Hey Blog! This post is all about science.
I’m not your typical mad scientist; I don’t have crazy white hair, a secret lab and a bunch of test tubes stuck into a pocket; but all the same I do like a little bit of science. A lot, actually. E=mc2, s=d/t, etc. are all very interesting to me; I like condensing a lot of knowledge into a simple formula and discovering the laws of the universe. There are apparently three basic sciences: biology, chemistry and physics. I am not doing a science class for any single one of these at the moment, but we have discussed them, and of the classes I am doing, physics is probably my favourite, followed by chemistry. However, science as a whole is more interesting to me, as one area relates to all the others – studying biology is useless without knowing biological processes, which means you need to learn chemistry, and studying chemical elements is useless without knowing how they react, which means you need to learn physics. However, what defines a science?
All knowledge is learning and almost all academic learning (there are other kinds) is either arts, language, humanities, maths or science. Physics is reputedly “maths with toys” according to Mum’s old maths teacher, though! As such, science is one of the largest branches of learning, and one of the very few where there are ‘right answers’. This is because science explains things in consistent patterns, with rules that cannot be broken, and if a we are given a statement produced by science it is either correct, however unlikely, or the scientist has made a mistake. You can’t break the law of gravity, for example; even if you’re flying on a broomstick, you must be producing drag which the broomstick is countering by magical lift. And the energy for that lift must be coming from somewhere, as we are in a closed system, being in the universe, and as Newton said, “within a closed system nothing can be created or destroyed, only change state” – including energy. As I said above, I love the idea of discovering these little gems which demonstrate all the info in one package, which could be why I like the next thing on the list.
The Periodic Table is The Essential Tool in chemistry. Someone I know was asking for help with some homework questions on her WhatsApp status, so I sent her a message saying “Check your periodic table!”. That’s how useful it is; it will explain almost every chemical question as the arrangement of the elements within will show patterns you wouldn’t have suspected. The most amazing thing about it was that it was constructed before half the elements were discovered. Scientists had long wanted to put all the elements in a table to show how they worked, but there was no pattern to follow. Then Dimitri Mendeleev had a dream, and came up with the idea of leaving gaps for elements that might not be discovered yet. It worked. Every single element discovered since has been predicted by Mendeleev, and he has never been proved wrong…
On to the science classes I am doing now. For a few weeks I have been doing online sessions with Sparking Stem, which must be really good as they have been able to get me to write up my experiments afterwards, of my own choosing – which nothing else has been able to get me to do. They have a lot of information, and an experiment or two, the most recent one has been on the different forms of energy, for example. However, this is not the only thing I do for science. There is Theatre of Science; free science lessons with crazy experiments run by someone with the proper eclectic scientist personality, with the Science Alliance, Theatre of Science’s following, of which I am automatically a member. Both of these have a different vibe, but both are awesome!
Finally, what future do I have with science? Well, it is on my list of things I would consider doing. I may already be too tall for an astronaut; though there are many kinds of science, so I don’t know which kind would interest me most. Science will always remain intriguing to me, whatever happens, and I hope never to stop exploring its possibilities.