Abstract
Science education faces many challenges, not least that of rendering the key propositions into language that children can readily understand. This chapter applies Minimal English to a canonical science education narrative about changing scientific and pre-scientific understandings of the universe. It attempts to capture the key beliefs and mindsets associated with the views of Ptolemy, Copernicus, and Galileo, with a look ahead to the possibilities of further advances in scientific thinking about the cosmos.
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Notes
- 1.
Someone might argue that the words in Table 8.1 also come from shared human experience, but it is not clear how concepts like ‘I’ and ‘you’, or ‘because’, ‘if’, and ‘can’, for example, could come from experience—at least, not from ‘external’, observational experience.
- 2.
In ordinary colloquial English, people wouldn’t normally call a spider, or even a fish or a bird, an ‘animal’, but in scientific language, the word ‘animal’ has a more inclusive meaning, close to, or even identical to ‘creature’. Also, ordinary language distinguishes between people and animals. For example, there are children’s books with titles like ‘People and Animals’, but many scientists would prefer to say ‘People and other animals’. It’s good to remember that it wasn’t always so, even in science. For instance, one of Charles Darwin’s books had the title The Expression of Emotion in Man and Animals. So for Darwin, people were not animals; but since then in scientific language, this has moved in a different direction.
- 3.
There isn’t time here to justify all the details of these explications, or to discuss other possible ways of going about it, but if you are interested, you can follow up with Goddard (2016). One point about the meanings of semantic molecules is that they are so taken for granted in our everyday thinking that it is quite hard to ‘take them apart’.
- 4.
The words ‘sometimes’, ‘often’, and ‘always’ are used a lot in the Minimal English texts. They are short equivalents (linguists call them portmanteau expressions ) to ‘at some times’, ‘at many times’, and ‘all the time’, respectively. In a similar fashion, the word ‘it’ is sometimes used for ‘this something’, and ‘they’ for ‘these things’ or, sometimes, for ‘these people’.
- 5.
It’s interesting that scientists don’t much like words like ‘far’, but prefer to use words like ‘distance ’. When I say ‘very far’, for example, scientists would always prefer to say ‘at a considerable distance’. This is something which we have to resist at this stage. The word ‘distance’ already brings in the idea of something ‘measurable’ and encourages us to think along those lines. In lots of languages people have no word for ‘distance’, but they do have an adverbial word for something being ‘far’ or ‘very far’.
- 6.
Notice that at the end of the first part, there is an extra line, not like anything we have seen before, that introduces a new word, namely, the word ‘planets’. This line uses the semantic molecule ‘called’. The basic idea is that all languages have a way of bringing in a new word, so to speak, to make it easier for people to be specific about what they want to talk about. Using the word ‘planets’, the second part of this block captures the new knowledge that recognizes that the planets are very different from all the other stars, because they are ‘not very very far from the Earth’ and ‘not very very far from the Sun (at least, in comparison to most other ‘stars’).
- 7.
‘Well’ is not on the list of 65 semantic primes , but ‘good’ is and we can regard ‘well’ as a kind of contextual variant of ‘good’. It can combine with a number of predicates. You can ‘live well’, you can ‘know something well’, you can, apparently, ‘say something well’ in any language. So if you feel that the meaning is different … in a sense, it is different, but that’s because of the combination. If it’s ‘live’, it gives a different kind of feel, and if it’s combined with ‘know’, then there’s a different feel as well. And someone can ‘speak very well’—‘say things well’—and so on, but ‘well’ is the same.
- 8.
The statement ‘The Earth turns like this once in one day’ may seem circular, given that today popular books on astronomy sometimes define ‘one day’ as ‘the amount of time it takes the Earth to spin around once’; but of course the concept of ‘one day’ is a pre-scientific one and does not depend on any knowledge about the rotation of the Earth. Similarly, the statement ‘The Earth turns around the Sun once in one year’ may seem circular, given that today popular astronomy books often define ‘one year’ as ‘the amount of time it takes the Earth to turn once around the Sun’. In fact, of course, the concept of ‘one year’ is a pre-scientific one and does not depend on any knowledge about the Earth’s revolutions around the Sun. Discussing how the concepts of ‘one day’ and ‘one year’ are built out of universal semantic primes would go beyond the scope of the present chapter. (See, however, Goddard, forthcoming.)
- 9.
From a linguistic point of view, the last sentence of the section below deserves a comment: the double negative in the sentence ‘when people know much about these things, they can’t not think about God’. In general, double negatives are not universal, but it seems that ‘can’t not’ is ‘sayable’ in all languages.
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Appendix: The Universe from the Point of View of Ptolemy
Appendix: The Universe from the Point of View of Ptolemy
[HOW PTOLEMY THOUGHT ABOUT THE SKY AT NIGHT] Ptolemy lived a very long time ago. He often looked at the sky at night for a long time. When he was looking at it, he felt something very good because of it. He often thought about it for a long time. He thought about it like this: 'I live now, a short time after I will not live anymore. The stars are not like this, they will always be in the sky as they are now. I am here now, I can’t know where I will be some time after this. The stars are not like this. If I know where a star is now, I can know where it will be some time after this. Here on Earth nothing is ever the same. The stars are not like this, they are always the same. On Earth, things move in many ways. It is not like this in the far away places where the stars are. In these places, everything moves always in the same way. Many bad things happen on Earth, it is not like this in the places where the stars are. It is good if people can know a lot about the stars. If people know a lot about the stars, they can know how they can live on Earth. If they know how they can live on Earth, they can live well.'
[HOW PTOLEMY THOUGHT ABOUT THE MOON, SUN, ‘PLANETS’, STARS, AND THE EARTH] Ptolemy thought like this: ‘The Earth is round. The Moon turns around the Earth. The Sun turns around the Earth. The “planets” turn around the Earth. All the other stars turn around the Earth. Everything turns around the Earth. The Earth is in the middle of everything, it is not turning around anything’.
[WHAT HAPPENED AFTER PTOLEMY SAID THIS TO OTHER PEOPLE] Ptolemy said many things about it all to other people. After this, for a very long time many people thought like this: ‘It is as Ptolemy said, it can’t be not like this’. Many people thought like this because they knew that Ptolemy knew a lot about the stars. They knew that he knew a lot about the ‘planets’. They knew that people could always see the ‘planets’ in the places in the sky as Ptolemy said.
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Wierzbicka, A. (2018). Talking About the Universe in Minimal English: Teaching Science Through Words That Children Can Understand. In: Goddard, C. (eds) Minimal English for a Global World. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-62512-6_8
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