Ten Basic Scientific Facts

I'm a poor science student, but I think I have an understanding of some of the most vital basics around. Some of that comes from atheism, which tends to cause scientific interest. Here, I'd like to present ten scientific principles that Jay Leno might get an interesting Jaywalking segment out of. These are things everyone should know about science.

1. Evolution: The basic principle here is that, through change over a very long time, all life has come to be. All life on Earth shares a common ancestor, right down to the first single-cell organism. We did not, however, evolve from apes, or any other contemporary animal. The only relevant point is that we share a common ancestor and are fairly close cousins with all primates, the closest relation being to chimpanzees.

2. Thermodynamics: Heat is energy and cold is lack of energy. Cold sinks and heat rises. No matter what, heat will always move in the direction of cold. Cooling down is conducting energy away from yourself, while warming up is conducting heat to yourself.

3. Photosynthesis: This is the process of converting sunlight into usable energy in the form of plant sugars. It is enormously complicated and baffles scientists even today.

4. Sustainability: This refers to any sort of agriculture the yield of which may be harvested on a regular basis without reducing the population to the point where future harvest will one day become unsustainable.

5. Refraction: Light is white when unrefracted. When refracted, it turns into seven colors. Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue, Indigo, and Violet are the colors formed by refraction. Black is formed by complete absence of light.

6. Atomic Theory: An element is any substance that is only made up of itself, not multiple substances. These are all listed on the periodic table. An atom is the smallest possible peace of an element. An atom may be split, but the resulting matter is no longer the element in question.

7. Placebo effect: A medication, or anything presented as improving health, will work, to an extent, so long as you believe that it will. The difference between real medicine and everything else is that real medicine can hold up in double blind controlled experiments that control for the placebo effect.

8. Ideomotor Effect: This is when the body moves without consciously doing so. It is responsible for mundane bodily functions like crying and for phenomena like Oujia board usage and dowsing.

9. Relativity: Time is not a fixed phenomenon. It passes differently as one approaches the speed of light. There's a lot more to it than this, but that's the basic theory.

10. Scientific Theory: The common use of theory is not the same as the word in science. Basically, a scientific theory is an explanation of the natural world that has been repeatedly confirmed by observation and experimentation. It also must be falsifiable and the less falsifiable it is, the correspondingly weaker it is considered. Hence, gravitational theory, germ theory, and evolutionary theory are not the same as your theory that your dog knows what you're thinking or that your lunch partner is late just to twist your nads.

-Frank