A friend of mine swears by her Casio calculator which has a set of physical constants accessible at the touch of a button – she finds it very useful. It’s ageing though, and it turns out that Casio only sell that model in Hong Kong now – a long way to go to get a replacement!
The effect of Science usurping Religion’s place in our quest for understanding, is that we now expect everything to be sown up; understood beyond question; black and white and quantified to two decimal places.
This manifests itself in all sorts of ways. Friends wanting to know if they’ve
- picked the best thing on the menu;
- circled the right answers so that a mindless pop-survey turns out right or
- answered the questions on an adoption form correctly.
Students wanting to know whether they’ve got
- the right results in an experiment;
- the right response to a stimulus;
- the right answer to a question.
As if having the right answer is the only thing that matters.
Do you remember getting all your correct answers marked wrong in Maths, just because you neglected to show your working?
Stephen Hawking said last week that he no longer thinks that Black Holes exist – at least, not in the way we’ve come to envisage them.
So it turns out there’re few constants!
