He told us tha if you put a toad in a boling water pan, the toad Will jump quickly out of the pan for salving itself. But if you put the toad in lukewarm water and you increase Little by Little the temperatura, the toad Will not noticed the gradual rise and it Will died eventually boiled.I am sure that nobody understood the fable and the teacher was writting on the blackboard the First Law of Themodynamics (∆u = q − w) next to the drawinf of a smiling toad
From my point
of view, this fable would work pretty well to illustrate the risks of climate
change. The average increase in temperature on the planet is so gradual, using a
human life as scale, that we do barely notice it. But we might be like the toad
which is being heated up little by little. When the old teacher keeps on writing
down a formula, his students no longer pay attention to him. It´s something
very well-known by teachers and science communicators. In fact, in popular
science books, there is a premise of avoiding formulas and working with metaphores
and fables. It´s even said that some
editors have quantified ( with a formula!) the number of readers that would be lost if there were a specific
number of formulas on a page.
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