balance

Today:

caution

Someone said to me yesterday that it wasn't that he saw some of the intense ways I follow my inner journey as bad or wrong, but he did feel the need for caution. He said cars are good but you have to be careful with them. I laughed and laughed and said I argue with my freshman engineers all the time about whether cars are good.

kids

My son finished sixth grade last spring, which is as far as our local Montessori school goes, and the question was what next? He's ahead in some things and behind in others and has had a lot of problems with teasing, so we didn't want to put him in public school particularly in this era of budget cuts. The only other private schools in the area use the Bob Jones University Curriculum, and I'm not willing to send my kids to a school that doesn't teach evolution. So last spring we talked to a Montessori School 20 miles away, that has 7th and 8th grades. The middle school teacher initially said they couldn't meet P.'s needs, but we persuaded him to agree to take P. this fall for a 6 week trial period. Thankfully that teacher left, and the idea that P. was accepted only for a trial period seemed to disappear. Yesterday we had a teacher conference on the results of the first 6 week block. As part of the transition to public school this Montessori has tests and grades in middle school. P.'s lowest grade was an 83, and most of his grades were in the 90s, and that is essentially without accomodations (except a laptop we provide). The teacher said P. participates a lot and is fitting in very well. I've known it was going well, but it is awfully nice to get the official confirmation.

balance

Today:

Anniversary

For what it is worth, this is the first anniversary of this blog. It is doing what I wanted to do, serving as a place where I can put the different parts of my life together. What I've never been clear on is audience. It seems to work as a place where some friends can see what is up with me and write me an email when something particularly strikes them. I think I need to just not worry whether anyone else reads it. I don't want to make it less diverse and I don't have time to write at more length, so I am what I am.

balance

Today:

It took a lot of tries to get this one to balance. But the two I balanced last week were still up despite wind and rain. There is a picture of all four here.

Evidence in History

Timothy Burke writes about the danger of distorting evidence in historical writing. It reminds me of a story that I heard Gerald Holton tell in a paper at a history of science conference many years ago. He had been reading Millikan's lab notebooks from the famous Millikan Oil Drop Experiment. Holton's conclusions are published in: Holton, Gerald. 1978. "Subelectrons, presuppositions and the Millikan-Ehrenhaft Dispute." Historical Studies in the Physical Sciences 9:166-224. Reprinted pp.25-83 in The Scientific Imagination (Cambridge Univ. Press, 1978).

In his experiment Millikan measured the electrical charge of oil droplets by how they moved in a magnetic field and calculated that the charges only came in certain amounts. You could have an oil drop with a charge of 2 or 4, but not one with a charge of 2.5. This showed that electricity came in fixed amounts in particles that came to be called electrons rather than being something that could come in any amount (like heat).

On each page of the notebook Millikan goes through a lengthy calculation to find the charge of a single oil drop. If you have done the modern version of the experiment be aware that Millikan's version was much more complicated because he had to calculate a correction for the evaporation of the oil. Holton showed us a slide of one notebook page in which Millikan's calculation found a charge almost exactly half way between the fixed amounts. At the bottom of the page Millikan wrote: "This couldn't be an oil drop." And it may not have been--it may have been a dust mote. (A defense of Millikan.)

Some scholars argue that Millikan was not as ethical as he should have been--in fact the 58 observations Millikan reports in his scientific paper are culled from at least 107. I draw a different conclusion. We make sense of the world by a process of simplification--we could never know anything unless we select for the evidence relevant to the particular simplification we want to make. As a historian, I select the evidence that is relevant to the point I want to make rather than putting a lot of irrelevant evidence in my paper. Someone else may come along and feel I have distorted the story. I can avoid some of that problem by being honest about my point of view. It is certainly possible to take selection too far so that it becomes distortion, and that is to be avoided and criticized. But selection is necessary and there is no nice neat line that defines when you have gone too far.