Chapter 6: Science and the World-Farm
There are many kinds of science I must tell you about. Scientists have discovered many things they can study, but each of them needs to be studied a different way. Some kinds of science have been around for hundreds of years. Others have been around for only a few years, and not many people know about them.
One thing you must remember when talking about science is that sometimes it turns out the world doesn’t work the way you thought it did. When you were a child, you probably felt like the world was supposed to work a certain way, and had to learn that it didn’t work that way. Maybe you wanted to stay up all night and eat candy all the time and never take a bath. Then your mother had to teach you you couldn’t do that, because you’d be tired and hungry and dirty.
Science works the same way. Just because you’re an adult now doesn’t prove you know everything there is to know about the world. The people who are taking your farms believe they know everything, and it isn’t working for them either. If you’re good at farming and you spend your life farming, you learn a lot about farming that most people will never know. The same is true for any occupation, including science. If you’re good at figuring out how the world works and you spend your life figuring out more about how the world works, you learn more about it than most people could figure out on their own.
One kind of science is called physics. This isn’t hard to understand. Scientists use physics to study things like how hard you would have to push on something to make it move, or how strong different kinds of wood are. The Maya and Aztecs and other people who lived in Mexico built great cities and pyramids, so they must’ve figured out a lot about physics, in order to cut all that stone, move it, and fit it together. Some physicists study how stars work, and the Maya even studied that, but the Maya didn’t have telescopes, so there is a lot more people can study about stars now.
Other physicists study atoms. That is important for many other kinds of science. Atoms are tiny pieces that fit together to make everything in the world, including the air. They’re so small that no one can see them. They are kind of like grains of sand that make up a beach or a desert—the beach or the desert is a big thing that’s made up of many, many very small pieces. Only with atoms, everything is like a beach or a desert, and they are made up of pieces that are much smaller than grains of sand.
The first people I know of who thought of atoms lived in ancient Greece. The people there built big stone temples, like the Maya and a lot of other people in the world. Every temple that was built was brand new at one point, with freshly cut stone blocks for the steps leading in the front door of the temple. Some of the old men who lived in ancient Greece noticed that the steps of the temples that had been built when they were boys were now worn down where people walked on them. They wondered how that happened.
Those old men also noticed that other things get worn down over time. If you rub two sticks together, you can rub the bark off both of them. When you do that, you can see that friction rubs pieces off of the sticks. So these old men reasoned that the stone steps could be wearing down because of the friction of people’s feet, if stone was also made of pieces like wood was. The only difference was if the stone was made of pieces that were so tiny no one could see them, the stone would wear down so slowly that no one could watch it happening.
As you can see, that’s a fairly simple thing to notice. Other groups of people in the world had stone temples and wise old men, so other groups of people could’ve figured that out too.
Another kind of science is called chemistry. Chemistry is the study of how atoms work together in big groups to make everything in the world work. There are many different kinds of atoms, and each of them works differently. By figuring out what the atoms a thing is made of do, you can figure out a lot about how the thing works.
Air has a lot of oxygen atoms in it, as well as some other atoms. Some of those are carbon atoms. When the carbon atoms connect with oxygen atoms, it makes carbon dioxide, which is part of the air you breathe.
Wood has a lot of carbon and hydrogen atoms in it. Water is made of hydrogen and oxygen atoms. So this is one example of a way that scientists have discovered something about the world that nobody else noticed, and of how the world works differently than a lot of people thought it did. Air, water, and wood are very different things from each other, but they’re all made of different combinations of the same atoms.
The same is true for everything else in the world. There are only about 100 types of atoms in the world (although many types of atoms have a few different variations). Wood, water, and everything else in the world are different from each other not because they’re each made of completely different things, but because they are made of a few different things that interact with each other in many different ways.
Each of those 100 different atoms is made up of even smaller pieces. This is another example of something scientists have discovered that no one else thought of, and that seems strange to a lot of people. The smaller pieces of the 100 different atoms are all the same as each other. Those smaller pieces are called sub-atomic particles. There are three kinds of smaller pieces, called protons, neutrons, and electrons. Those same three pieces make up all the 100 different atoms. The different atoms are different from each other because they have different numbers of protons, neutrons, and electrons from each other.
In the same basic way that air, wood, water, and everything else in the world are different from each other because they’re made up of different combinations of 100 different atoms, those 100 different atoms are made up of 3 kinds of subatomic particles. In the same way that everything in the world is different because of the different ways 100 different atoms interact with each other, the 100 different atoms are different from each other because of the different ways 3 different kinds of subatomic particles interact with each other!
This is an example of something that’s more complicated than I know how to explain to you. But this is the basic idea behind how chemistry and physics work. Now that you know this much, you could ask a school teacher or university student to tell you more about it. You could say, “I’ve heard that everything in the world is made of 100 kinds of atoms, and those 100 kinds of atoms are made of protons, neutrons, and electrons, I’ve heard that air, water, wood and everything in the world is different because of the way those 100 atoms interact with each other, and that the 100 kinds of atoms are different from each other because of the different ways protons, neutrons, and electrons interact with each other. Now what else can you tell me about that? How does that work on my farm?” Then the other person could tell you about how those atoms interacting with each other make good soil nutrients, how they make healthy plants grow, how air and water pollution are created, how soil nutrients get depleted, how rain forms, and many other things.
You could learn a lot more about how your farm works that way. If you already know how to grow your food well and keep your farm healthy, obviously you already know enough about farming to be able to do those things. But one thing that learning about how chemistry works on your farm would let you do would be to prove to the people who are taking your farms, and to a lot of other people, that you’re not just a bunch of dumb, superstitious peasants, you’re people just like them who know a lot about farming, just like they know a lot about whatever they do.
Something else that learning about chemistry would let you do would be to recognize how organic farming works differently from industrialized farming, why organic farming works better in the long run, and why industrialized farming produces more food in the short term but destroys the land in the long term.
You probably already knew that organic farming works better in the long run than industrialized farming. But by learning about the chemistry involved in farming, you could learn why science doesn’t prove that you were wrong, and you can learn how to prove that anyone who tries to use science to prove you were wrong is lying. Your ancestors developed farming thousands of years ago, and if you’re still farming on they same land they farmed, it means you know how to farm in a way that keeps your farms healthy year after year. That means you own some of the most valuable land in the world. That’s why the Capitalists want to take your land from you. What I’m telling you about here is that the things you know about farming can be broken all the way down into subatomic particles, and it’s still the best way to keep your farms healthy. If you learn about the chemistry of farming, it might show you that the world doesn’t work the way your ancestors believed it did, but that doesn’t change the fact that they figured out how to grow healthy farms. Your ancestors learned how to grow healthy farms, and by learning about chemistry, you would just be carrying on that tradition.
Ultimately, what everything in the world being made of 100 kinds of atoms and 3 kinds of subatomic particles means is that everything in the world is part of the same system of cause and effect. Everything in the world is connected to everything else, and everything affects everything else. You know how cause and effect works on everything on your farms. This is another way that the whole world is like a farm. Scientists have discovered that cause and effect works on everything in the world in the same basic ways it works on your farm, just much, much bigger.
Atoms stick together into bigger pieces called molecules. Sticking molecules together takes energy. The energy is stored in the molecular bonds that hold the atoms together. When you break the molecules, you release the energy.
You can see three important chemical reactions that happen with trees. One is called photosynthesis. The tree sucks molecules of carbon dioxide out of the air, and it soaks up sunlight through its leaves. It breaks the carbon dioxide molecules. It releases the oxygen atoms back into the air, which is what we breathe. It keeps the carbon molecules for itself, which is why the tree keeps growing—because it keeps adding more and more atoms to itself. It uses the energy from the sunlight to turn a lot of carbon atoms into bigger carbon molecules.
If a branch breaks off the tree and you take it home to build a fire with it, you are making a different chemical reaction happen. Now you add some heat to the wood when you light the fire. That heat breaks some of the big molecules of the wood. Breaking the big molecules in the wood releases more heat. Some of that heat breaks more big molecules, and that releases more heat. And so on. Basically, when you burn a piece of wood, you’re letting the sunlight back out of the wood that made the tree grow in the first place.
When you eat an ear of corn, you do the same thing. You chew the corn up and swallow it. Then the acids in your stomach break the big molecules in the corn and that releases the energy from the big molecules. That’s where you get the energy from your food. Basically, when you digest food, you’re releasing the sunlight energy and using it in your own body.
When you break up the molecules in the corn, you absorb some of the atoms into your body and turn them into different molecules. This is how children grow, and this is how adults build muscles or get fat.
As farmers, I’m sure you already knew that everything in the lifecycles of the world were connected to each other. By studying things like this, scientists have discovered that you were even more right than you realized.
Biology is the study of life. This is the study of plants and animals, which you already know a lot about. Biology is mainly what I’m going to teach you about in this book.
Biology is one of the most complicated things anyone has ever studied. I told you how plants grow and how people get energy from eating plants. Those are pretty simple chemical reactions. All of biology is made up of chemical reactions like those, but there are so many, and many are so complicated, that it makes studying biology very complicated. Everything that happens in biology is some kind of a chemical reaction. Figuring out how they all work has been the big mystery.
There is a lot that people can learn about biology. But most people here in America don’t learn much about it. As farmers you spend your whole lives working with plants and animals, so you already know more about biology than most people in America. You probably know more about biology than President Bush.
Physiology is the study of how your body works. A physiologist can study how your arm works or how your heart works. Neurology is the study of how your brain works as an organ of your body. A physiologist studies how your muscles make your arm move. A neurologist studies how things move around in your brain to make it work.
Psychology is the study of how people think. This is another very complicated field of science. Psychology is the study of how your brain works by studying the thoughts it creates. Your brain is made up of the nutrients from the food you eat, just like every other part of your body. Your brain is just the most complicated organ of your body. It creates your thoughts somehow, but how it creates thoughts is so complicated that for a long time no one had any idea where thoughts came from. But thinking is what your brain does, so all your thoughts have to come from your brain. Figuring this out has been another big mystery in science.
Sociology is the study of how people act in groups. Sometimes when people are in the company of other people, they think things and do things they wouldn’t think or do if they were alone. Sometimes when people are in the company of large groups of people, they think and do things that they wouldn’t do any other time. How all the people in a town act is one example. How the people figure out who their leaders are going to be, and how people decide how to work together, and things like that.
Anthropology is the study of the differences and similarities between different groups of people. For instance, what do people in Mexico have in common with people from the United States? Also, how are people from Mexico different from people from people from the United States? You can also break either one of those groups up into smaller groups and compare those groups to each other. How are people who live in northern Mexico different from people who live in southern Mexico, and how are they the same? Or, how are Indians who live in Mexico different from Europeans who live in Mexico, and how are they the same?
Archeology is the study of how ancient people lived. This is a big field of science in your part of the world. The great cities and pyramids of the Aztecs and Maya give us a lot of clues about how they lived. By studying the things groups of people left behind, we can learn things about their history that they didn’t write down.
There are many other fields of science, but those are the most important for the things I’m going to be talking about.
Now, here’s an example of what scientists can do when they combine all these different branches of science.
Suppose a group of scientists hear about the ruins of an ancient city somewhere in the jungle. So they go visit it.
When they walk into the ancient city, they see a big stone pyramid. That one thing they can see gives them many clues about how the people in the city lived.
First of all, it tells the scientists that the people knew a lot about mining and architecture, to be able to cut the stones, carry them into their city, and stack them on top of each other to build a big pyramid. That means the people in the city knew some important things about physics, so that’s something the scientists could use physics to study.
The big stone pyramid also tells the scientists that the people in the city were probably farmers. Moving a lot of big stones and building great pyramids with them takes a lot of energy. The people had to get all that energy from food. So where did they get all that food? That’s something the scientists can use chemistry and biology to study.
The big stone pyramid also tells the scientists that the people in the city had a lot of political organization. This is something scientists can use sociology to study. First, building a big stone pyramid takes a lot of people working together to build one thing. Why would so many people all want to build the same thing? Usually it’s because one person had the idea to build that thing, and he was some sort of an emperor, so he could tell everyone else to build it.
The other reason a big stone pyramid is a sign of a lot of political organization is because all the people who move the big stone blocks have to eat. A big stone pyramid exists because a lot of people spent a lot of time moving big stone blocks. That means that all those people didn’t spend all that time producing their own food. That means that someone else must’ve produced the food those people ate. The question that presents is: Why did the people who produced the food give it to the people who moved the big stone blocks? One reason they might’ve done it was because the people who grew the food believed that building a big pyramid was important work, so they were willing to trade the food they grew to the people who built the pyramid in exchange for their work. The other big reason is because the same emperor who told the workers to build the pyramid also told the farmers to produce food for them.
Then the scientists can use anthropology to compare the way these people lived to the way other groups of people lived. If they find many cities with big stone pyramids in them, they will probably discover that the people in the different cities had other things in common with each other, like farming and a lot of political organization. They can also look at differences among the different groups of people. For example, the people in another city might’ve grown different food and might’ve built their pyramids differently. If one group built smaller pyramids than the other, that’s a clue that their farming might not have produced as much food—but it could also be a clue that the people with the bigger pyramid had more good stone near their city.
Anthropologists can also compare the way the people in the ancient city lived to the way the people in an ancient village lived. The people in the village might’ve built a temple also, but it would be a smaller temple because there weren’t as many people in the village who could help build it as there were people living in the city who could build that temple. If the two groups of people built different sizes of temples but their temples contained statues of the same god, that would be a clue that both groups of people practiced the same religion. But it could also be a be a clue that the people practiced different religions and worshipped different gods who looked the same because both groups of people were farmers who lived in the jungle, so the same things were important to the two groups of people, so their different gods embodied the same aspects of the world.
Once scientists discover some clues like these, they can look for more clues to try to learn more about the people.
This is what I mean by you learning patterns of cause and effect that make your plants grow, and scientists learning patterns of cause and effect that make other things happen in the world. In the same way that you could figure out whether or not your neighbor really had discovered a breed of corn that could produce twice as much food as yours, scientists can use those same kinds of techniques to figure out how everything else in the world works.