Monday, January 13, 2003
Refusing to Face Facts
Lots of fascinating discussion of Galileo today in National Review Online here and here, which reminded me of a tale told by David Sobel in Galileo's Daughter:
[U]niversity communities all over Europe honored the dictum of Aristotelian physics that objects of different weights fall at different speeds. A cannonball of ten pounds, for example, would be expected to fall ten times faster than a musket ball of only one pound so that if both were released together from the same summit, the cannonball would land before the musket ball had gotten more than one-tenth of the way to the ground.
Galileo's famously demonstrated otherwise by dropping a one-pound ball and a ten-pound ball from the Leaning Tower of Pisa.
[Galileo] did not succeed in swaying popular opinion down at the base of the Leaning Tower. The larger ball, being less susceptible to the effects of what Galileo recognized as air resistance, fell faster . . . The fact that it fell only fractionally faster gave Galileo scant advantage.
The "don't confuse me with facts" spirit of the folks at the base of the tower, who forgave Aristotle an error of 99% while rejecting Galileo for an error of less than one percent, is now part and parcel of the bilingual education establishment. Any student who learns three words of English after a decade in a bilingual education program is considered proof of the bilingual education's success everywhere, while a leap in English test scores statewide after bilingual education was repealed in California is considered proof of absolutely nothing at all.
|posted by Jim on 3:14 PM|
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