Topic 1 • Science Literacy Book Report (100,000 points)PHYS-107 (17) • Fall 2004PurposeScience Classes As a student, you have received science and science related information from your teachers. Whetheryou believe it or not is up to you. But a professional has taken the time to determine what sorts of thingsare important to know and with how much detail, both for the purposes of the courses you are taking andfor the more general purpose of “Science Literacy”, to help make you a better citizen and better able tofunction in our science & technology driven 21st Century.How Will I Get Science Information in the Future? For some of you, your courses at Western Michigan University may be the last time you will have thebenefit of someone directing what science you are exposed to. So, what happens when you get to the“real world”? Well, you may be bombarded with information from all sorts of sources: your job,newspapers, magazines, books, television, radio, movies, the Internet, friends, conversations overheardwhile standing in line somewhere – you name it. What these methods may lack, though, is the controland expertise of your teachers. You can find all sorts of amazing information on the Internet, but youwould have to be very naïve to believe 100% of everything you read there. Much of our news isdominated by politics, but how much science do our politicians know? At the moment, we have exactlyone professional engineer and one physicist in the House of Representatives (both of these men are fromMichigan – you should know who they are, but probably don’t), none in the Senate. Most of Congress ismade up of lawyers. While there is nothing wrong with studying the Law per se, legal arguments do notfollow the same rules and purposes of scientific arguments. Therefore there is nothing that requires anenvironmental cleanup bill, for example, to have anything to do with either the environment or cleaning itup. Likewise, the talking heads we get our news from on TV are not trained in science and technologyfor the most part. I don’t know what Dan Rather or Connie Chung majored in at college, but I canprobably bet it wasn’t Physics. They may have, unlike you, been able to graduate from college withoutever having had a Physics course. Even on the cable channels, one of the hosts of a computer show Iused to watch is now doing a cable show on gardening – go figure. So how will you evaluate information on your own? This is possibly something that you have neverthought about, but Dr. Phil and other professionals have. Dr. Phil’s approach is to have you read a bookand examine what you read and how it affects you, as well as whether you believe it. (You don’t haveto.)Learning to “Parse” Information Evaluating what you read in this context is very much in line with definition 3 of the verb parse:parse (pärs) verbparsed, pars·ing, pars·es verb, transitive1. To break (a sentence) down into its component parts of speech with an explanation ofthe form, function, and syntactical relationship of each part.2. To describe (a word) by stating its part of speech, form, and syntactical relationshipsin a sentence.3. To examine closely or subject to detailed analysis, especially by breaking up intocomponents: “What are we missing by parsing the behavior of chimpanzees into theconventional categories recognized largely from our own behavior?” (Stephen JayGould).4. Computer Science. To analyze or separate (input, for example) into more easilyprocessed components. Used of software.verb, intransitiveTo admit of being parsed: sentences that do not parse easily.[Probably from Middle English pars, part of speech, from Latin pars (ōrātiōnis), part (of speech).]Source: Microsoft Bookshelf '95 (American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (ThirdEdition))PHYS-107 (17) (Kaldon) - Fall 2004 - 2Dr. Phil’s Definition of Science Literacyscience literacy n. An exposure to science in a historical context that serves toallow a person to observe the world around them with understanding, deal withtechnological applications at home and work, appreciate the distinction betweenfact and speculation in the media and politics, have a working knowledge ofnumbers and the scale of the universe, and be able to pursue more information ifdesired, as a function of everyday life.Philip Edward Kaldon, Fall 1995Books as a Source of Information From all the sources listed in How Will I Get Science Information in the Future?, most are verydifficult to evaluate. Dr. Phil can’t easily watch hours of VCR tapes or interview your friends along withevery paper he reads to compare your impressions with the actual information being presented. So bynarrowing the choices to one medium – books – we can have a little control and consistency betweenpapers. For more than ten years Dr. Phil has been building up a booklist of suitable books. They are, as youshall see, not just Physics books, but cover all the Natural Sciences, Engineering, Computers,Technology, Medicine and the Morality and Ethics of using these. The total list is kept around a hundredtitles. Books come on and off the list from time to time, sometimes because Dr. Phil gets sick of readingtoo many papers on Airframe or Jurassic Park, etc., and sometimes because some books work better withsome classes (such as PHYS-309) than others. Because this is not strictly a Physics paper but a Science Literacy paper, the range of books isconsiderable. There are fiction and non-fiction titles, biographies, science fiction, mysteries andtechnothrillers – books that straddle the line between science fiction and current reality – from somepopular best-selling authors as Tom Clancy and Michael Crichton, covering topics that include Physics,Biology, Chemistry, Engineering, Computers, Mathematics, Technology, Medicine, etc.. The list isanything but boring. It is easiest to pick a book you have not read before. And if you pick a title from the booklist, that’s it.However, you may decide that (a) you have read everything on the list, (b) read everything you think isinteresting on the list or (c) waited too long to get the book(s) you were interested in from the library andare now stuck. You may read a book that isn’t on the booklist, but you must get Dr. Phil’s approvalbeforehand and be prepared to hand in a draft of your paper at least one week before it is due. If you goahead and write a paper on a