Science is a beautiful thing. With it, we can understand the nature of the universe around us, explaining what was once thought to be super-natural, replacing it with the natural. While I don’t know whether the human mind as it exists now is capable of understanding all of reality in all of its spectacular complexities, I do know that science is the best tool we’ve devised to begin the process.
Yet the iterative nature of science — with its seeming backtracks, contradictions and disagreements — is often misunderstood and mistrusted by those who are looking for certainty in a chaotic world. It is with the goal of helping people better understand what science is and how it works that Bridge 8 has created six new short animated films.
Following on from the wonderfully informative “Critical Thinking” series, the “This Thing Called Science” series covers skepticism, empiricism, blind testing, and hypothesizing as well as looking at ethics and citizen science. Although intended for tweens and teens, I can not think of a single person who would not benefit from watching these films. They are not only immensely informative, but simultaneously entertaining and thought provoking.
Don’t believe me? Good! You should prove it for yourself…
Part 1: Call me skeptical
Part 2: Testing, testing 1-2-3
Part 3: Blinded by Science
Part 4: Confidently Uncertain
Part 5: Do the right thing
Part 6: Citizen Science
Thanks for this! These videos are great ^_^
Really interesting Jason, thanks !
Given your interest, I think that you (and the other readers here) would be really interested in some recent research that I have come across that theorizes about citizen science and similar phenomena.
It’s called “The Theory of Crowd Capital” and you can download it here if you’re interested: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2193115
In my view it provides a powerful, yet simple model, getting to the heart of the matter. Enjoy!