The Flux Capacitor is Broken!

First, I would like to apologize for my longer than acceptable absence. Both from this blog as well as my YouTube channel. My academic world has been consuming all of my time. Life, getting in the way of so much, you know? Yeah, you know.

Also, as a side note, I recently received a comment from an anonymous user which was very non-productive and non-constructive. This person apparently removed it in short order, but I still have an e-mail copy of it. This person appears to be a troll. I would like to request not only that you critique my blog, but also that all comments critiquing my blogs be constructive in nature. I am open to criticism, so long as I can actually take something productive out of it. Another note on the comment section; I would like to encourage conversations in the comments section. This will help in reduction in errors on everyone's part. This is always something I am looking to improve upon, including but not limited to in myself. This also helps increase the amount of positive flow in this world. Which leads us to our topic for the blog.

Everything in this world fluxes, from day to day lives to eras, from fashion to mind, from interpersonal relations to internalization, from the heart to the mind. You can see it all around you, if you look hard enough. Your best friend is not the same person as they were when you two met. The change was not noticeable while it was happening, but it is only noticeable upon reflection. When you travel by aircraft, you don't really notice that you are moving except for brief moments when you think about it.

Science in general and chemistry in particular is the same way. It is always fluxing, always flowing towards a higher intelligence and higher knowledge base, slowly but surely. Like all of us in our daily lives, we in science do not have all of the answers. I am near certain that, like all of us in life, science is likely to never have all of the answers. We can, however, understand things better today then we did yesterday. That's the best we can do right now; understanding in better detail today than we did yesterday, even if it's slow and small.

Some of this flow of scientific knowledge stems from raw scientific curiosity. People such as Marie Curie have given their lives for the sake of this flux in scientific knowledge, and people such as myself thank her for her work and her sacrifice. Some people, such as Galileo, came to clash with those in power for the sake of breaking through to the realm of science. I thank him for clashing with an entity whose wish was to confine intellectual knowledge. There are yet others, like Carl Sagan, who try to bring science to the general public in the face of the shunning by their peers for doing so. I thank him for being essentially isolated from his peers to show everyone else that scientific flux is achievable by all.

There are plenty of others who have made huge contributions to the realm of science and scientific flux. These people on the forefront of flux realize that no, we don't know everything but realize that yes, we can know this particular thing. Yes, we can use this knowledge for our own benefit. Tide comes in, tide goes out; there's never a miscommunication. Yes, we can explain that and yes we can use that for energy generation. The sun; we can explain how it got there, and yes we can use it for energy and food generation.

We haven't always been able to understand such things; we are able to do so now because of scientific flux. When all of the necessary small bits of knowledge came about, they were all brought together. This is how flux works a lot of the time. Small business flux into a larger breed of business by bringing in people in. Small additions come in to eventually yield big differences.

In science – as with every other aspect in life which fluxes – these small additions often times only yield small differences at first, and only later on yield major differences when brought together. For instance, the internal combustion engine which everyone on the first world takes for granted only came together from other small changes. The carburettor was brought in from the spray bottle model for perfume. The crank shaft came about from the mechanism used to use stream-flow power to hammer stuff like wheat for bread. The spark plug came from the sparks used to see if air was “safe” to breathe. Every part of the engine, I'm willing to bet, came from something else entirely in this fashion. I am willing to make a wager that most major contributions to technology came in this fashion.

Today, I was watching Dr. Kiki Sanford's Science Hour justin.tv (http://www.justin.tv/drkiki, Fridays at 12:00 PM GMT -8) and the thought occurred to me that there is a problem with the educational system, at least in America in the public sector. Well, there is a plethora of problems with America's public education system on all levels, but there is one which resurfaced to my conscious mind. This problem is the most common mechanism of teaching, which is to give the students the facts and use some wording of the phrase “Don't worry about where it came from”.

I see the logic behind this method of teaching. There is a lot of information – a lot of data – in each course to be taught. There is no way to actually expect students to actually contemplate what went behind these facts.

The thing is, this method of learning is inefficient. The biggest detriment to this method of learning (in my humble opinion) is that there is no apparent thought taken to have students learn intuitively the thought process behind what we are learning. We are left predominately ignorant of the flexes and flows which preceded these facts.

This is especially detrimental in the early years (5 years to 10 years) and in the collegiate years. Early on is when the neural network is still developing. Therefore, it is vital that the brain is developed in a fashion which would make these children (future adults) would be the happiest. A huge part of that is the ability to think about the world around them. In the college level, we need to get these students to think critically about the fields they are getting degrees in, so they will better be successful in their particular field. (Cross-Reference my most recent blog entry The Importance of Curiosity and Life.)

So with that in mind, my prompt for you today is to learn by thinking. Learn by determining the mentality behind what the final outcome is. You know the old saying “It's not the destination; it's the journey that matters”? That sentiment holds true here as well. If you don't know the journey, you can't understand the destination. If you don't know the path of flow which lead to the conclusion, then you can't hope to understand the conclusion.

Next time, I will expand on the educational system, and what I see as potential solutions as well as at least one solution which is currently being implemented on a small scale.

Until next week, have fun. Learn. And don't forget to be awesome.

-K. "Alan"Eister Δαβ