Ramblings and Resent

My very first aspiration was to become a scientist. About a decade later, I found myself enrolled in a curriculum that won't make me think about science for a good two years. In the afternoon of last week's Wednesday, those two years ended. This semester, I'm studying Natural Science 2.

If there are only two things I can take away from years of high school general-education science, they are that Science and Math are married, and that I can never escape them even if I tried. Not that I want to.

Who would? Man's quest for knowledge has continuously made significant advancements to the quality of life on earth. Not to mention it took people (and a few animals) off what was once thought to be the edge of the earth and into the colorful colorful outer space.

This post is dedicated to the things I  recently take particular interest in in the broad field of Natural Science:

Astronomy:
We were talking about the colorful outer space, yes? Speaking of color, have I mentioned Hubble's photographs are lies?

Pictured: Lies.

Alright, maybe lies in this context is a harsh word to use. To be fair, lets ask Space Telescope Science Institute's (producer of images from the Hubble Space Telescope) Zolt Levay:

"In the case of the Hubble, Levay explained, the images are further adjusted to boost contrast and tweak colors and brightness to emphasize certain features of the image or to make a more pleasing picture."

Read more: http://www.universetoday.com/11863/true-or-false-color-the-art-of-extraterrestrial-photography/#ixzz1xXuHEmRc

Turns out images from space are colored according to the information that people who study the universe need:

"True color would be an attempt to reproduce visually accurate color. False color, on the other hand, is an arbitrary selection of colors to represent some characteristic in the image, such as chemical composition, velocity, or distance. Additionally, by definition, any infrared or ultraviolet image would need to be represented with “false color” since those wavelengths are invisible to humans."

Read more: http://www.universetoday.com/11863/true-or-false-color-the-art-of-extraterrestrial-photography/#ixzz1xXwL1CiM

Also, the sun isn't yellow. And it's not there:




Biology:

Charles Darwin made it a point to stay on the very top of the food chain. Genuis apparently comes at a terrible price.


LiveScience tells us:

"Darwin was also adventurous—he eagerly ate many of the animals that he collected, including iguanas, armadillos and rheas—and pious, taking along a bible for his five-year voyage."

Read more: http://www.livescience.com/493-life-charles-darwin-aimless-adventure-tragedy-discovery.html

He's also responsible (at least in part) for this:

Earth Science, Chemistry and Physics:
There must be some explanation why I lumped these three branches together. Applying Occam's Razor, the answer is that I've ran out of trivia now and that I'm not as well-read (in the limited sense of "well-read" applicable in this context) in these subjects as the two already mentioned.

In conclusion, at least according to the things I read about (mostly on comedy sites and the more serious occasional authoritative education sites) and the quiz show clips above, what we think we know may not be enough, or flat-out wrong. The more we understand about the world around us, the more we are capable of understanding how the world affects us, and more importantly, how we affect it. Then, we can learn to live accordingly - responsibly.

Plus, it's entertaining. This is why even though Math hates me, I  still really like science.



Sources:
http://www.universetoday.com/18689/color-of-the-sun/
http://www.universetoday.com/11863/true-or-false-color-the-art-of-extraterrestrial-photography/
http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/imagegallery/iotd.html
http://qi.com/talk/viewtopic.php?start=0&t=3350
http://www.livescience.com/493-life-charles-darwin-aimless-adventure-tragedy-discovery.html

CHECKED BY PROF. CRISENCIO PANER.