Eureka: Discovering Your Inner Scientist

280 Pages·2014·2 MB·English

by  Chad Orzel

ALSO BY CHAD ORZEL
HOW TO TEACH RELATIVITY TO YOUR DOG
HOW TO TEACH PHYSICS TO YOUR DOG

Copyright © 2014 by Chad Orzel Published by Basic Books, A Member of the Perseus Books Group All
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Designed by Jack Lenzo A CIP catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.
ISBN: 978-0-465-04491-7 (e-book) LCCN: 2014034615
10987654321
For my parents, whose unfailing support made all of this possible.
CONTENTS
Introduction Discovering Your Inner Scientist
STEP ONE: LOOKING
Chapter 1 Collecting the Origin of Species
Chapter 2 Scientific Cuisine Reigns Supreme
Chapter 3 Needles in Haystacks
Chapter 4 Waldo at the Galaxy Zoo
STEP TWO: THINKING
Chapter 5 Setting the (Periodic) Table
Chapter 6 Asking the Allowed Questions: Bridge and Scientific Thinking
Chapter 7 Dinosaurs and Mysteries
STEP THREE: TESTING
Chapter 8 Quantum Crosswords
Chapter 9 Precision Baking
Chapter 10 Like Chess Without the Dice: Sports and Scientific Thinking
STEP FOUR: TELLING
Chapter 11 Scientific Storytelling
Chapter 12 What’s Going to Work? Teamwork! Science as Collaboration
Chapter 13 Talking Sports
Chapter 14 Damned Lies and Statistics
Conclusion Science Is Never Over
Acknowledgments
Index
Introduction
DISCOVERING YOUR INNER SCIENTIST
When I brought home my iPad for the first time, before I’d finished
getting it out of the box, my then three-year-old daughter spotted it
and announced, “I want to play Angry Birds!” I was a little
bemused by the idea that the game’s marketing reached even the
preschool set, but I was not particularly unhappy. After all, Angry Birds is a
great way to learn about science.
I’m not talking about using the game to investigate the physics of birds flung
from slingshots, but I mean the process of the game: To succeed at Angry Birds,
you need to think like a scientist.* When confronted with a new level, you need
to look closely at the arrangement of pigs and blocks and other elements, to
determine exactly what you need to accomplish. Then you develop a mental
model of what will happen when you start launching birds: “If I hit this block
with the yellow bird, it will topple that block onto the pigs, and collapse this
tower. . . .” Then you test your model directly and see how well your prediction
matches (video-game) reality. If you’ve guessed correctly, you devastate the pigs
and move on to the next level; if your model was incorrect or incomplete, you
refine it and try again.
That’s as nice an encapsulation of the process of science as you’ll find
anywhere, and it’s wildly popular. The original mobile-phone game and its many
spin-offs are among the most successful video-game franchises of all time,
downloaded over a billion times as of early 2013 and boasting more than 260
million monthly users. It’s simple enough that a three-year-old can figure out the
basics, and complex enough to be addictive even for adults. I’ve lost hours to it
myself.
The success of Angry Birds gives the lie to the popular notion that science is