Main Topics: Module 1

Science is a human activity—it isn’t Truth, but it works.
Science is the best way to answer many questions (How does something work? How can we use that information to help ourselves, by curing disease or ﬁnding clean water or in other ways?).
Science cannot answer many questions we care about (What should we do? Why are we here?), but it gives us important background information.

Get a new idea (hypothesis) from somewhere (genius?).
See if the new idea beats old ideas in predicting what will happen (experiment).
If yes (after many tests), use the new idea; if no, we still use the old one.
Repeat—there’s always more to learn.
Ideas that work better might be True, Close, or Lucky, so science is never sure.
Science can prove ideas wrong, but cannot prove them correct.
But, if we act as if science finds truth, we succeed in doing many things...If we follow the scientific method.

National Parks were a U.S. idea; Yellowstone was the first (1870).
Take a quick visit to Yellowstone, and imagine what we would have lost if it had been developed as a power plant or a shopping mall.
Problem: parks are for both “conservation unimpaired for future generations” and “enjoyment” for this generation.
Doing both is not always easy.

We WILL cover the evidence for all of this during the semester, but we must start somewhere.
Earth is 4.6 billion years old and formed from pieces that fell together from space under gravity.
Earth heated as it formed (natural radioactivity, and the heat from stopping those falling pieces—think of the hot-brake smell after stopping a truck on a steep hill).
This heating melted Earth and allowed it to separate into layers (think of a car-bottom clump on a snowy day—ice, rocks, and dead-squirrel parts are all lumped together but separate when they melt in the garage).
The layers include the iron-rich core, the iron-silica mantle, and the more-silica/less-iron crust. Refer to the Chemistry Sidebar in this module if this seems unfamiliar.