The Panda’s Thumb has been keeping a close tab on Ohio science teacher/religious fanatic John Freshwater even since he got into trouble last year, allegedly burning a cross on a student’s arm with a Tesla coil.

Freshwater and school officials have been making their cases in adiministrative hearings since then. There have been six days of testimony so far, spread over several months. So far, the testimony suggests Freshwater was an insubordinate teacher who resisted his superiors’ efforts to bring him in line, perhaps because he believed God’s authority trumped theirs.

Members of the science department were supposed to bring their Tesla coils to the front office; Freshwater kept his. He was supposed to remove his Bible from plain sight of students; he put additional religious materials in his classroom instead. Ohio’s scope and sequence of science instruction places the teaching of evolution in the 8th grade and later, and forbids the teaching of creationism; Freshwater was telling his seventh graders that evolution was bunk, that the world was only 6,000 years old, and that humans and dinosaurs co-existed for a time.

Freshwater, who apparently is a very popular teacher and has won teaching awards in the past, is associated with rightwing Christian organizations, particularly the kind that just can’t seem to accept that old “separation of church and state” idea enshrined in the Constitution. They try to weasel their church teachings into the public schools in defiance of federal (and state) law anyway.

November 9th, 2008 | Tags: insubordination, john freshwater, religion, Science | Category: Commentary, Science, evolution, religion, teaching | Leave a comment

JISHOU, HUNAN — Most of my posts lately have been about China, for obvious reasons, but it’s hard to abandon being a physics teacher. So, here’s a science post.

While humans have been flitting around in low-earth orbit, NASA-JPL’s Martian probes have been busy on the red planet. The arctic explorer, Phoenix, has discovered water ice in the soil and in the sky, detected snow falling from the clouds, and photographed the sun creeping up above the horizon as the martian winter approaches.

This sequence just fascinates me in particular. It shows clouds scooting through the sky, much as they would here in Earth. These are water-ice clouds, like the high-altitude cirrus clouds here.

Aside from practical issues like not having any oxygen to breath and sub-sub-zero temperatures, you could almost imagine yourself standing there watching the clouds go by.

Phoenix has been operating for more than four months, but the approaching martian winter solstice may kill the little fellow off. Temperatures are dropping to -120C (-184F), which is bad for its electronics and especially its solar panels. Carbon dioxide frost is forming on the solar panels, cutting down sunlight reaching the solar cells. And the sun itself, as it does in Earth’s arctic region, will soon dip below the horizon, not to return for three months.

So NASA-JPL scientists are trying to keep Phoenix busy every waking hour before it’s lights out for the probe. For details, visit the website.

October 1st, 2008 | Tags: discoveries, MArs, NASA, probes, Science | Category: Astronomy, Commentary, Science | Leave a comment

The premise of the anti-evolution movie, Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, is that a “Darwinian” hegemony routinely suppresses scientists who try to bring religious faith into discussions of science. In truth, no such situation exists.

Omitted from the movie are scientists who are in fact religious and have no problem with accommodating evolution and science in general within their beliefs. It appears the creators of the movie deliberately ignored such scientists to prop up the movie’s false dichotomy between faith and science.

Details are here. It’s worth the read, believe me.

April 14th, 2008 | Tags: expelled, faith, Science | Category: Commentary, Media, Science, evolution | Leave a comment

Bloomfield Middle School officials had to tell a seventh grade science teacher that she could not teach Intelligent Design (ID) after they received a warning from the Kentucky chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).

The ACLU letter advised them that the teaching of ID was contrary to “the substantial legal authority establishing the illegality of teaching a religious doctrine within a science curriculum.” The Panda’s Thumb reprinted part of that letter yesterday.

The teacher in question, Adonna Florence, confirmed the gist of the report to me today. I am awaiting details from her, the BMS principal and the ACLU.

Technically, Florence’s introduction of ID into her science classes is not contrary to Kentucky state law.

At one point in history, Kentucky law expressly permitted, but did not require, the teaching of the Biblical creation of Earth and the organisms on it. As part of the Kentucky Education Reform Act, that statute, KRS 158.177, was effectively repealed in 1990 and re-enacted with substantially the same language as before:

March 26th, 2008 | Tags: creationism, evolution, id, intelligent design, kentucky, law, Science, teaching | Category: Commentary, Science, Skepticism, evolution | Leave a comment

Down in the Sunshine State, state education authorities are attempting to hold local school systems to consistent standards of science education, that is, to teach evolution and not creation science or Intelligent Design. Not surprisingly, some local school boards are none too happy about the new standards.

So far, 12 local boards (including Polk, Taylor and Holmes Counties) have passed resolutions that state education authorities revise the standards to include evolution as only one explanation of how life began and developed on Earth. Taylor County’s board actually resolved, “the district is opposed to teaching evolution as a fact.”

All of these challenges are doomed to fail, given the clear results from the Kitzmiller v. Dover court case, which basically sank the Intelligent Design ship in the Dover, Penn., schools. After weeks of expert testimony, the judge hearing the case definitively found that ID was a religion and not science, and thus it had no place in the Dover schools’ science classes.

Clearly, none of the Florida school board members voting for these anti-evolution standards have any clue about the significance of Kitzmiller v. Dover, much less what the words “scientific theory” mean. Science standards by definition cannot include creationism or ID instruction, since neither is scientific by any stretch of the imagination. Who knows what the school boards there expect to happen — the entire state challenging legal precedent and common sense?

January 10th, 2008 | Tags: Education & schools, Professional skeptic, Science | Category: Uncategorized | Leave a comment

By my estimate, I am at most three degrees removed from the late astronomer/writer Carl Sagan. In spirit, however, we are much closer.

My connection to Sagan, who died on this date 11 years ago, is pretty convoluted, so bear with me while I try to explain it.

First, some background. In 1972 Sagan and his colleague at Cornell University, Frank Drake, helped devise a plaque for the Pioneer 10 and 11 probes to Jupiter and Saturn. The plaque depicted the nude bodies of a man and a woman, the location of the Sun relative to prominent stars, and other basic details about the origin of the probes. The idea was to leave a calling card on the probes, in case any intelligent life “out there” should find them.

Later in the decade, Sagan and Drake repeated the exercise, making it much more elaborate, for the Voyager probes to the four gas giants. The Voyager Golden Record was a metallized phonograph record, with greetings in 55 languages (including one from Sagan’s son), music from across the globe and 115 photographs.

One of the photographs is by the famous landscape photographer, Ansel Adams, depicting in his signature style the Snake River weaving its way across the high prairie with Wyoming’s Grand Teton Mountains in the background.

At the time (1978), I was a young reporter working for the Casper (Wyoming) Star-Tribune. I proposed to my editor that I write a story about the Voyager missions and the Golden Record, highlighting Wyoming’s connection to the erstwhile communication to extraterrestrials. He agreed, and so I hit the phones.

December 20th, 2007 | Tags: Science, The media | Category: Commentary | Comments (1)

It’s been a long while since I participated in the science blog carnival called The Tangled Bank. So, I submitted my post on zero point energy. Hopefully, the physicists reading it won’t laugh me off the stage.

December 5th, 2007 | Tags: Science, The media | Category: Uncategorized | Leave a comment

James Willmot, a former science teacher at our sister school, lays down the law in an opinion piece that appeared in the Sunday Courier-Journal.

It begins:

There is a great educational injustice being inflicted upon thousands of children in this country, a large percentage of whom come from the Kentucky, Ohio and, Indiana areas. The source of this injustice is a sophisticated Christian ministry that uses the hook of dinosaurs, the guarantee of an afterlife, and the horrors of hell to convince children and their families to believe in a literal interpretation of the Bible.

It gets better after that. Willmot basically slams down creationism and pins it to the floor. It’s worth reading.

Willmot taught science at St. Francis School in Goshen, Kentucky, a K-8 school that sends a lot of kids to St. Francis High School. He now lives and writes in England.

Needless to say, the fundies among the C-J’s readers were none too pleased. Comments ranged from suggesting Willmot was intolerant to predicting he would burn in Hell for questioning a literal interpretation of Genesis.

We have a long way to go. Religious intolerance and closemindedness is alive and well in mid-America.

December 3rd, 2007 | Tags: Education & schools, Professional skeptic, Science, The media | Category: Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Once in a while, a student will ask me a question that sends me back to the books (as it were) to learn something new. He wanted to know about zero point energy (ZPE), and Wikipedia was not helping him out much.

I couldn’t either at the time, so I dutifully poked around the web to learn more about ZPE. For a “zero,” the concept has some pretty far-reaching effects.

As it turns out, ZPE (and its cousin, the zero point field) is connected to the very questions of where mass and inertia come from, and may provide an explanation of why electrons, for example, have both wave and particle properties.

Anyone who spends any time at all learning physics sooner or later learns that everything in the science is connected. So it is with the ZPE, it seems.

First, we need to understand what the ZPE is, then we can investigate how it connects to all these other basic physical phenomena.

In classical physics, it was assumed that the internal kinetic energy of a substance could theoretically be reduced to zero, by cooling the substance to absolute zero (-273 C or 0K). And indeed, we can chill things down to a mere fraction of a degree above absolute zero. It is, for a couple of reasons, impossible to reach zero, however.

November 29th, 2007 | Tags: Science | Category: Physics | Comments (3)