| Common misconceptions
Physics almost always turns out to be something other than what it seemed to be when we first learned about it. Misconceptions are prevalent, persistent, pervasive, sometimes pernicious, almost always pre-scientific, and often humorously preposterous. |
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| Common misconceptions (raw
material)
Keep an eye and an ear open for weird misinterpretations of science. Radio, TV movies, everyday conversations...these are rich sources of goofy science. |
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| Extend your perceptions
Physics has been a steady stream of realizations that our perceptions reveal to us only a tiny fraction of what we are looking at. We tend to feel that what we see is all there is. |
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| Learning & Understanding
Take a physics course and you learn a lot. Now, think about what you learned. Can you recognize it when pops up in front of you? How much of it can you use to your advantage? How much of it did you really understand? Odds are, that when you understood some concept, you could see that many others in your class did not. |
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| Puzzles, Illusions, &
Magic
Oregonians for Rationality has presented puzzles, illusions, and magic at Da Vinci Days, Corvallis, Oregon for the past five years. |
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| Where to start?
Posters at Da Vinci Days directed toward some elementary steps necessary to understand science. Most are aimed at avoiding common oversiplification we tend to make when dealing with the world. Or, "Just send your lottery dollar to us; your odds of winning are exactly the same to eight significant figures."* *Bob
Park in "What's New"
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| Perception to Magic
We perceive energy through experiences and feelings of hunger, fatigue, exhaustion, and empty fuel tanks. We imagine ways to avoid hunger, fatigue, exhaustion, and long gas pump lines. We (through Aristotle) create a metaphor for energy with the idea, "capacity for doing work." We have a mathematical concept of energy through the development (in the19th century) of thermodynamics. Somewhere along the path of increasing sophistication and abstraction, we encounter our personal boundaries of human comprehension—it is beyond those boundaries that we sense we are under the influence of magic. |
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| The Magic of Physics
The magic of physics comes from recognizing mathematical patterns we are looking at but not seeing. When we figure out how to see, we, too, become magicians — to those who don't see. And if we get hooked on it, we will want to see more and more and more... Everybody can see more. |
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| Web site navigation aids
made for Oregon AAPT meeting October 18, 2003 |
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| Pseudoscience
belief in a lot of things that today's science knows to be wrong or at the very best extremely improbable. |
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| E = mc2
It does not mean that matter can be converted to energy; it means that energy and mass are "merely different expressions of the same thing." |
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