School standards and grades only require students to learn a small amount about a few subjects. Kids get diplomas for getting 75% (grade C) of the limited subject matter that state standards describe for each of the very few subjects studied in schools.
So how can a youngster get a chance to learn about an image like the one above? The fresh, new, comprehensive knowledge online is now magnitudes greater than the standardized fare in schools. The more money we dump into schools that settle for very little learning as they graduate kids, the more intrenched underclasses become.
Online, what is known by humankind is emerging robustly and interconnecting richly. The image with this post is in a SEED MAGAZINE slideshow about a book of nano images: No Small Matter: Science on the Nanoscale, by Felice C. Frankel, George M. Whitesides. This intriguing image opens many ideas to a student’s mind:
Two streams of water collide with remarkable results. At the top, under the influence of pressure and gravity, the streams squirt out into a flat sheet, while surface tension draws the fluid into strands and then globes as it falls. “We often associate complex behaviors—the spontaneous formation of intricate patterns, unexpected changes over time—with systems that are themselves complicated,” Whitesides writes. “Even the simplest systems have the potential to show behaviors that confound us.”
