There will come a time in every student’s life when they have to do school science experiments. Usually from about grade six and up kids will be asked to compete in school science fairs. This is a very exciting time for many students and they take great pride in their work, especially when they win. There are numerous ideas for projects, and you should have no problem coming up with an original experiment to do. All you need to do is to think of an idea that interests you and you will be off to a great start.

Interesting ideas for school science experiments can include finding out if the color of hair affects how much static electricity it can carry. For this experiment you will need some balloons, a few volunteers each with a different hair color, and a timer. Gather a pen and paper to make a chart to record your results. Read the rest of this entry »

1. Introduction

As a start, I would like to point out to you a few things which might explain my interest in history and philosophy in general. You have all heard the slogan “Two Cultures,” the contrast and conflict between sciences on one hand and art on the other. However, in Hungary, where I come from, there was only “One Culture.” The Hungarian word for science is “tudomány.” It corresponds to the word “Wissenschaft” in German. These expressions designate one, all-embracing science, including everything from mathematics to music. The Hungarian Academy of Sciences has, at present, eight sections: languages, literary sciences, social and historical sciences, mathematics and physics, agricultural sciences, technical sciences, chemistry and biology, and a section on musical folklore under the well-know composer Zoltán Kodály, who recently visited this country and taught in a music summer school at Dartmouth College. Incidentally, we have also in our country at least one institution, the American Academy of Arts and Science, which emphasizes the union, rather than the contrast, between Arts and Science. However, as you know, this is an exception. Our National Academy of Science is concerned only with science, but not with the arts.

My interest in philosophy of science was kindled by Poincaré’s books. It was reinforced by the requirement for the Ph.D. degree in Vienna, which included philosophy. My finals consiswted of two one-hour exams in physics, which was my major, a single one-hour exam in mathematics, my minor, and two one-hour exams in philosophy. These requirements forced one to study philosophy and to consider science in general, physical and mathematics in particular, in a more general context.

I managed somehow to take both one-hour exams in philosophy of science, since I had a sort of allergy to some parts of traditional philosophy. Fortunately, a friend of mine, Herbert Feigl, who is now a distinguished philosopher of science himself (Professor of Philosophy and Director of the Minnesota Center for Philosophy of Science at the University of Minnesota) tutored me. This way I did not have to read voluminous books on traditional philosophy.

One of the philosophers who examined me was M. Schlick. He was the founder of the “Vienna Circle” of logical positivists, also called logical empiricists. This direction goes back to Hume, Comte, and Mach. The circle had weekly sessions on philosophy of science, which were very interesting, but sometimes quite baffling, to me then. For example, there was a discussion about a book by Herman Weyl, “Was ist Materie” (What is Matter). There was an expression “es gibt” (there is). I remember a spirited discussion about the possible meaning of that expression. Being a young student of science, I did not at that time appreciate the significance of such semantic discussions. Later on, I realized that the precise meaning of statements in philosophy can be very important. Still, I always remembered a saying by Goethe in “Faust”: “Wo die Begriffe fehlen, stellt ein Wort zur rechten Zeit sich ein” (When the concepts are missing, a word shows up). Clearly, a new word is no substitute for a new concept!

2. History of General History

After this bit of autobiographical introduction, I would like to discuss very briefly and in big historical jumps the “History of History” and the “History of History of Science.”

History may be defined as a methodical reconstruction of the past of mankind. From Herodotos to Thucydides, from Livius to Tacitus, there was a gradually increasing sophistication leading away from the naive, purely narrative type of history. However, even with some sophistication, history was only an uncritical description of separated human events (like battles) and actions (by kings or other leaders).

General history, taking account of the dynamic forces emanating from the structure of a society, started only in the eighteenth century and actually developed only in the nineteenth century. Voltaire’s “Siècle de Louis XIV” was, perhaps , the earliest general or cultural history. Gibbon, at least in some parts of his work, was another early bird. Sismondi, Thierry, and Michelet emphasized the role of communes and the rise of the “Third Estate” in medieval history. The British “Whig” historians, Hallam, Grote, and Macauley considered history as a successive unfolding of political liberty. Carlyle vainly tried to turn the clock back with his hero worship, as exemplified in his “History of the French Revolution.”

Influenced by the philosophers, Comte and Spencer, Taine and Buckle were, perhaps, the first cultural historians. They emphasize social factors, ideas, and idealogies. Hegel and Marx catalyzed the dialectic materialism style of history, with all its excesses. However, they rightly emphasized that in an age of quickly changing social and industrial development in particular, and even more generally, the sociological and industrial factors played very important roles in all human endeavors. Lecky, following Buckle, emphasized (in his “History of the Rise and Influence of Rationalism in Europe” and in his “History of European Morals from Augustus to Charlemagne”) the “practical, active, and social sides of history, in contrast to the “intellectual and speculative” side, as exemplified by Leslie Stephens’ “English Thought in the Eighteenth Century.” Of course, all these aspects of history are complementary and should enter together into a really general history.

Grand synthesis in history cannot be practiced without analytic specialization. As a matter of fact, analytic specialization is a pre-condition for a successful cultural synthesis. The great attention to innumerable details, documented by a large number of footnotes, was the style set by Ranke and, perhaps to a lesser extent, also by Mommsen, who for his monumental “History of the Roman Empire” received the literary Nobel prize. Detailed treatments of shorter epochs on history have been previously pioneered by Voltaire and Gibbon and developed by Macauley (famous third chapter of “History of England”), Taine (“Ancien Regime”), de Coulange (“La Cité Antique”), Dill (“Roman Society from Nero to Marcus Aurelius”), although these cannot compete with Ranke in the number of footnotes!

Of course, a detailed study of any aspects in history is justified only if it can be used in the grand synthesis. Details which cannot be woven into the canvas of general history are clearly not significant. In other words, the details of any specialized historical study must be “embeddable” in the whole picture one attempts to paint, like apiece of mosaic is “embeddable” in the whole.

This “principle of embedding” is valid for any human endeavor and activity. Any human activity is the more important the more it interacts with and is related to other human activities. The abstract form of this principle goes back, perhaps, to Protagoras of Abdera, one of the first relativists. More concretely and recently, it has been applied by Felix Klein, David Hilbert, and John von Neumann to a relative valuation of different branches of mathematics and very recently by Alvin M. Weinberg to a relative valuation of different sciences.

The grand synthesis can be characterized also, again as all human endeavor, and more generally as all the nature around us, as a result of an evolution. This view is, of course, only valid if one “averages” over a longer time period. Over a short period, evolution looks more like the envelope or average of revolutions.

It may seem that the significance of vitamins to nutrition health has been known for a significant amount of time. However, it wasn’t until the 15th century that scientists began to realize that nutrients found in various foods could improve health. The classic realization is the one of sailors who suffered from scurvy and improved their condition by eating citrus fruits. To discover the exact benefits a particular food would provide, scientists simulated conditions of nutrient deficiency using animals. These experiments were carried out by feeding the animals one specific type of food for an extended period of time. In all cases the animals’ health declined; some became seriously ill and some died. For those that became ill, the scientists fed them various nutrients until their health improved.

In the early 1900s, British chemist and Nobel Prize winner Frederick Gowland Hopkins concluded from his research that the human body needed a certain amount of specific substances to live. Casimir Funk, a biochemist from Poland who worked closely with Hopkins, conducted an experiment with polished and unpolished rice. The results of his experiments coupled with what Hopkins discovered led him to coin the term “vitamin” to represent the crucial supplemental substances necessary for growth. It would only take thirty years after their discoveries for chemists to begin synthesizing (commercially producing) the vitamins that we know today.

Since the early discoveries, there have been many developments in understanding the value of vitamins. The most recent development is that taking a multivitamin every day can decrease an individual’s risk for conditions such as osteoporosis, cardiovascular disease, and cancer. The vitamin industry is probably a multi-billion dollar industry. Just visit any nutrition center or grocery store that sells vitamins and you will see shelf after shelf of vitamins. There are vitamin preparations for just about ever type of health condition and nutritional need. The reports of the benefits of vitamins are outstanding, but indicate that there may be more to discover about vitamins and their benefits on human life.

Almost everyone has used an antibiotic like penicillin or Terramycin at one time or another. You may have tried using an antibiotic ointment for bad cuts or scrapes, or your doctor may have prescribed antibiotics to help you get over fever, boils, pneumonia and other infections. Antibiotics work very well against so many infections that they are often called “miracle drugs”. But the more accurate name for them would be “microbe drugs” for that is what antibiotics really are. Antibiotics are essentially chemicals that helped kill or stop the growth of certain germs and bacteria. It comes from two Greek words meaning “against life”.

More than 3000 years ago, Asian peoples had already stumbled on molds that could cure certain afflictions. The Indians of Central America as well the Chinese used molds to treat infected wounds in rashes however, they did not understand either diseases or treatments in the way we do now. Many of them thought in terms of magic and spiritualism, so they simply believed that molds drove away evil spirits that cause the disease. As time passed, men had slowly gained some more knowledge of disease. True understanding began only in recent times. In the 1860s, a French scientist Louis Pasteur proved that many diseases were caused by bacteria and concluded that man could learn to fight these bacteria using other bacteria. Read the rest of this entry »

Welcome to the 21st Century! Are you ready to create websites, blogs, podcasts, or movies? Kids are all about wires and visuals, and it’s time for teachers to catch up and keep up. Teachers across the nation are using technology in innovative ways to enhance the learning experience across the curriculum. Here are five exciting ways you can go high-tech on a budget:

Create an Interactive Classroom Website

Today websites are easier than ever to create. There are a ton of free hosting and website creators specifically designed for teacher created websites. Here are just a few -Teacher Website, School and Teacher, School Rack, Class Notes Online, Educator Pages, Class Jump, Teacher Web, EZ Class Sites, Bloust. These websites offer everything you need to get started, but if you are like me, and you want to maintain control of your site in case your host disappears, I highly recommend using Microsoft Office FrontPage 2003. You will want the 2003 version. They are no longer making updates to Microsoft Office FrontPage 2003, but it is still a great starter program.

If you are technically savvy you might want to check out Microsoft Expression Media 2 Mac/Win, the new web master program from Microsoft or Adobe Dreamweaver CS4.A classroom website is a great way to communicate with parents, display student created work, provide downloadable copies of assignments and projects, and share your resources with other teachers. You can get your kids involved in designing pages and adding content. You can open your site up to the public or make it password protected. Students love to visit their teacher’s sites to get updates and instructions for assignments and links to sites for research or just playing educational games. Check out these classroom websites, and when you finish your site, stop by and add your link. Read the rest of this entry »

Screaming! Tantrums! Arguments! Is this what happens to you when you try to get your kids to do their homework? It certainly happens to many of my students when they go home.

Their homework is designed to be a. quick to do, b. managable but challenging, and c. for review. However, students sometimes express reluctance to do homework. So perhaps there are some things you can do to help you kids do THEIR homework. Read the rest of this entry »

What is the best way to improve study skills? The fact is many students can not answer this question and this is what leads to those students struggling. The key to succeeding in school is the ability to perform well on tests and exams. This article will provide the basic foundation to successful students and people. Furthermore just having this does not mean automatic success it has to be used.

I am talking about motivation and a desire to be great. This might not have been what you were looking for but the truth is desire and a motivation to succeed will carry you along way. How do you get motivated or develop it if you perceive to not have it. You have to have something that you want that will help you get motivated. I would know because for most of my life I did not think I was capable of being motivated about anything. Read the rest of this entry »

If you’ve taken a first-year college history course - or read through a basic history textbook - you may have noticed a small gap. It’s only a thousand years or so.

For a long time, the history of Western culture was told like this: around the fifth century BCE, math, philosophy and science developed, thanks to the hard work of some very smart Greeks such as Thales, Plato, Archimedes and Aristotle. Then Rome took over Greece, and Rome fell, and things went dark for a thousand years or so. Then the Renaissance came along, and thinkers like Galilei and Johannes Kepler took up where the Greeks had, in effect, left off.

Thanks to new historical research - and broader awareness of non-Western countries and of the very rich intellectual cultures being developed east of the Urals - this picture of the history of math, philosophy and science is changing, slowly. But still, teachers tend all too often to skip over one of the most interesting stories in intellectual history - the way that math and logic, including the best insights of Greek logicians, became the property of Muslim countries during the long twilight period, from Rome’s fall to the Renaissance, when most Europeans could no longer read Greek. Without the work of these great Muslim scholars, math today might be a very different animal. The Islamic Arab Empire, beginning in the eighth century, was a world intellectual capital, and Arabic became a language of learning to rival Latin. Some of the best mathematical reasoning in the world was done here.

We may as well start with Muhammad ibn Musa al-Hwarizmi (9th century), a Persian astronomer deeply learned in the mathematical lore of ancient India. From his name (in its Latin form) we get the word algorithm, and from one of his book titles we derive algebra. It’s appropriate that he should be associated with the history of algebra - after all, his books preserved most of what the ancient world knew about algebra (as well as his own brilliant innovations), and his works helped to spread the use of Arabic numerals (the numbers we know and use today) to the West, thus making algebra a good deal more feasible. (To understand why this is important, imagine trying to do algebra problems while using Roman numerals: XIIa times XXVb equals c? No, thanks.)

Then there’s Al-Karaji, who around 1000AD invented the proof by mathematical induction - one of the most basic logical maneuvers in math. Poet Omar Khayyam, writing in the twelfth century, laid the groundwork for non-Euclidean geometry. During this period, Muslim mathematicians invented spherical trigonometry, figured out how to use decimal points with Arabic numerals (though the decimal itself had long been invented by Hindu mathematicians), and developed cryptography, algebraic calculus, analytic geometry, among other things.

As important as any of these contributions, though, was the rescue of Aristotle’s texts from obscurity by Arab scholars. For long periods during the middle ages, Aristotle was considered by Western intellectuals as one of the world’s great thinkers - but most of them hadn’t read him. The few of his works that had survived the twin falls of Greece and Rome were available in sometimes poor, or rather freehanded and inaccurate, Latin translations, and many of his most important works weren’t available at all. Here and there a Greek manuscript survived, but almost nobody, at this point, could read Greek. (Widespread teaching of Greek had to wait for the Renaissance - even famously learned scholars such as the poet Petrarch struggled over it.)

The same went for such seminal works as Euclid’s Elements, the greatest known treatise on geometry. During this long period, when it was thought that these brilliantly logical works were gone forever, Islamic scholars kept their own copies and translations. When European scholars began traveling to Spain and Sicily (then under Muslim rule) during the 12th century, these works and others were rediscovered in the West, leading to great intellectual ferment, including the theology of Thomas Aquinas - and to an understanding of logic that helped the discipline of mathematics to survive and, slowly, thrive again in the Western countries.