What Americans know and don't know about science | Hacker News Reader

What Americans know and don't know about science

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23 pointsshawndumas24 comments

I expected questions on the scientific method or something. Wouldn't the title be more accurately "What Americans know and don't know about nature"?

To me, knowing some facts about nature is different than knowing how one would use a scientific approach to test hypotheses about nature. I'd like to save the word "science" for the tools and processes. I see too much "because science" out there, which is basically the opposite of rational, skeptical thinking.

Indeed. I think knowing about science is probably more useful and relevant to the majority of people than trivia. That can be used more generally to distinguish scams and fearmongering from important issues.

That more than a couple of percent knew the inventor of the Polio vaccine was a surprise to me. Is he a popular hero in America or something?

Also, height of a sound wave? Don't they mean high of a graph of a sound wave? It doesn't really move up and down except where it's travelling upwards or downwards.

RE: Polio - I suspect this is because most Americans do know who the other options (Isaac Newton, Marie Curie and Albert Einstein) are. This may be reflected in the fact that the most obscure of those three (Marie Curie) is also the one with the most incorrect guesses.

Marie Curie is obscure? Now I have heard it all.

That was a relative statement; out of the three I'd expect the general public to recognize Einstein and Newton (in that order) before Curie.

Kids today may not remember it so much, but the Polio vaccine was a Very Big Deal at the time. I'd be surprised if any reasonably well-educated older American didn't know who Salk was.

According to the results, 86% of people over 65 got it correct.

Makes you wonder what the other 14% were doing at the time...

That more than a couple of percent knew the inventor of the Polio vaccine was a surprise to me.

It's multiple choice. I'll admit that I didn't know his name off the top of my head when reading the question. But I kind of recognized it when I saw it and I definitely knew it wasn't one of the other 3 options.

That's a generational thing. There isn't a single member of my generation that doesn't know. We lived through it; my Uncle died of it; we took the first vaccines when they came out.

And as someone who's almost 55, we learned it from your generation, the memories were still very fresh.

And probably because I'm into these sorts of things, I also remember Sabin, who created the oral vaccine that was essential for eradication, as Wikipedia puts it:

The Sabin vaccine worked in the intestines to block the poliovirus from entering the bloodstream. In the intestines, Sabin had discovered, the poliovirus multiplied and attacked. Thus, the oral vaccine broke the chain of transmission of the virus and allowed for the possibility that polio might one day be eradicated.

I mention that in part because the only other vaccine developer I can remember (well, not counting Pasteur who's famous for a whole lot of things) is Jenner.

Is uranium really needed to make nuclear energy? I was under the impression that you could use thorium. I only got that question right because the other options didn't make sense.

Thorium reactors are also Uranium reactors. The difference is that instead of powering the reactor directly with fission of Uranium you feed the reactor with Thorium which is then transmuted into Uranium in the reactor and then nuclear fission of that uranium is used to generate power.

I think I would still tend to say that you don't need uranium in that you don't need to start with it. I guess it's a matter of interpretation.

Its complex. Thorium has a long chain of transmuted states called the 'Thorium Cascade', during which it is twice Radium, twice Polonium, twice Lead and even twice Thorium (232 and 228)! The form of Uranium it passes thru is called 'synthetic' and is not the kind that makes bombs. All steps in the cascade generate power.

Well, it's easy to make nuclear energy or nuclear weapons with plutonium, for instance. But we can only create plutonium using nuclear reactors. In terms of naturally occurring substances it's much easier to use Uranium to bootstrap yourself but with enough effort you could use others.

Apparently sound waves aren't used to make cellphone calls. I thought the whole point of phones was to receive and emit sound waves.

Like many tests this comes down to being good at knowing what the question asker is really after. It amounts to a test of how good are you at standardized tests.

Phones work by displaying text and detecting keypresses, everyone knows that.

So last year. Modern phone interfaces are back to soundwaves: "Siri, play Nicki Minaj".

I thought the tides question was a bit flawed/ambiguous, despite knowing which of the answers they were really looking for.

"Which of these is the main way that ocean tides are created?"

Are 'tides' defined as the tidal bulge caused by the moon, or the harmonic rising and falling of water levels caused by earth's rotation relative to that bulge?

Would we (laypeople) even recognise there were ocean tides if earth's rotation was somehow slow enough for the moon to be geostationary? The bulge would still be there, but without the earth's relative rotation to the moon the sea level doesn't go up and down any more (ignoring the smaller tides from the sun).

I just blasted through the quiz and got the astrology question wrong because I didn't read it carefully. The results on the questions that require flawless English comprehension are suspect.

> astrology

> science

What? Did you use the wrong word? I would take answering an astrology question incorrectly as a badge of honour.

This question was flawed, I believe, as none of the answers for it were correct. Astrology isn't science and the others don't study effects of stars on human behavior.

Amplitude doesn't directly translate to volume/loudness, in the same way that frequency does not directly translate to pitch.

For those interested, pitch vs frequency is covered by the mel scale https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mel_scale and "loudness" in decibels is logarithmic (and at best, not a great measure of volume as perceived by people in different environments).

Seems a bit rich to fail people on this ambiguous question..

Hey, why the downvotes?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudness

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