My experience in Science and Global Change has helped my understanding of the nature of science and science of nature by improving my critical thinking skills, helping me learn in more detail about how to properly apply the scientific method and spot improper uses of the scientific method and scientific ideas, and has helped me learn about the effects of and solutions to climate change.
First, I will discuss a misunderstanding of science I noticed in my time here at the university. During last semester, someone showed me a book that talked about rocks and crystals, and the book claimed that a bunch of different types of rocks had different “powers”, claiming that some crystals having healing powers, and some give wisdom, and some bring “good energy” into the room you have them in, and it went one about these different abilities it claimed that rocks and crystals have. I admittedly probably wouldn't have believed the claims of this book anyway, but some items from Sagan’s toolbox helped me immediately identify and put a name to the falsehoods contained within the book. Specifically, the idea that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence is fitting here; these claims about rocks, while not on the level of claims about aliens, for example, are still pretty strong claims, but the book offered no evidence to support its claims.
Now I will discuss an area where I was able to apply the hypothetico-deductive method of science, which is in mathematical proofs. This semester I am taking Math310, intro to proofs, which is all about proving mathematical statements. The steps taken in these proofs are reasonably similar to the scientific method, in that you try to logically deduce what conclusions you can make from what you already know. There are some differences, for example that in proofs, you are deducing your conclusions from axioms (“obvious” statements accepted to be true), or from already proven statements, while in the scientific method you are making your conclusions from empirical evidence, and also in proofs, you are not allowed to use any inductive reasoning (using the colloquial definition of induction), but in science it is acceptable in some circumstances. But still, there are many overlaps between the way you go about thinking about proofs and the way you go about the scientific method.
Outside of colloquium, I have taken AREC240, and in that class, we discussed how tariffs impact economies. The topic of tariffs was actually decently complex, requiring considerations of producers of goods within and outside of the tariff-levying country, as well as considering impacts on consumers of goods within and outside of the country. This is an example of how that class helped build my critical thinking skills, at least in terms of thinking about the economic impacts of various potential policies that could be enacted by a government.
Another class outside of colloquium is AREC200, which is about looking at the Chesapeake Bay from various different perspectives (primarily scientific, economic, and policy perspectives). In that class, we learned about how climate change will impact the Chesapeake in various ways, such as through sea level rise, a worsening of hypoxia in the bay, and a potential migration of some species, as well as what can help mitigate some of these effects, such as wetlands holding down soil and slowing down erosion to help slow sea level rise, as well as fixing nutrient runoff issues to help reduce hypoxia in the bay. This class taught me a lot about climate change impacts on the chesapeake, and helped develop my understanding of the impacts of climate change, and some mitigation strategies.
Interactions with other SGC scholars have aided in my learning in a few ways. The ones I will go into here are interactions with SGC scholars in my other classes. I have had three classes where I had other SGC students in the same class as me; those being English 101, Arec200, and Math310. In each of these classes, I have been able to connect with my fellow SGC students, and collaborate in various ways. In Arec200, the collaboration was relatively minimal, in part because it was such a large class, but me and the other SGC scholar I knew in the class were still able to discuss some of the concepts from time-to-time. In Math310, I was able to work collaboratively on some of the groupwork assignments with my other SGC scholar in the class, as well as discuss some of the concepts covered in the class with them. In English 101, I was able to talk with the other SGS student about how to best go about writing the papers in the class.
I think my personal contributions to scholars have been moderate-sized, I haven’t done any super big things like being a peer mentor or joining the scholars student advisory committee, but I have attended every colloquium, and have been a pretty active participant in discussions during colloquia. I also was an active participant in service day, and on my first two excursions (NMNH and NASM), I talked with other scholars about the ideas behind the design of some of the exhibits, and other things related to the museums during the excursion.
SGC has brought me into contact with a number of ideas which challenged my previously held beliefs; the two I will go into here in detail are both related to climate change. The first is just how doable many climate change solutions are. Before coming into scholars, I was under the impression that there was a tradeoff in addressing climate change. I was under the impression that effectively every way to address climate change would be worth it due to the immense costs of climate change, but would be pretty expensive, and would not be economically worthwhile, and instead would only be defendable when looking at the economic and climate change impacts. However, scholars challenged this belief, as I learned that there are many solutions which would actually save money and address climate change at the same time. The second idea is that when entering into scholars, I didn’t know the full extent of what contributed to climate change, and I was under the relatively simplistic worldview that the vast majority of what we need to do to address climate change is to stop using fossil fuels, decarbonize transportation, and try to cut back on cattle methane emissions. In scholars, I learned that there is much more to addressing climate change than just these, such as refrigerants, emissions from construction materials like concrete, other agricultural emissions, amongst various other things which all need to be addressed to combat climate change. I have since changed my mind on both of these ideas after reading from Drawdown and learning about the solutions in class.
I think the ways that scholars will inform my future the most is through the development of critical thinking skills, the scientific method, and Sagan’s Toolbox of strategies to discern between believable and not very believable claims. These skills I think are immensely important in everyday life and in many professional careers, especially science-oriented ones, which is where I think I will be going. The critical thinking skills will be important throughout my entire life, and, while it will be useful earlier, I think the knowledge of the scientific method will really become especially useful after undergrad, in graduate school and/or some kind of career in science after that.