I tweeted this on an impulse:
What is the one concept in science that you really think should be explained better to a wide audience?
At least 140 characters restricts people to really only suggesting one thing. But I don’t want to leave the blog readers out, so have a go. See if you can stick to just one!
@99, You appear to generalise ‘religion’. There are many religions, some of which do not encourage science, others do. Therefore my request would be that the meanings of ‘religion’ and ‘science’ are properly understood.
“Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle. Nothing makes more people quit Physics and Science in general than Indeterminacy taught poorly by Physics professors who lack educational skills, or disbelief in the subject itself, or worst, both.
I’m not exactly sure what is the best way to teach this simple but vital concept, myself, but I’d suggest starting with the Mathematics of Inequalities, with the Cauchy–Bunyakovsky–Schwarz inequality, and move forward through Planck’s constant until you hit the year 1927 running!
After that, Quantum Tunneling and Quantum Entanglement.”
I don’t agree. Quantum mechanics is extremely well understood these days, but the way it is taught, by following the history, really obscures it. We don’t teach classical mechanics at the college level with the historical presentation, and quantum shouldn’t be taught that way either. Start with quantum information, axiomatically, entanglement, etc. Bam. Then do Hamiltonians and quantum dynamics.
1) SpaceTime – Once a student “gets it” a whole new world opens up.
2) Probability – Many phenomena are not absolute but a continuum between 0 and 1. (Weather, Quantum Mechanics, Stock Market …)
and let us drop this religion versus science talk. The bible cannot explain quantum mechanics and quantum mechanics cannot explain how to live in peace with your neighbor.
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Second law. That it is only a statistical law and not really a physical one. Specifically Loschmidt’s paradox. I mean, isn’t it the strangest thing, that the thermodynamic arrow of time is only a statistical arrow and not a direct implication of the physical laws as we know it(unless something ties it to the Big Bang)? I may be wrong here, but isn’t this a serious issue?
Demystify quantum mechanics. Bonus: The process of evolution. Most of us learn science blowing things up in chem lab, cutting apart frogs in biology, and sliding things around on ramps in physics class. But looking at what happens when you have lots and lots of things banging around for a long, long time might give more insight into things we encounter daily, like traffic jams and elections and economies and the weather.
Division.