Shine A Light (video)

One response to “Shine A Light (video)”

1. JacobWeissmann | August 13, 2009 at 8:05 pm |

   Sorry to be a party pooper, but based on the clip, Shine a Light looks like it will have nice production values, but like many ‘educational’ endeavors, will ultimately be devoid of much information or insight. Worse, it might be uneducational. The problem is that the video producers spend a lot of time trying to analogize in fancy (and not particularly entertaining) fashion what is already an analogy. Thus they slip even further from the truth. The picture we see in textbooks of electrons in orbit around a nucleus is a century-old cartoon version of reality. Trying to further analogize that into some sort of dance doesn’t help anyone, but rather makes the whole thing even more disconnected from reality (and ultimately confusing). It’s also ultimately somewhat patronizing and insulting to assume that a lay audience can’t grasp the idea of a dense nucleus surrounded by clouds of electrons. This picture of the atom has entered common use and is pretty much universally recognized — it’s the old 1950 symbol for radiation, fer chrissakes. They use it in cartoons! Making that common (and more accurate than this movie) image into some sort of weird dance is like trying to explain how a car works by comparing it to a dog. Makes no sense and is not helpful, right? Perhaps worst of all, the video gives the impression that we generally see things because objects emit light. Sure, all objects emit radiation, and some of that radiation is visible, but that’s a very different thing from the truth — that we see most things via reflected light. So despite perhaps a vague feeling of ‘education’, viewers will not only gain no insights, but will actually potentially come away with MISinformation.