I recently spent two evenings attending an adult class given at the local high school. The subject was advertised as “the Universe, coming or going”. The description in the catalog implied that the course would focus on the 1973 PBS series “The Ascent of Man” by the late Jacob Bronowski. I saw that series when I was in engineering school, and it was heady stuff … it made you really want to believe in humankind and the power of the mind (but then again, I was young at the time). Well, I hadn’t heard anything about Bronowski or “Ascent” since then, so I signed up for the class, with high hopes.

As always, advertising can be deceiving. The class was taught by a retired physics professor on a mission. I wasn’t quite sure though just what his mission was. At first, it seemed as if he was trying to apologize for science to a largely liberal-arts audience. It seemed like he was pandering. Then he tried, not very successfully, to revolve everything around a Gauguin painting, the one with the 3 questions: where do we come from, who are we, where are we going. Turned out that he was putting those questions out as bait for the artsy set, trying to get them to swallow some math and physics using the Bill Nye the Science Guy entertainment / demonstration approach. Well, the demonstrations were mostly a flop, and the artsy people were pretty well glazed and dazed by 9pm.

At the second class, my guy had lost about a third of his audience. But some die-hards stuck it out; to sugar-coat it for them, he had someone read poems during the bell curve and entropy demonstrations. I was pretty well convinced that this fellow was a dweeb (and I don’t think he liked me too much either — during the first class I injected some know-it-all comments about fractiles and cosmic expansion during a dead spot, trying to keep some momentum going — hey, I was only trying to help, but I don’t think he appreciated it). But during the walk home, a classic Indian summer evening with wet falling leaves all over the place, I figured out what was going on.

It seems pretty clear that a whole lot of people out there, even the most educated people, really don’t have a good grasp of basic scientific principles like entropy, randomness, statistical distributions, exponential number functions, the microsphere of molecules and atomic particles, digital logic and the macrosphere of galaxies and the universe. And you can see the consequences of that in many ways, for example in the short-sightedness of politics and in the crazy way that most people drive. Most folk don’t know that the way they drive, i.e. fast and jerky, and the huge vehicles they drive, i.e. SUVs, use up a whole lot of oil, which is eventually going to run out. And most of our biggest political problems revolve around this — Al Qaeda and Iraq are both ultimately oil issues. If we weren’t such oil junkies, both wouldn’t be such problems. (Yea, I’m guilty too, I drive to work every day when there’s a bus, albiet a slow bus that runs thru some nasty neighborhoods; but I drive carefully and get 31 MPG, and keep the driving down on weekends, for what little it’s worth).

Well, I now see what the guy’s mission was. I hope that he keeps working on his script and starts getting thru to those physics-challenged english majors. He didn’t do so well the first time out, despite invoking the ghost of a master (Bronowski), but maybe he’ll get better with practice. And actually, I did learn one interesting thing from him: the role of flowers in evolution. Flowering plants came relatively late in the grand scheme of things, but without them, the bigger warm-blooded animals like elephants and horses and monkeys (and thus humans) would never have evolved. There were a lot of little mammals around once the cold-blooded dinosaurs started dying off, but they could only grow so big eating grasses and ferns. Flowers, and the fruits and grains that come from them, concentrate sugar and starches into snacks with a lot of punch, thus allowing bigger warm-blooded things to live (the dinosaurs, being cold-blooded, didn’t need high-carb diets). So, the flower was one of those little things that made a really big difference. How about that! Live long and prosper, Professor Goldstein.