Letter: A Thought on the Cobb Stickers
6th January 2006
Now a third year nuclear engineering student at Tech, I graduated from Marietta High School in 2003 — I’m really grateful, at this point, that I didn’t live a few miles away, in the Cobb district, because my science education got me to where I am now.
If the Cobb school board wants to make sure that students know that “evolution is a theory, not a fact” and that it should be “approached with an open mind, studied carefully and critically considered” let them. But insist that they also know that gravity is only a theory. Relativity is only a theory (imagine - your commute at faster than light speeds!). Nuclear physics is based on theories - we don’t really know how an atom is shaped and held together, but that theory is strong enough to power some areas of Georgia and most of France, in addition to many other places. If every scientific theory must be prefaced by an explanation that it’s “only a theory”, the whole thing will very quickly be (correctly) labeled as absurd.
Anyway, I just wanted to throw in my two cents. This whole thing has gotten way out of hand and it does nothing to help the students. I hope the school board realizes this soon, and realizes that religion belongs in a religions/sociology course, the home, or the church, not the science classroom.
Emily Colvin
Secretary, Mars Society @ Georgia Tech
Nuclear and Radiological Engineering
Georgia Institute of Technology
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