This is a dramatization of a fictitious debate about the age of the earth that takes place in the Royal Institution, London, England, in the year 1872. The debate is among Sir William Thomson (later Kelvin), T.H. Huxley (Darwin's Bulldog), Sir Charles Lyell, and Hermann von Helmholtz. In 1862 Thomson published his celebrated and widely studied The Secular Cooling of the Earth that raised the post-Darwinian debate of the age of the earth above the level of popular controversy. He entered the debate with all the arrogance of a newly established science of the century, namely the recently drafted laws of thermodynamics. The debate is partly based on a lively exchange of comments and arguments that occurred between T.H. Huxley and William Thomson, starting in 1868, when Thomson addressed the Glasgow Geological Society. This long public discussion also involved the ideas and the work of geologist Charles Lyell and those of the celebrated German physicist Hermann von Helmholtz. The confrontation is between the unyielding physicists and the insecure biologists and geologists who required a much longer time for the age of the earth than the physicists were prepared to give them. However, the debate ends on a conciliatory note, suggesting that perhaps Sir William's storehouse of creation may contain a hereto undiscovered source of energy that is more bountiful than gravitational energy. 相似文献
Many theories and models describe the various cognitive processes individuals engage in as they solve ill-structured problems. While diverse in perspectives, these theories and models uniformly agree that essential aspects of complex problem solving include iteration and inquiry. This paper further argues that an important yet overlooked component of knowledge construction during problem-solving is the ability to ask meaningful questions. What is needed, but not adequately articulated and validated, is a theoretical taxonomy of question-asking to better understand and guide a learner’s reasoning process. Based on the expert–novice literature, we proffer the following question taxonomy: shallow/simple (verification, disjunctive, concept completion), testing (example, feature specification, quantification, definition, comparison), and deep/complex questions (interpretation, causal antecedent, causal consequence, goal orientation, instrumental/procedural, enablement, expectation, and judgmental). We, therefore, build on existing theories/models of problem-solving, failure, and reflection and their implications towards a taxonomy of question-asking. Given this taxonomy, researchers and designers can better understand learners’ level of understanding and problem-solving trajectories.