Density, the Dummy Version

buoyancy principle

If you spend most of your time consuming your news from inside the bubble created by Fox News and similar outlets, you may not be aware that many educators¹ believe that there is a crisis in our educational system. For the uninitiated, it's scientific illiteracy – and the reason that bubble does't talk about it is because they helped create it. Here to demonstrate the phenomenon is a freelancer from Sciencing.com with a degree in religion. Take a look at the hatchet job Flora Richards-Gustafson performed on "Examples of How Density Works."²

Density, at least to someone who's taken a couple of chemistry and physics courses, is a simple concept. Well, compared to string theory or quantum mechanics, it's simple, and Richards-Gustafson was supposed to be writing to an eighth-grader, anyway. With pre-teens, she could get away with her definition,

"Density is the mass of an object compared to its volume. It describes the heaviness of an item. Density can also refer to how tightly packed a material or molecule is. The density of an object depends on its composition, pressure and temperature..."

...but a more astute person (one who's had seventh-grade science, for instance) would recognize the weakness of the way Flora threw three disjointed statements at the screen and then moved on. The definition stuff was bad enough, but it's what she moved on to that caught the eye of our staffer. Here are her four examples, including the bogosity that makes them worthy of a DotD nomination:

• "Hot Air Balloon: ...Warm air is less dense than cool air. Because it weighs less, warm air rises..." – weighs less that what, Fora? This is a truly lousy explanation of buoyancy!
• "Water and Ice: ...When water turns into ice, its volume increases and the density decreases because the hydrogen bonds change..." – It becomes less dense because the crystal lattice of ice is less tightly packed than liquid water. That's because the number of molecules sharing each hydrogen is greater in ice than water, not because the "hydrogen bonds change."
• "Salad Dressing: Because the vinegar and water have similar densities, they blend together when mixed. When you add oil to the mixture, it will always float to the top of the container, even after you shake or whisk the dressing." – Vinegar and water don't blend because they "have similar densities," you scientifically illiterate idiot, they blend because both are polar compounds. Oil, however, is non-polar.
• "Floating Egg: ...If you slowly pour regular water into the jar that has the sugar water and egg, the regular water will float above the sugar water as the egg remains suspended between the two." – First, Flora, that's not what your reference says. Second, it's (almost) impossible to pour a sugar water solution into plain water and not mix them. So if the egg "remains suspended" it's because you've achieved neutral buoyancy: the egg and the sugar-water solution have identical density.

This sort of semi-scientific twaddle was pretty much par for the course whenever eHow.com allowed journalism (errr, "communications"), English lit, creative writing, business, film, polysci, philosophy, history, and – guess who – religion majors try to write about science on the site, and assigned other journalism majors to edit their work for accuracy. Small wonder our staffers call eHow (now Leaf Group niche sites like "Sciencing") the mother lode of misinformation. In Richards-Gustafson's case, all her little missteps add up to a big load of scientific illiteracy. For spreading her ignorance of STEM and contributing to the stupidification of the internet, we hereby do award to Flora the singular honor of being named our Dumbass of the Day.

¹ Contrary to her title, Betsy DeVos is not an educator...
² The original has been deleted by Leaf Group, but can still be accessed using the Wayback machine at archive.org. Its URL was   sciencing.com/examples-density-works-23804.html

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