the science behind

A dear friend recently posted this on her blog:

Did you know that you can melt sugar? And that it turns into caramel? 

I cannot tell you how happy it made me to read that. This is the wonder of science. Watching sugar melt is essentially what I've done all summer in my organic chemistry lab class. Okay I didn't watch sugar melt, but whatever we would make that day and then take a melting point reading on, often looked like sugar, or snowflakes, or smelled like laffy taffys. I felt like I was in a cooking class, learning how to make caramel brownies, only my ingredients often included carcinogens or flammable chemicals and my end products weren't brownies but things like 4-tert-butyl-2,6-dinitrophenol.  Or maybe I was in potions class. I kept having lines from Harry Potter run through my head and occasionally my teacher felt like Snape.

I beyond dreaded taking physics. I had escaped four years of high school and three of college  without having to take the subject. Unfortunately the time came, I swallowed my pride, and... completely fell in love with velocity, momentum, circuits, and the buoyancy factor. I loved that I understood (in a very small and simple way) how the world worked better.  I felt like a new way of seeing and thinking was opened up to me with this new knowledge.

Yesterday my nephew and I went to the Bean Museum on campus to see the black widow spider (ironic that we would go to a museum full of dead things just to see the only living one). As we wandered around and Ry's eyes filled with wonder at the crocodiles and prairie dogs, I was flooded with memories of coming to this place as a child. I am eternally grateful for parents who took the time to teach me to love the world around me. I loved shows like zoom or Bill Nye the Science Guy.  My dad and I would take apart old computers and he would show me what each part did. We would go hiking as a family and my mom would stay up late working on science fair projects with me.

Do I think that science is the only important or worthwhile field of study? Absolutely not. But so often I feel like science gets short-changed by "non-science" folk as being dry, boring, difficult, and nerdy. My friends, you can never, ever escape science. People say "science isn't my thing" but I'm afraid that's impossible. Science is everybody's thing. Everything in this world revolves around it from dancing to baking to candle-stick making.  Science is not without difficulty and there are some things that are indeed boring, but a simple understanding of science opens up an amazing world and I cannot stress that enough.

Is science creative? I cannot answer a big enough YES to make you understand enough how much it really is. Science is governed by our current understanding and rules, but anyone who has worked on a science project or in a lab will tell you that half the time everything that you try that should work doesn't and you are left with your own knowledge and guess work to come up with a solution. We only have the knowledge that we do because of the men and women of history were brave and creative enough to try and fail a million times and to learn from each attempt.

So take some time to become acquainted with science. Your life will be full of so much more wonder and joy because of it.

And that is a promise.


loves,

M