is called Moore’s Law (not proven yet,so technically incorrect). If however, the rate decreased or even increased and not double every 18-24 months then it would only be a failed theory and really just a trend like Gordon Moore originally intended. This is called science. You gotta love it.

Then take any theory and do the same. Using new measurements, observations and other evidence you can change, modify or even throw it out and start new. This is why I love science. It is built on evidence and can only be overruled by better evidence that is proven and repeatable.

I know some like to know the ultimate question to everything but really we are only human. In reality we are in the infancy of knowledge.

In reality, we humans observe only a small spectrum of light, know of only matter in that spectrum and can only detect non measurable data outside of that spectrum through multiple tests to form a theory on it. We can only measure these invisible things and make guesses on how they work, and really our largest problems deal with missing data or unaccounted for mass that makes us change our theories and discard previous theory with old or outdated data.

Most of the things you cite as changes are great successes for me. The periodic table should not be confusing, and as we know and measure isotopes better this can be refined and the elements could be broken out and explained better. The knowledge learned here could help many different subject but LENR/CANR comes to mind for me. To know how our elements react under all pressure and conditions is the key to understanding how they bond, which is the big secret everyone tries to answer. This also is the same problem you have with nuclear fission, hydrogen bonds, microscopes, and Einstein’s cosmological constant. They all deal with the fundamental issue of particle physics and since we really do not know the answers the smart guys in the room, guess, and it’s called a theory. Since all physics are based on improvable theories, this field will change dramatically in the coming decades by way of novel models dreamt up or a new measuring device is invented to prove these ideas true or false.

Again I see beauty in the fact that all this work can be over turned if there is a better method or measurement in the future to prove our theories wrong.

The reptile section is quite interesting, this is not my subject but hopefully this would allow reexamining how we group things together and come to a better conclusion. I suspect in the future this will happen a lot with classification of species, or whatever word will be used for them. The recent discovered arsenic based life form will help this along as well or at least start an entirely new branch.

The subject of monopoles is great, if only we could find one every more than once a decade, and is part of particle physics questions as well. I would like to briefly say, we know nothing, really, nothing of this. In fact a bunch of those theories I have talked about would solidify if we found a monopole. Namely, string theory, a grand unified theory, and we could drop Maxwell’s equations for starters. If we do not find it, who is to say there is not one, look harder.......

All this is great in my eyes and hope others see this information in the same light.

Major milestones on the journey of knowledge for mankind


Hopefully you can embrace the scientific method in other studies of life and find out most of our common knowledge is wrong and create a theory so our children can read it and laugh at us at how little we knew but how far we took them….

en.wikipedia.org...

reply to post by Maxmars


yes!!

reply to post by Maxmars


Think the topic is very interesting and I'll read it a bit later, but this quote at the beginning is, sort of, out of place here:

"We like to think of the periodic table of the elements as immutable. It isn't....

Atomic weight expresses the average mass of an element's atoms relative to those of other elements. It is not to be confused with atomic number, the unvarying number of protons found in the nucleus of atoms of a particular element. The atomic weight adds the tally of neutrons to this, and that's where the problems start: elements may come in different forms, isotopes, whose atoms contain different numbers of neutrons."

Isotopes are covered in just about any chemistry 101 course.

edit: Reading further :

"The problem with this approach, says Tyler Coplen of the US Geological Survey's Reston Stable Isotope Laboratory in Virginia, is that it perpetuates a misconception. "Teachers are teaching their students that atomic weights are fundamental constants of nature," he says. They are not: the ratio of the different isotopes of a particular element depends on the processes that created, transported or aggregated the material of which it forms part."

I first came across isotopes in a chemistry text written, I believe, in early 90s. It was a required text back in the late 90s post Soviet high school. Just my two pennies.

Please watch



I know now that I posted K.H, I'll be discredited, even more so, around here lol...

reply to post by Maxmars


I'd love to read those articles, I just don't want to have to start a membership to read the articles. Thanks for the thought though.

Religion gets it wrong all the time, so I could care less.

reply to post by Maxmars


Truly these textbook authors and publishers act more like politcians with every passing year.

What ever happened to scientific "fact".

Well I guess text book authors and publishers have to make a living too.

S&F from me.

reply to post by coolhanddan

It is wonderful how, science, can in the presence of new facts be adjusted, rewritten or even change the commonly accepted conclusion others stated as fact and now confirmed wrong with new measurements, observations and other evidence.

Unless they have an agenda or it goes against the dogma and then they can extraordinarily stubborn and disinclined to accept new ideas.

Mostly men in white coats guessing.

I'm curious,
how many people have we met in our lives
who have conducted a scientific experiment for themselves.

A thousand, a hundred, ten, one? Not even one. To take this further...
How many of the people writting, publishing, selecting, and approving out textbooks,
have any practical experience in teaching people how to do an experiment and collect data.


David Grouchy

Simple fix, Page 1 of the new science textboot, a giant bolded, can't miss it, right in your face -- DISCLAIMER.

This book contains the knowledge of popularly accepted scientific theories current as of writing this book.

Done. It wouldn't ingrain such a certainty in the contents of the book, if the first page started like that would it?

They need to teach and ingrain the fact that science evolves, so the people that use it are left open to the possibilities of new solutions.

It's a matter of how you handle the curriculum IMO, though, this has to do with the professors skill -- as much as it does how the book is written.