Over at Edge is a must-read piece giving many expert but readable examples of where science had the wrong answers but stuck to them for a long time.

The explanations cast light on many other aspects of knowledge and learning. See eg leading computer scientist Roger Schank describing how another professor made his presentations:

Ken had given a very glib funny speech without much content. He seemed to be a lightweight, although I knew he wasn’t. I, on the other hand, had given a technical speech about my ideas about how language worked and how to get computers to comprehend.

I asked Ken about this and he told me: if you can say everything you know in an hour, you don’t know much.

It was some of the best advice I ever got. You can’t tell people everything you know without talking way too fast and being incomprehensible. Ken was about hoping to be understood and to be listened to. I was about being serious and right.

I never forgot his words of wisdom. These days I am much funnier.

And, I realize that I do know a lot more than can fit into an hour long speech. Maybe then I actually didn’t know all that much.

So, I learned a great deal from Ken’s just in time advice which I then had to think about. That is one kind of learning. And then, that experience became one my stories and thus a memory (which is another aspect of learning.)  

Learning is also about constructing explanations of events that were not predicted so that you can predicted them better next time. And learning is about constructing and trading stories with others to give you nuances of experiences to ponder, which is a very important part of learning.

Fascinating advice, not least in the great debate about how far PowerPoint-type presentations are a good teaching tool.

Then there’s another top computer scientist Charles Simonyi drilling down into the idea that ‘wrong’ scientific theories maybe were not as wrong as they seem now:

Real improvement in precision came only with Kepler and the elliptical orbits which were arrived at in part by scientific genius, by being a stickler for accuracy, and in part by mad superstition (music of the spheres, etc.)

From his point of view, putting the coordinate system around the sun simplified his calculations. The final significance of putting the sun into the center was to be able to associate a physical effect — gravitation — with the cause of that effect, namely with the sun. But this did not really matter before Newton.

In any of the cases a common thread seems to be that the "wrong" scientific ideas were held as long as the difference between "wrong" and "right" did not matter or was not even apparent given the achievable precision, or, in many cases the differences actually favored the "wrong" theory — because of the complexity of the world, the nomenclature, the abstractions.

I think we are all too fast to label old theories "wrong" and with this we weaken the science of today — people say — with some justification from the facts as given to them — that since the old "right" is now "wrong" the "right" of today might be also tainted.

I do not believe this — today’s "right" is just fine, because yesterday’s "wrong" was also much more nuanced "more right" that we are often led to believe.

Excellent. Read them all. And learn about learning.

Which reminds me. In South Africa in the late 1980s I heard a science teacher tell me all about how he had taught Zulu students about electricity, using the nifty spark effects created by a Van der Graaf generator.

All went well enough until the time for exams. Then one of the students asked to speak on behalf of the group:

"We know that you want us to write down all this scientific stuff about electricity, which we’ll do to get good marks. But we just want you to know that lightning is created by the King of the Zulus."

Knowledge and Belief go hand in hand.