Scientific literacy is one of the primary purposes of science education which briefly focuses on using and interpreting scientific explanations, understanding science within its culture. However, science curricula emphasize science with its cognitive aspects and underestimate affective and aesthetic aspects of science. Science education needs to cover beauty of science for students to cross borders between their own culture and culture of science and to achieve the aim of scientific literacy. Relating aesthetic aspects of science with content of science and (...) paving the way for aesthetic experiences through artworks may enrich science education. The purposes of this study are to discuss the need of integrating aesthetic aspects of science in science instruction and to propose examples and pedagogical suggestions to promote aesthetic experiences into the science education. Artworks are selected to present socio-cultural aspects of science to demonstrate the culture of science, their stories are explained, and pedagogical suggestions are proposed. Advantages and difficulties of using artworks in science instruction are discussed as a result of the study. (shrink)

This multifaceted essay emerges from a host of sources within diverse academic settings. Its central thesis is guided by physicist John A. Wheeler's thoughts on the quantum enigma. Wheeler concludes, following Niels Bohr, that we are co-participants within the universal self-organizing process. This notion merges with concepts from Peirce's process philosophy, Eastern thought, issues of topology, and border theory in cultural studies and social science, while surrounding itself with such key terms as complementarity, interdependence, interrelatedness, vagueness, generality, incompleteness, inconsistency, and (...) mestizaje. Ultimately, a sense of semiosic process pervades in light of combined homogenous and hetergenous tendencies. (shrink)

This article offers a contribution to the history of scientific ideas by proposing an epistemological argument supporting the assumption made by Miller whereby Niels Bohr has been influenced by cubism when he developed his non-intuitive complementarity principle. More specifically, this essay will identify the Bergsonian durée as the conceptual bridge between Metzinger and Bohr. Beyond this conceptual link between the painter and the physicist, this paper aims to emphasize the key role played by art in the development of human knowledge.