RSVP Scientific Critical Thinking: A missing ingredient in science education
2011 Nobel Laureate, Physics
Franklin W. and Karen Weber Dabby Professor
University of California, Berkeley
Senior Scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
This talk is to be held jointly with the Physics Department Colloquium.
Overview:
There is a body of techniques and practices, a language and culture, that is usually implicitly taught to graduate students and postdocs in the sciences. This is the underpinning of an approach to building a credible sense of the “real world” that is shared by scientists, but not much used (or understood) by the rest of society. Equipping future generations with this scientific-style critical thinking could be one of our most reasonable defenses against confused thinking and misinformation, both major challenges to our democratic societies’ ability to make deliberative decisions. What can we learn from the sciences when we develop strategies to tell facts from values? How can we teach critical thinking in a better way?
Biography:
Saul Perlmutter is a 2011 Nobel Laureate, sharing the prize in physics for the discovery of the accelerating expansion of the universe. He is a professor of physics at UC Berkeley, where he holds the Franklin W. and Karen Weber Dabby Chair, and a senior scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. He is the leader of the international Supernova Cosmology Project, director of the Berkeley Institute for Data Science and executive director of the Berkeley Center for Cosmological Physics. His interest in scientific-style critical thinking led to the development of interdisciplinary courses at Cal called Sense and Sensibility and Science and Physics & Music, which he has been teaching to undergraduates for more than a decade. An author of hundreds of articles on cosmology, Professor Perlmutter has also written popular articles and appeared in numerous PBS, Discovery Channel, and BBC documentaries. In addition to other awards and honorary doctorates, he is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a fellow of the American Physical Society and the American Association for the Advancement of Science.