The Invisible World

Science Made Easy!

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To sign up, skip to the bottom!
To know what it’s all about, just read on:

Main clientèle: high school and college students struggling with their science classes. True understanding found in this relaxed course in the form of a Facebook hangout with a real scientist (and experienced teacher) who can explain in every-day language does way more than expensive home tutoring.
Secondary clientèle: anybody else who wants to know why meteorites explode, planes fly, and eggs fry. 😉

Welcome to an exciting conversational online course on conceptional science — a kind of science conversation course of world discovery that illuminates meaning and understanding rather than having you memorize confusing dry formulas and big words. It’s an approach that works for everybody. It’s exciting to discover how everything connects with everything else. And it’s a lot of fun to get an intuitive grasp of the fundamentals of science, never to be scientifically illiterate or ignorant again. And it’s so easy!

This course is pure discovery and fun. No grades or assignments. Little time commitment. Flextime: You yourself decide when you visit, read, post, think, or comment.

The approach is based on curious questions (I call them “power questions”) which come from me but can also come from you — the exact reversal of traditional science classes where your questions annoy or flabbergast the teacher who is trying to march through predetermined milestones before the bell rings.

And while we will reduce the public anathema of scientific illiteracy and science denial, this will also benefit this blog whose principal editor will get back to teaching his awesome course and earning a little money when schools have proven too unreliable (public schools have no room for this kind of course, and private schools keep going under or laying off teachers before salary rises). Plus, online, this amazing course can reach more people and be much cheaper!

So… Want to know a little more about this course? Well, if so, here goes:

Course Details

Have you found science difficult? Have you been crushed under formulas, jargon, and confusing claims by science teachers? Must you pass a science course for credit? Do the fundamentals of science seem mysterious? Want to actually understand how our universe works, EASILY, without all those formulas and big words? Now you can!

I work by starting with “power questions” about our everyday world that connect everything with everything, expose the underlying forces behind every surface, make the invisible visible through the visualizing power of your imagination, and make transformative learning possible. You yourself will grow as a result of our enlightening conversations. One “AHA!” moment after another will brighten your visits.

Like scientists themselves, we will uncover a new question behind every answer and live through an adventure of discovery. Examples: Why does a pump with which you inflate a bicycle tire or liferaft get hot, and what has that to do with refrigerators, AC, fried eggs, space suits, the buoyancy of ships, the lift on the wings of airplanes, the engines of cars, the smell of perfume, or the behavior of raisins in a cake, or that bewildering topic of “osmosis” in biology class? Or how is this connected to that flaming meteorite which exploded over Russia in 2013 like a bomb in the sky, the Youtube videos of it going viral? Or how can we deduce that air molecules whiz around us and hit us with the speed of bullets keeping us warm that way (and yet protecting us from boiling and freezing at the same time)? Or why do “mitosis” and “meiosis” – such annoying topics in biology class – even exist? Or what the heck do oxygen, nitrogen, phosphorous, and sulfur do in the biomolecules our bodies are composed of (except for all the water, of course)? Did you know that you and I (except for our minds) are almost exclusively put together from air and water? A tree even more so? And that the living part of a tree is like a thin glove covering dead tree matter called wood (made almost entirely from air and water, not the soil the tree is rooted in)? In my course, we take science from the angle of interesting questions, mysteries, and surprises from our daily lives and discover amazingly sense-making answers, learning and growing as we go. It’s actually fun, even for those who never liked science before, and a great way to sharpen one’s mind. And all the boring stuff in conventional science class begins to make sense.

For those who want a checklist of science curriculum topics, early topics include heat, pressure, lift and buoyancy, diffusion, osmosis, the structure of atoms, chemical bonds and reactions, polarity, electricity, magnetism, force and energy, to name a few. All sorts of advanced topics are also fair game, however, like the interconnections between evolution, psychopathy, and Parkinson’s Disease. We can link climate change to a cooking pot, too. This course is all about the intuitive and deeper understanding which typical curricula and teachers don’t handle well. I don’t want to call it ‘science for dummies’ because we are not necessarily dummies when our thinking is more adapted to revolve around people than around atoms and molecules.

I simply realized during my own studies in the past that atoms and molecules can be understood much like people. And from that perspective, those of us who are not naturally geared for the big formulas and abstractions in science, can actually quite easily understand how our natural world ticks. An army of molecules slamming into us is more intuitively comprehensible than the phrases “air pressure” and “sound waves.” Even for those who struggle less with the traditional approach, this way of looking at the natural world presents some really interesting intuitive insights, when you start seeing the universe through the eyes of atoms and molecules.

In addition, you will be supporting a guy who wants to spend more time working for a better world, rather than be bogged down in often-times mismatched bread-and-butter jobs and recurring hunts for those pointless jobs. A win-win for us all. 🙂

Registration

There are only three steps involved into signing up and participating:

1. Payment or FREE: To give financial support, go to our Patreon page and make a $5 monthly contribution (it lasts until you cancel it). If you don’t have a Patreon account, yet, you can quickly make one and use it also to contribute to other alternative media and citizen journalists. — If you can’t afford $5/month or want this course to be funded by voluntary donations, skip this payment step. With luck, this approach may also work (it did for Wikipedia).
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2. Registration: Go to our contact page, then copy and paste the following message and send it with the blanks filled in:
  I wish to participate in the course titled The Invisible World. My Patreon name is ____________ and my Facebook name is ____________. By participating in this course I agree to honor the copyrights of all those who participate as instructors or students. I will not, without the author’s permission, redistribute, sell, or represent as my own, any content (including text, graphics, or videos) posted by others in this course.
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3. Start: Then you go to the course’s Facebook Group and request to join. As soon as you are approved, you can participate. The group is closed, so people who are not in the course cannot spy on your posts or comments (unless Facebook fails to protect our privacy).