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Monday, February 13, 2012

The Essentials - Where Does He Get Those Wonderful Toys?


The Joker was impressed by the cool grappling guns, smoke bombs and armored PJs Batman wielded but those were not the reason the Caped Crusader was a great crime fighter. Batman was good at his job because he was motivated and he was a detective.  While Joker saw Batman as a flawed fighter (because he knew that Bruce Wayne, like any (hu)man is capable of good and evil) what the clown overlooked was the cunning and diligent detective work that unraveled the mysteries of the joker’s schemes and ultimately brought the truth to light and the criminal to justice.
Scientists are a lot like Batman.  Sure they have cool tools.  Who wouldn't want to go to work every day to a lab filled with lasers and liquid nitrogen or at the heart of a rainforest or the bottom of the ocean? But it is not just the tools that scientists have, but how they use the tools to unravel mysteries, that give them super powers.
For much of history a rational understanding of the world has largely been a mystery scientists have diligently worked to unravel.  Like Batman’s detective work, the work of science often reveals new areas to investigate.  As these new areas are investigated new techniques develop and understanding grows. 
How do scientists learn about the age of the Earth? It’s elementary my dear Watson, specifically isotopic elements.  How do you observe a time that has faded into the past? See the forest for the trees, while making careful comparisons of the rings they have accumulated.
Radiometric dating and dendrochronology are examples of detective tools that scientists have used to reach into the past.  However simply counting rings or measuring and comparing ratios of isotopes doesn’t do anything.  These tools have helped us understand events and scales of time that were unobservable.  Natural history is a mystery and scientists are the sleuths that can solve it.

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