Simply Smart Three—How to Get Smart About Science and Math

By Robert DiYanni, New York University

Preface

This volume follows a pair of earlier companion books: Simply Smart—Learning for Your Life and Simply Smart Two—How to Get Smart About Humanities. The first work explains how to develop smart skills—critical and creative thinking, critical reading and writing, effective listening and speaking. Simply Smart Two emphasizes knowledge—how to become smarter about a suite of disciplines across the humanities. Like that second book, this one, Simply Smart Three—How to Get Smart About Science and Math, shifts the focus from skills to aspects and elements of math and the sciences.

Individual chapters of Simply Smart Three explore basic questions and concerns of the sciences generally, with a focus on specific topics in biology, chemistry, and physics. I also take up a few mathematical topics regarding numbers and then attend to some approaches to geometry. My goal is to get you thinking productively, in a preliminary way, about each discipline’s central interests and issues.

In his Analects, Confucius says: “Learning without thinking is useless; thinking without learning is dangerous.” For Confucius, thinking needs to be wedded to learning, and learning linked to thinking. Thinking and learning are inseparable. We can neither learn without thinking nor think without learning. Simply Smart Three—How to Get Smart About Science and Math takes Confucius’ idea as axiomatic; learning develops best in context, in terms of specific fields of study. Considering the differing perspectives of varied science disciplines will make you smarter. (And it will also prepare you to converse confidently in situations when you meet new people from different backgrounds and with varied interests—the “cocktail party” scenario.)

Although I take a wide view of the disciplines included, I make no attempt to discuss every major topic within them. Nor do I try to go deeply into any single aspect of a particular discipline. I offer, instead, a taste of the disciplines included and an opportunity to get acquainted—or re-acquainted—with their fundamental facets and essential elements.

This book, thus, is not for experts, but rather for those with limited knowledge of the fields and subjects included. For some readers, it will serve as a primer; for others, perhaps you among them, it will extend what you know; for still others, it provides an opportunity for synthesis, consolidation, even provocation.

My consideration of disciplinary knowledge is both eclectic and synthetic. I synthesize a range of sources, many of them recent books. Getting Smart Three—How to Get Smart About Science and Math offers you eight chapters and four interludes to discover new ideas, exercise your thinking, and engage in thoughtful inquiry—all while helping you become smarter.

Each science, social science or math discipline follows methods that provide the grounds for its authority. Each discipline provides its own special way of gathering, presenting, and evaluating evidence for the truths it claims to present about the world and its workings. Each has its distinctive way of identifying, asking, and answering questions it considers of importance and value.

Throughout the book, I take up the following questions: What approaches to knowledge does each science discipline take? What questions are central to each discipline? What makes each discipline what it is and not something else? How do practitioners of the sciences convey their knowledge, craft, and art?

Considering these and related questions provides you with an opportunity to refresh and reconsider what you already know, while broadening your knowledge base and deepening your understanding. I hope that you find in the following pages many pleasures and rewards of learning.

Why not begin discovering those rewards and pleasures right away?

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

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Preface

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Chapter One                 Getting Smart About Science

Interlude 1        Scientific Research and Bias

Chapter Two                 Getting Smart About Big Ideas in Science

Chapter Three               Getting Smart About Psychology

Interlude 2        A Bit of Behavioral Economics

Chapter Four                 Getting Smart About Political Science

Interlude 3        A Hint of Anthropology

Chapter Five                 Getting Smart About Sociology

Chapter Six                   Getting Smart About Math and Numbers

Interlude 4        Some Interesting Numbers

Chapter Seven              Getting Smart About Geometry

Chapter Eight                Getting Smart with Influential Science and Math Educators

Epilogue           Thinking about Technology

References

Index

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