Timescopes

Another way we play with knowledge in ways to interest and motivate students (enabled by multimedia) is contracting and expanding time. ISGE explains “time” as a consensual fantasy of humans imposed by our recognition of the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics. This gives our universe time’s arrow and unchangeable direction. Simultaneously, we indicate the importance of time in several scientific theories and our increasing accuracy in establishing and sharing time. How many significant “meet ups” in your life would you have missed if we didn’t share the same time constants.

Student are allowed to travel through time. Click on this to see an animation that traces the evolution of forelimb bones in an ancestral mammal to our current structure in horse evolution. While the animation shows in a few seconds what took millions of years to accomplish, a monitor on the side shows the estimated number of years that passed and number of mutations that were required.

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In this other animation, we summarize how many scales of the universe the sciences recognized at different decades and centuries of human civilization.

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