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Your point about the museum is interesting... but I think you may be slightly missing the point of a museum :) An art museum isn't about teaching kids about th
by mithr 5y ago
Your point about the museum is interesting... but I think you may be slightly missing the point of a museum :)
An art museum isn't about teaching kids about the process behind making art -- the brush strokes, the dedication, the frustrations, the frequent failures, the occasional successes. It's about showing "this is what some artists that we consider 'great' have produced". Similarly, science museums are about showing some stuff that we've learned using (very broadly) science. So high-level overviews of engines, and tesla coils, and pop-science illustrations of how some math principles work, are all perfectly within the goals. I think that optimistically, a kid might come out of a science museum thinking "look at all the cool things that science has led to -- maybe if I'm a scientist, I can contribute to something like that one day too!", and that could be a different perspective than they otherwise would've had. They can learn what it actually means to "do science" later on in life.
And I think your point about "body of knowledge" implying "level of truth" is also interesting, but I take perhaps the opposite view. The scientific process does produce what we consider truth -- it's just that a deeper understanding of it is that anything we understand today comes with a degree of uncertainty, even if that degree is pretty small. But this is a perspective that's hard for a lot of people to grasp, and this article was written for a pop-science audience, which doesn't generally have a solid understanding of this principle ("What do you mean, we can't really be sure? I know lots of things for sure. Science is stupid."). Given this caveat, I think it's actually dangerous to say to this audience "the scientific body of knowledge is never truth", because while this is technically true, it leads the pop-science reader to think "huh, well in that case, my totally unfounded opinion is just as good".