University Science Education: A New Approach

At most major U.S. Universities, there are two approaches to teaching science. The first approach is to just make all students take the general introductory courses for a science discipline (either introductory biology, chemistry, or physics). The other approach is to create fun courses, such as "The Physics of Music", which are tailored for the non-science majors and place science/engineering majors into rigorous introductory courses. While the latter is a good approach to keep students happy, the focus of such science courses are too narrow to provide non-science college students with a true general science education.

For students to understand the issues in modern science (particularly with the rise of interdisciplinary science), they must have at least introductory knowledge of both the physical and life sciences. However, in order to teach an umbrella course that incorporates both physical and life sciences, a unifying principle is needed. I propose that scaling be used a unifying concept to teach a general science course for non-science majors. The course would focus on how the world works on different length scales, and different time scales.

The motivation for using scaling as a concept for a science course is the difficulty that non-scientists have in relating science that occurs on small scales to science that occurs on big scales. One obvious example of this confusion is evolution. An argument that is often used by non-scientists against evolution is that one cannot witness a species turning into another species in a human lifetime. However, this is a fundamental misconception of the time scale on which evolution occurs for organisms larger than a single cell. While some of the mechanisms that drive evolution (such as random mutation) occur on the human time scales, the process of evolution occurs on the time scale of starting in the thousands and up through millions of years.

The first half of this course would focus on how matter works and organizes at various lengths scales. A possible syllabus for this part of the course might look like the following...

Sub-Angstrom Scale: Sub Atomic Particles. Light.
Angstrom Scale: Atoms and interaction of atoms with light. (Introduction to energy)
Nanometer Scale: Organic and inorganic molecules
Microscopic Scale: Cell Biology. Thermodynamics and transport properties.
Meter Scale: Human physiology. Introduction to Forces and dynamics.
Planetary Scale: Geological structures
Astronomical Scale: Stars, solar system and galaxies.

This certainly isn't an exhaustive list, but I think it is a good starting point. I put thermodynamics and transport properties in the Microscopic scale because so many of the processes that occur in cell biology are dependent on free energies, diffusion, and osmosis. The forces and dynamics were put on the meter scale for conceptual clarity for students.

The second half of this course would focus on time scales of various special topics. The following is a short list of topics in which relevance of time scales can be illustrated...

Evolution: The first time scale to explore in this subject the various transciption proteins involved in the replication of DNA and how random mutations can occur. The next time scale in this subject would be the lifetime of an example organism and how its genes conferred advantages or disadvantages for reproduction given various environments and conditions. The final time scale to explore is the formation of new species over thousands and millions of years.
Plate Techtonics: The basic idea with this subject would be to relate events that occur on smale time scales (such as earthquakes and volcanic eruptions) to the larger time scale movements of plates, formation of mountain ranges and trenches.
Chemical Kinetics: One of the most important concepts in determining the mechanisms of reactions is to find all the reaction paths and then determine the time scale that each reaction occurs. This topic might be advanced for an introductory class, but does lead to many applications in organic and photochemistry that could be interesting for students.
Cosmology: Time scales are extremely relevant in cosmology. The formation of all the structures in the universe (planets, stars, galaxies, clusters) occur at varying time scales.

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