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Science for Everyday Life

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Submitted By juliadewitt
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Julia DeWitt
SC250-05: Science for Everyday Life
Unit 9 Assignment
August 05, 2014

When I hear the word “scientist” there are multiple things that run through my thoughts. I picture someone in a lab coat trying to discover a cure to a disease like cancer or the next plague that comes along. There is this image of dry ice coming out of test tubes and beakers surrounding them. Maybe even a bunch of stressed out yuppie looking guys who had way too much coffee, desperately trying to find the vaccine to stop the zombie apocalypse. I also picture Beaker from the Muppet show. He did a wonderful job forming an image of what a scientist probably was to me as a child. He was insecure and he made a mess. My cousin is a scientist so then there is an image of this very stern but sarcastic guy testing and testing and retesting. That image sounds so boring but I’m grateful there are brilliant minds like him out there. Scientist come in many different forms. They study and discover many different things.
Over time there have been many types of scientist and they weren’t all wearing lab coats. Leonardo da Vinci was one I found interesting due to my love of art. He combined art and science in his sketches. He has amazing futuristic designs and even envisioned flight. Sadly he was a chronic procrastinator and had frequent disasters with his experiments of new techniques (Leonadoda-Vinci). Galileo Galilei was an Italian scientist who developed the telescopes and started to observe the solar system. He was a pioneer of observations for modern physics and astronomy (Biography). Emanuel Swedenborg was a scientist who lived from (1688-1772). He is very interesting to me as he is one of the founders of Modern Spiritualism. His scientific work had plans for flying machines. He wrote books on chemistry, physics and the first book in Swedish on algebra (Swedenborg). Stephen Hawking is a current day scientist that comes to mind for me. He’s a physicist whose work on the nature of space and time is groundbreaking. He also plays himself on The Simpsons and does appearances in Star Trek. As I sit and wright this paper my daughter keeps singing “Bill Nye the Science Guy”. I had pleasantly forgotten all about him. Now that song will be burned in my brain for another week or so. He had really good teaching aids that her elementary school use to play. He also came to the hockey games in our town and there was a corner for kids that won science trips with him. So here are a few of the scientist have shaped our world.
I envision a scientist with certain characteristics. Persistence is extremely important to being a good scientist. It’s a shame that da Vinci did not have persistence in the area of science. His ideas were ahead of his time. He could have teamed up with some other scientist to share his ideas and there is a chance some of his creations could have come to life sooner. Experimentation takes many trials and errors over years. One would not be able to give up easily if they were to make a profound discovery. Logical thinking would be another characteristic. This involves theory and deductive reasoning. It is a collection of facts. One would need to involve math and step-by-step solutions to come to a conclusion. The most important characteristic I think a scientist needs is curiosity. One needs this to have an interest in starting research in anything at all. Picture a child looking at up the stars and wondering how big they are or if there is life out there. Curiosity inspires science.
My image of what a scientist does and how they look over time has not really changed much. There is so much information for us to see what is going on in the world today. I don’t believe their visual attire has really changed all that much in my own opinion. It’s all a matter of what they are studying and the environment that they are in as well as where they are doing their work. They still wear lab coats and protective gear in some areas but in other areas they do not. For example Dian Fossey studies gorillas and dresses for the habitat she is in. You wouldn’t catch her wearing goggles, rubber gloves, and a lab coat in the jungle. Scientist study all sorts of things therefor scientist do not have a standard look to them. Types of sciences are physics, chemistry, oceanography, geology, botany, computer science just to name a very few. An oceanographer may be wearing a wet suit on the job while a computer scientist could have every day office clothes on and one studying botany may have gardening gloves. My neighbor is an archeologist. I’m very disappointed he doesn’t wear a hat and own an Indiana Jones whip. He said all he cared about was wrapping his head like the locals do to protect himself from the heat as he spends his day dusting rocks. He said there is nothing sexy about his job. As you can see a scientist doesn’t have a look to them. They dress for their field of work or they dress their style just like anyone else would.
Fictional scientist are both villains and heroes. Batman/Bruce Wayne was a scientist. He constantly worked in the bat cave to improve his bat suite or an antidote. My favorite movie scientist ever was Dr. Fran-N-Furter from Rocky Horror Picture Show. The scientist is from another planet, claims he has discovered the “secret to life itself” and partially kills a delivery boy for part of his brain. It’s a cult classic. Jeff Goldblum plays a scientist in at least seven movies I can think of. Independence Day and the Jurassic Park movies are a couple that he was in and he played a good guy in all the ones that I saw. Another favorite of mine is when Neil Patrick Harris plays “Dr. Horrible in Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog”. He wants so bad to be a villain but just can’t seem to make the cut. Dr. Henry Jekyll was a character in a story. He was a scientist who performs experiments on himself. He isn’t an evil scientist but the concoction he administers on himself makes him an evil version of himself. Resident Evil had very bad science experiments going on. In this movie an experiment went horrible wrong and everyone was compromised. People turned into zombies and a creature was mutated. The computer system was alive and controlling the corporation. The hit show Breaking Bad was about a science teacher that put a meth lab in the back of an RV. This man was incredibly dark. He character was so well played the show was a huge success. The media does portray scientist as both good and evil.
The portrayal of science in fictional media has definitely been seen both positively and negatively over the years. Dr. Frankenstein would be example of some early negative effects. Dr. Victor Frankenstein had tried to create a living being but a monster was the result instead. This scientist was portrayed as being obsessed with how to create a human that he forgot to consider morality. He forgot to look at his experiment as a whole. A positive in the movie world would be Back to the Future. Spielberg loosely based Doctor Brown off of Albert Einstein. He creates a time machine and a hover board.
Media has a very significant impact on our culture and how we see those in the scientific profession. Our thoughts and ideas our manipulated and influenced through media. We have the right to form our own ideas but they definitely are impacted from the information that is pumped out to us via the mass media market. Media has the ability to sway the less informed. Those that don’t have access to better information or don’t choose to do their own research for better information tend to believe the ‘in-your-face’ ideas that are presented to them. I may fall into this category in one aspect. I think there is already a cure for cancer. I am sure that one or more ambitious scientist already figured out the cure. From what I’ve seen in today’s society I think that our governments and medical worlds don’t want the cure. Cancer makes trillions of dollars. A cure would end that. I’d like to be proven wrong. I don’t think I will be though. We live in a very greedy society. Look at how we fight for oil or diamonds. There are other ways to get oil than what were are currently doing and there are other resources than the oil we choose to fight over. The diamonds are just ridiculous. There is no need of blood diamond workers. With that being said maybe one day I will be proven wrong. A cure will come out and save millions of lives. Then we can move on to the next thing we need to discover and fix.

REFERENCES:
Doctor Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog Full 1080p HD. Retrieved August 1, 2014, from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IUvPfZqEftI
The life of Emanuel Swedenborg. Retrieved August 1, 2014, from http://www.swedenborg.com/emanuel-swedenborg/about-life/
The Complete Works of Leonardo da Vinci. Retrieved August 3, 2014, from http://www.leonardoda-vinci.org/

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