Wednesday, 30 April 2008
08:17 AM
Neil Comins teaches astronomy and physics at U Maine. He's spent a career learning and then refining his ideas about how the cosmos works. At one point while teaching introductory astronomy, however, he had a realization:[T]hat week I was back at school, in front of 250 students eager to learn more about the universe. Every semester for ten years I had taught such a group the latest information about astronomical discoveries and insights. My teaching was based on the assumption that I if I said things clearly, students would digest that information, replace incorrect ideas they might have, and make the correct knowledge part of their understanding of how nature works. This intellectual house of cards collapsed that day.  This is the beginning of Comins's book Heavenly Errors. The book is subtitled "Misconceptions about the real nature of the universe," and it is about that, and Comins spends about half of the book addressing the cosmological misconceptions he sees most frequently. (In fact, he keeps an ongoing list of them on his Web site.)
He makes a distinction between misconceptions and simple errors of fact. For the latter, he gives examples like the number of moons around Jupiter -- a fact that is easy to look up, and one whose adjustment does not require much mental rearrangement. By true misconceptions, he means "any deeply held belief that is inconsistent with currently accepted scientific concepts." These are beliefs, as we investigate through the course of the book, that require a bit of -- or a great deal of -- mental exertion to correct. People have surprising (or maybe not that surprising) misconceptions about the universe, as he catalogs -- everything from how seasons work, phases of the moon, and the nature of the sun, to somewhat more profound misconceptions like astrology, the long-held belief in a geocentric solar system, and the nature of the scientific process. (Plus of course pretty much most of the types of counterintuitive things that one attempts to learn in Physics 101.)
His examples are all drawn from astronomy and physics, of course, but misconception is hardly limited to his field. He relates an anecdote about a professor of biology who gave a presentation on the evolution of his beliefs about astronomy from his childhood to the present. As Comins says, "Even the diagram showing his current beliefs contained surprising errors." Comins relates this not to cast aspersions on this remarkably brave academic, but to illustrate that even highly educated people have many misconceptions. As he says:While I may have fewer incorrect beliefs about astronomy than you do, I probably have as many about economics, sociology, the law, paleontology, botany, and many other fields in which I am not an expert. Indeed. How many misconceptions do most of us have about various fields? We might be able to scan through Comins's list of 1700 misconceptions about science and feel pretty good that we don't hold that misconception or that one or (omg!) that one. But I can guarantee that there are things on his list that you are wrong about, and the world is large -- we can safely assume that a significant portion of what we think we know about the world is apt to be incorrect.
Comins is careful not to sound negative about this; his book is not about how dumb people are, but an exploration of the nature of people's misconceptions. This can be hard, as I bet you know. It's difficult not to get a bit tetchy with people who don't understand your field as well as you do, and who moreover make the most outrageously incorrect assertions about it. Sometimes it seems that the Language Log is primarily about addressing linguistical misconceptions, which (like cosmological ones) abound. (And a lot of its entertainment value arises when the posters there don't hold back their tetchiness.) Language is probably the field in which I personally experience the most WTF? moments when I hear people's ideas about how it all works. At one point Comins says, "I find it fascinating that we live in a natural world that rarely works as we believe it does, yet most of the time we function very well." Ditto language, methinks.[1]
As I noted, the book is not just a catalog of astronomical bloopers. After spending some time on misconceptions in his field, Comins turns his attention to the nature of misconceptions in general. Why do we believe what we believe, and why is it so hard to change our misconceptions? He surveys a variety of reasons, which include the following:- Sensory perception and "common sense" in conflict with the realities of science. The natural conclusion, for example, is that heavenly bodies circle us.
- Bad information. We take information at face value from people we trust: "The problem is, when the first source is allegedly trustworthy, we are unlikely to look further." Changing such beliefs is hard:
The reality is that everything in science is tentative. Tomorrow's experiment, observation, or theory may well show that current beliefs need revision or replacement. However, our minds work differently. Most of us usually take what we hear or see and accept it as "fact." Once we do this, it is very hard to change our belief on the subject. And not just because we're stubborn:After all, the conclusions you have drawn over the years have helped to determine many of your attitudes [...] Instead, I propose that you would take the new information and massage it to fit your prior beliefs. - Choosing the first or simplest explanation.
- Incorrect logic or reasoning.
- Finding patterns even when there aren't any. For example, it's almost impossible not to find familiar shapes in the clouds.
- Overgeneralization.
- Political beliefs.
- Media misrepresentations. For example, he said that after the first Star Wars movie came out, people "knew" that the asteroid belt consisted of huge rocks that were so close together that a space ship would have to slalom around them. In reality, as he explains, individual asteroids are millions and millions of miles apart.
... and so on.
The conclusion of the book is that Comins has changed how he teaches, certain now that his students are harboring incorrect ideas and that dislodging those ideas is not easy. The strategy is that he enlists the students in identifying and then fixing their own misconceptions. (Hence the list on his Web site.) When possible, he does demonstrations and other hands-on activities, because these make much more of an impact than simply reciting facts.
Anyway, an interesting book. As it happens, you can get this book cheap from Daedalus Books. Or if you've changed your beliefs about acquiring books (haha), you can always get it from the library ...
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