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Article: Licence to Wonder.
- Article from:
- Khaleej Times (Dubai, United Arab Emirates)
- Article date:
- November 8, 2009
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2009 Al Bawaba (Middle East) Ltd. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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Summary: One of my favourite things to do is to take a set of facts and use them to imagine how the world might work. In writing about some of these ideas, my aim is not to be correct but to be thought-provoking, to ask questions, to make people wonder.
I mention this because science is usually presented as a body of knowledge -- facts to be memorised, equations to be solved, concepts to be understood, discoveries to be applauded. But this approach can give students two misleading impressions.
One is that science is about what we know. One colleague told me that when he was studying science at school, the relentless focus on the known gave him the ...