“We go about our daily lives understanding almost nothing of the
world. We give little thought to the machinery that generates the
sunlight that makes life possible, to the gravity that glues us to an
Earth that would otherwise send us spinning off into space, or to the
atoms of which we are made and on whose stability we fundamentally
depend. Except for children (who don’t know enough not to ask the
important questions), few of us spend much time wondering why nature is
the way it is; where the cosmos came from, or whether it is always
here; if time will one day flow backward and effects precede causes; or
whether there are ultimate limits to what humans can know.”
-Carl Sagan from an introduction to A Brief History of Time By Stephen Hawking
After
hearing and reading your peer's reactions during class about the listed
quotation, what new insight can you add to this quotation analysis?
Please respond during your first class on Thur., Aug. 27th or Fri., Aug. 28th.
Thursday, August 27, 2020
Metacognition?
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18 comments:
When children ask their questions they ask them with a bigger imagination and not knowing that those questions are not important to those that are older, and have a smaller imagination to the point that those question do not matter as much the older you get.
I totally agree with this small blog. Most of us are oblivious to the world around them. Most of us don’t pay attention to the small details of the small world. But I think if we stop and think we notice the great small things around us. I believe people that are artistic or anything kind like that sees the world around them including the small noticed and unnoticed world.
When we show up to school, or when adults show up to work, we don’t think a whole lot about it, we think about what we are doing right now and what we need to do to either learn or work for the day. Really young kids don’t really have things they have to do for the day, so they have the time to sit and think, but when they get older, they more primarily focus on their school, career, money, etc.
There are so many complicated events that happen throughout the world that it makes me question if we even have the right answer... People are always talking about life outside of our world but I constantly think that there can't be any living things outside of our world because life is what is habitable to Earth. There may be something that can function on another planet but it wouldn't be a living thing because it wouldn't be able to live on Earth. People question and have been questioning the ways our world works but it makes me wonder if we just made up a solution that made sense or if we discovered it. We have no idea how atoms truly work or how dna actually replicates, we just kind of make theories that make the most sense. I know there are experiments that can prove one thing or another but we really don't know all the ins and outs of our world and our bodies so we have to constantly challenge our perception of the world. For the longest time people thought the sun revolved around the Earth until one person questioned it and changed the science world forever. For all we know we could be in a simulation and everyone is too encased in a bubble to see it.
Children have more of an imagination so they ask more questions and as you grow up you think of different things like school and work and you have less time to question why something happens. As you grow up you learn some of the things you didn't know about as a kid like space and gravity and why certain things happen.
Children are more curious about the world because they're still learning how to understand it. They're more aware of things that passively affect them, whereas older people are more aware of the things that directly affect them.
V Cagande
I think that children are like the ancient Greeks because they are always asking questions about things that we might not have the answer to, or that we just don't think about. They question everything that they see or experience, as did the Greeks. They try and find ways to explain the things that they are experiencing.
I think that by the time we grow up we know a large amount of information about our world and because of this we think that we have a strong grasp on reality. But in a way this limits us because it stops us from asking deeper questions, which we cannot answer.
I think that the people back then were less informed and thats why people had to ask many more questions and now people get taught about everything that they need to know they dont think they need to know anything more and people start to question less about the world.
I think that we don't ask questions as much as children and the Ancient Greeks because we get everything told to us and that means that we don't have to ask any questions. But even though we still don't know so much we don't ask about it because I think that we don't feel like we have to or want to.
We made up (maybe we didn't) things to help us cope with the amazing scary wonders we need to survive, like air and the sun and the planet. What if aliens are out there with their own stories about how things were made, and why things are the way they are. Kids ask questions because they don't view the world the way we do. We have been taught to just accept the way things are. The kids haven't learned yet, that we don't actually know why anything really exists.
I feel like people used to wonder about the world more because they were not living quite as comfortably as we are today. I bet they were looking for any way to improve their quality of life, and also people who discovered things were rewarded for doing so. For example I remember learning about the explorers that discovered America for the other countries, and they were given large amounts of money from Spain and places to learn about the newfound land. We on the other hand, are living in a world where many people have already presented us with answers to many things we might wonder. The incentive to wonder and discover is no longer there, nobody is offering large sums of money to explore what has already been seen, and there isn't much left unknown. Likewise, children ask more and wonder more because they don't have access to the knowledge around them (they don't have electronics and they can't read advanced texts), but once they become older and have access to those things, there is less need to wonder, at least outloud..
I think that it's interesting how children do end up questioning so much about the world, while most people who have grown into adults don't even need to. As you grow up, you're told so much about the world and how everything works, whether it's true or not. Every society/culture/religion has their own beliefs about the world, and once those questions have been answered, most people don't find the need to ask the same questions anymore. When you're a child, you still haven't quite gotten all of those answers, and so you ponder and imagine what you think the real answers are. Eventually, through education, second-hand knowledge, and life experiences, those questions are answered, and the need to wonder anymore is fulfilled. The people who keep asking those questions after they have already received the answers are the ones who achieve the most.
It shows that no one really asks questions anymore. We are to oblivious to the world that we discover less than our ancestors. People today believe that asking a question means you are dumb, and it really impacts a lot of them. Children ask more questions than older people because they are still learning about our world around us and how we live up to our history today.
I think that kids ask more difficult questions because they are more curious and they have a bigger imagination and instead of thinking like oh yeah gravity just keeps us on earth they think why and they think more in-depth about it and we just leave it be.
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