Science in a Hundred Words

January 26, 2012

Children often offer unique insights into everyday situations, possibly because their logic is unencumbered by social convention. From this idea, we get the idiom, "Out of the mouths of babes." The full idiomatic expression is, "Out of the mouths of babes and sucklings...," which appears twice in the Bible (Psalms 8:2 and Matthew 21:16). Since the word, "suckling," is not part of normal conversation, that part is never said.

This idea was commercialized by the television series, "Kids Say the Darndest Things," a spin-off from House Party, a long running radio show hosted by Art Linkletter. In this program, children were interviewed with the expected comical consequences. The inventors among us will be interested to note that Linkletter was a major investor in the commercialization of the hula hoop.

Never too young for science! An artistic representation of science as a cherub. It's interesting that the artist identifies science with mathematics. La Ciencia (Science), oil on canvas, c. 1884, by the Spanish artist, Antonio Cortina Farinós (1841-1890). (Via Wikimedia Commons).

In a 2008 letter to Nature,[1] Marco Prunotto of the Nephrology Unit Laboratory, Giannina Gaslini Children's Hospital (Genoa, Italy), described a science crowdsourcing study with high school aged children, aged 16-18. This was done in the context of a workshop sponsored by the San Paolo Fondazione per la Scuola and Fondazione Venezia. The idea of this study was simple - The high school aged children from Italian schools were tasked with developing a list of a hundred words that they believed embodied science as practiced today.

There was one thing done in this study that I, as an experimentalist, would not have done. The children prepared the list after listening to a series of seminars by scientists, so there might be bias according to the topic areas selected for presentation, and the individual preferences of the scientist presenters. The students, however, had other resources, such as the Internet, books and journals, to guide them. The scientist mentors for this workshop worked in the fields of Chemistry, Astronomy, Physics and Biology.

That one problem notwithstanding, here's the list.[1-2]

acid/base	galaxy	planet
aggregation	gene	pollution
analysis	gravity	pressure
antimatter	greenhouse effect	probability
apparatus	H2O	protein
atmosphere	heat	pulsar
atom	hydrocarbon	quantum
bacteria	infinity	quark
Big Bang	intelligence	radioactivity
biodiversity	Internet	reaction
bioethics	life	relativity
biosphere	link	research
black hole	light	reproduction
carbon	magnetism	rule
cell	matter	science
chaos	mass	symbiosis
climate	mind	systems
cloning	metabolism	solution
DNA	scientific method	space
ecosystem	measurement	species
element	mole	stem cell
electricity	molecule	star
electron	motion	technology
energy	mutation	temperature
entropy	natural selection	theory
environment	nebula	time
enzyme	neuron	tissue
equilibrium	GMO (genetically modified organism)	tumor
error	organism	Universe
experiment	osmosis	vacuum
ethology	particle	virus
evolution	periodic table	wave
force	pH
fossil	photosynthesis

As Marco Prunotto commented in his letter to Nature, there are words on the list, such as acid, base, magnetism, mole and scientific method, that could have been on a similar list a hundred years ago. But there are also words that relate to ethical issues that would have been absent in an earlier era. Of course, "Internet" is one word known to only a few just two decades ago, but it's a major part of science today. This blog serves as one example.

References:

1. Marco Prunotto, "Shaping science education in just 100 words," Nature, vol. 455, no. 7212 (September 25, 2008), p. 460. A PDF version of the article is available, here.
2. The 100 Words (100 parole) web site.