And I think Copernicus crops up in KS3. If you didn’t learn the former, you won’t have understood the latter. Which suggests you don’t have a decent grasp on how the emergence of modern scientific thinking made the modern world possible. That’s why not understanding the solar system is a bit worrying.
And contended Houdini did some of his escapes by paranormal means.
Mozart’s first name is Joannes, not Wolfgang. So no, its not like thinking Paul McCartney’s first name is Paul.
And had Holmes deduce at one point that someone must be smarter than average because he had a very large head.
I’m a science teacher, so this topic is one that hits close to home for me.
I want to respond to those of you (like Bryan Ekers) saying “What difference does it make if some people don’t know these things? It has no impact on their lives.”
Well, people who don’t know these things often become school board members, or parents who are voting for school board members, or school administrators. These people make decisions about what and how science will be taught in our schools. They may not understand why Young Earth Creationism or Intelligent Design are any less valid than current geological and evolutionary theories. A little basic understanding of astronomy and geology I think would go a long way toward a more rational world.
When I am teaching my high school students about gravity, that is one of the misconceptions I routinely have to correct. Another big misconception they have is that no air = no gravity. They think that astronauts are weightless in orbit because there’s no air up there. A couple of kids have even argued that NASA has a zero-gravity room here on Earth where they seal it up and suck all the air out and the astronauts go inside in space suits and float around. And, of course, there is no gravity on the moon because it has no air. :smack:
And you wouldn’t BELIEVE the number of high school students who have bought into the Moon Hoax conspiracy theories.
And Paul McCartney’s first name is James. So, yeah, it’s alike. 
My bolding; I agree completely.
It’s not about the simple fact, in isolation. It is absolutely possible to get through one’s life without knowing the difference between a lunar eclipse and a solar eclipse, or to know that DNA is made of G, A, T, and C, or any other discrete piece of information one cares to name. For any basic fact that modern scientists and/or engineers and/or technologists take for granted — the inverse square law, or ROY G BIV, or what an IP address means — one can posit any number of career paths or lifestyles for which that information is entirely irrelevant.
But that’s not the point. There is an expectation, I think, that we should understand how to understand, and there is a certain minimum familiarity with the physical world that accompanies such understanding. Knowing the moon goes around the earth, and the earth goes around the sun, is knowledge that indicates one’s relationship with the physical world: not because knowing the fact is important (and really, it isn’t), but because knowing the fact suggests that one knows, at least at a rudimentary level, where it came from, and why we know it to be so. That, more than the fact itself, is what’s significant.
D’oh. :smack:
The Big Dipper is occulted by Uranus, I know that much.
You might be interested in watching the documentary “A Private Universe”, which looks at science education, and exposes the widespread ignorance of basic science in our society. The students interviewed, including some graduating Harvard seniors, are not stupid. It also shows that science education is more difficult than many people might think.
I encountered a similar test a while back, from my father (who works in education), which was a long list of ‘yes/no’ questions. It was being used in certain quarters as evidence that our teachers had no scientific education, because many got ‘poor’ results.
It happened that I was meeting a bunch of friends that week, including several science PhDs and grad students. None got 100% on the test. A question on new moons was the point which caused most problems.
Specific comments on the video: It demonstrates that a series of classes specifically devoted to basic astronomy helps establish an understanding of astronomy more easily than general science within a crowded school curriculum. What a surprise.
On the other hand, they are absolutely correct that basic misconceptions are the causes of huge problems later on. These can come from when they are young, very young, far before they’re encountering any specialist science teacher. I say don’t talk about making university students aware of them, but provide training at that more fundamental level so that they don’t acquire misconceptions in the first place.
He wasn’t - or, at least, it depends on how you define “the United States.”
He didn’t at the time he wrote A Study in Scarlet. (According to his Wikipedia entry, he didn’t get into it until his son died in WWI.)
How does assholish come into the equation? Ignorance of trivia is assholish? People should know the correct full names of composers of music they don’t particularly like, even though those aren’t the names said composers were known by? I’m not seeing the assholery.
Here’s another one for you: What was Rembrandt’s first name?
Really, my beef is with fachverwirrt for his/her use of the word ‘asshole.’
Ha! I knew the “real” first names of both Mozart and the cute Beatle!
Take that, you intellectual lightweights! 
And yes, my wife’s question isn’t that “dumb”, true. But she went to college and we sat next to each other in Introductory Astronomy, so you’d think she’d remember the material. 
Dave.
Dude, you were Whooshed.
I’m pretty sure it was Wolfgang Assholish Mozart?
To be fair, we’re talking about extremely basic knowledge of astronomy, not something as complex as rebuilding a transmission or even installing a ceiling fan. A better analogy would probably be, “nerds and geeks with their heads buried in books, wasting time staring into the sky pondering the boundries of the universe, dragging down society by having never learned anything useful like the fact that electricity travels through metal, or that there are gears in a transmission.”
I agree with Lib here. This strikes me as a couple levels removed from “basic knowledge” (more like hanging a ceiling fan, actually). Someone with rudimentary knowledge wouldn’t even think to ask this question, and it takes a reasonably sophisticated grasp of how gravity works to understand why the moon doesn’t just “fall down.” Positing different types of gravity isn’t so unreasonable.
This is one of the reasons why I finally tossed in some of my hard-earned cash toward the International Dark-Sky Association. Without seeing the wonders of the night sky, the sight of which away from cities and towns is astonishing, I think we are losing a chance for children to be woken to the beauty and fascination of the natural world and hopefully to science itself. And an appreciation of the mystery and awe that is in the natural world might lead them to learning about science, and critical thinking, and so not be vulnerable to hokum.
As Sagan pointed out and I will paraphrase, there are enough marvels, mysteries and wonders in the real world, that pseudoscience, magic, and new age wishful thinking isn’t really necessary.
But if you look up at night, and see only three insipid stars, you very well may wonder “what’s the big deal?”
…and you may even suspect that planetariums are “lying” about the universe, and “they” are lying about evolution, and so on…
I’m not expressing this as well as I wish, alas. Carry on!
I’ve heard this “factoid” before. I think it may be a conflation of two things: that NASA does have a large pool where astronauts in neutral-buoyancy suits can practice spacewalks, and the “Vomit Comet”, an airplane that flies roller-coaster curves in the sky and can provide free fall for periods of about 20 seconds.
Or it may simply be that so many science-fiction movies and TV shows take artificial gravity for granted, and maybe people have a vague idea that magnetic levitation has something to do with gravity, that people are surprised there isn’t really such a thing.