Here in 2025, the fate of the good ship U.S.S. United States has yet to be written, but the bad news is that we’ve struck the orange-tinted iceberg and have been taking on water on all decks. We are called to stand our ground and raise our voices in protest, but I also have heard it argued that we must continue doing what we can continue to do. In my case, that’s teach some science lessons. So here goes the first of a series that I’m calling “Confounding Questions in Science.” Recorded history may or may not take note of my effort, but I can imagine it compared to the musicians who played till the very end on the Titanic. Regardless, you are invited to keep on reading.
Question 1: Can you see steam?
I’m sure simpler questions exist, but none leap to mind. We’ve got four words, each of one syllable, none longer than five letters, and all within the vocabulary of your average 5-year-old. We also can supply this question with any number of handy-dandy visual aids, such as this photograph of a teapot on a stove.
https://www.istockphoto.com/photo/kettle-boiling-on-a-gas-stove-gm1134086968-301239189
The obvious answer to the question, and certainly the answer from the kindergarten classroom, is that yes, you can see steam. Look, there it is, that fluffy white stuff coming out the spigot. However, as sophisticated readers might have guessed by now, the actual answer is not so simple. In fact, claiming that you can’t see steam is also legitimate and defensible.
The problem lies with the definition—or definitions, plural—of the word steam. Per Merriam Webster, steam as a noun is defined as follows:
1. the invisible vapor formed by boiling water
2. the mist formed by the condensation of water vapor
Meaning, the word steam could be used to identify water in either of two states of matter. Steam could be water vapor, which is the gas state and invisible, or it could be a mist or cloud, which is made of tiny droplets of liquid water.
The two conflicting definitions provide an amazing opportunity for confusion. If you’re asking “Can you see steam?,” I’d argue that either yes or no is a correct answer. It depends on the definition of steam that you are choosing.
Now with proper language, the science of steam is instructive and easy to understand. First, liquid water boils to become water vapor, which is an invisible gas. The gas rises out the spigot and immediately strikes the cold air, causing it to condense into tiny droplets of liquid water. Many of these droplets are large enough to be seen. As they rise and spread in the air, they soon evaporate to become water vapor again. In total, we’ve got three phase changes: liquid to water vapor, then to liquid again, and then to water vapor again. That’s wonderful, don’t you think?
The dual meaning of the word steam illustrates a phenomenon that extends beyond science, which is that language does not always serve our intentions for using it. Questions that involve counting, for example, can often be ambiguous. Here are some examples:
- How many vowels are in the English language?
- A typical automobile is equipped with how many tires?
- How many actresses played Catwoman in the 1960s Batman television series?
Each of these questions has two reasonable numerical answers (n and n + 1) due to an outlier or an exception or other example of troublemaker (the letter y, the spare in the trunk, and Lee Meriwether, respectively.*)
Not all questions like these are trivial. Disagree me with me if you like, but I’ll say that the most debated and controversial question of twentieth-century physics is essentially a question of language and word definitions, as its resolution acknowledges. That question is: Does light travel as a particle or a wave? The answer—which is “both”—recognizes that neither word option fully describes the nature of light. Which means, I think, that we don’t really have the words for light that we need. Maybe physicists will come up with those words in a way that makes sense in the world where I make my living, which is K-12 science education.
My next question is also simple enough for kindergarteners, but confounding for a different reason.
Question 2: What do deer eat?
I see you in the back with your hand raised, and I’m happy to call on you. “Leaves, and plenty of them!” you say. Excellent. Others volunteer that deer also eat shoots, twigs, acorns, berries, and plant parts in general.
So then….do deer eat anything else?
Turns out, yes. Deer will occasionally eat a bird or eggs. They’re also known to eat squirrels, small rabbits, various insects, and carrion.
Here is a video of a deer eating a bird, featuring confused commentary from onlookers.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pJopqdzKSNQ
You will never see this video referenced in children’s science education.
Why not? Because we want deer to be herbivores. In a school classroom of inquisitive 8-year-olds, a deer eating meat will raise a bunch of questions that we don’t want to answer.
On the Internet, authors of deer-related websites are not so wary. Many of them acknowledge the occasional carnivorous behavior of deer and tackle the classification issue. What I find interesting—as well as understandable—is that their typical solution is to expand the classification system. I’ve read that deer should be classified as herbivores, but not strict herbivores. Others write that deer are opportunistic omnivores, meaning they’re omnivores when the opportunity strikes. No one wants to bite the bullet and say “Deer are omnivores”—period, end of sentence. I don’t want to say this, either.
A typical kids’ science textbook defines three functional groups of animals: herbivore, carnivore, and omnivore. If we’re forcing deer into one of the three categories, then I’d argue that herbivore makes the most sense. The reason is that a typical deer looks and acts like a stereotypical herbivore from central casting. Deer forage daily for plant matter that they chew with flat teeth and digest with a long, elaborate digestive tract. They live in small herds and are chased by wolves, mountain lions, and other predators. Because of deer’s behaviors, senses, and body structures, they should be more than welcome to join the Herbivore Club, but I think with the admonishment, when they mingle in the social hall, to keep quiet about this bird-and-squirrel business. In education, we keep this quiet on their behalf.
The lesson is that models in science are useful, even necessary, but typically limited. Deer, like other animals, do not display tattoos that say herbivore or omnivore. These words are classifications, or a type of modeling system, that some person invented to help study and understand the natural world. We often allow exceptions to keep the models working. In the case of herbivore, replace ‘often’ with ‘must’. Cows and sheep eat insects along with the grass, and they digest them easily. Rabbits sometimes eat worms. The list goes on.
Interestingly, I know of an animal that poses the opposite problem from deer. That animal is the giant panda.
Pandas are classified as herbivores because their diet is almost exclusively bamboo. However, they share few characteristics with their fellow plant-eaters. Like other bears, pandas are members of order Carnivora, or the carnivores. The digestive tract of the panda is relatively short and simple, allowing the panda to take in only a small fraction of the food energy that bamboo contains. A fully-grown panda is generally solitary, too large and powerful to be a victim of predators, and might readily attack an animal it doesn’t like. At the Herbivore Club’s annual dinner dance, I expect pandas would receive a few nervous glances.
Up next is a language problem that was actually resolved. That’s right, we’ve got a happy ending.
Question 3: What do we call ourselves?
I don’t mean Steve and Biff and Monique and Ashlyn. I mean what do we call our species, our collective selves. Outside of formal biology investigations, the name Homo sapiens sapiens just doesn’t work for everyday conversation. Only a dedicated taxonomy nerd is going to say things like “Hey, look at the Cornu aspersum** crawling on my Cucumis satisvus***.”
In at least one episode of Star Trek, an alien character refers to the Enterprise crew as “Earthers.” This is terrible. Difficult word to say, could reasonably include any organism that lives on the planet, and seems too suggestive of earthworms, groundhogs, voles, and other digging animals with which we’d rather not associate.
Another candidate from the era was terrans, which comes from the Latin terra, for Earth. Terrans also never caught on. Maybe everyone was tired of Latin by then, or maybe because terra was already used for terracotta, a kind of pottery. Excluding fictional characters, I suspect no one has ever thought of themselves as a terran.
William Shakespeare wrote “What a piece of work is man,” part of a speech for Hamlet. A few trifling centuries later, Neil Armstrong gave voice to “one small step for man,” and a moment later, “one giant leap for mankind.” We can cite similar examples, but they all have the same problem. Both man and mankind clearly fail as shorthand for the species, and for good reason. Each would appear to exclude half the population.
This brings us to human being, which proved to be promising but not quite right. The name was a little long, but it was specific, simple to understand, and inoffensive. The main problem—and I’m not the first to point this out—is that no one goes around talking about giraffe beings, or gerbil beings, or oyster beings. Why should we call ourselves human beings?
Eventually, someone dropped the superfluous being part of the phrase. When the adjective became the noun, we all became humans. Success! The name has stuck because it works. Today, when you watch or read some recently-created science fiction, open and read your science textbook, or listen to some hoity-toity documentary on PBS, you will find the word human used unequivocally and unmistakably to describe you, me, and the rest of us.
The moral is that every now and then, small problems resolve themselves. We can only hope as much for the other problems, large and small, with which we wrestle on a daily basis.
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That’s all I have for now, but please look for more essays in the series. Once again, this has been “Confounding Questions in Science”—now signing off for the night.
*The Batman series, wildly popular in its day, remains a nostalgic touchstone for aging baby boomers. The show also provides a treasure-trove of useless, pointless details for trivia questions, such as my offering about the Catwoman actresses. Read on if you dare and/or have nothing better to do at the moment.
Julie Newmar and Eartha Kitt played Catwoman in the television episodes, while Lee Meriwether played the role in a Batman movie. Typically a movie would be considered as separate from a television series, but Batman was different. The movie was produced by the same production team, featured the same main cast (with the singular exception of Lee Meriwether), and employed the same key sets and props, including the Batcave and Batmobile. The movie felt like another episode of the series, only longer and on a bigger budget. Then years later, Lee Meriwether joined with other Batman actors to compete on Celebrity Family Feud, losing in a close match to the cast of Gilligan’s Island. That last detail might seem irrelevant, but to my mind it adds credence for including Ms. M among the other Catwoman actresses.
For anyone not yet exhausted with this arcane exposé of minutiae—now dating almost half a century into the past—you may be astounded to learn that the Batman series offered yet ANOTHER conceivable Catwoman, and for a completely different reason. The penultimate episode of the third and final series, entitled “The Entrancing Dr. Cassandra,” presented various popular villains, Catwoman included, in a few brief scenes. Uncredited extras played the parts and they spoke no lines. If the Internet Movie Database (imdb.com) is to be believed, we know the names of those extras. Catwoman was played by Marilyn Watson, whom earlier had been Julie Newmar’s stunt double.
Some more imdb.com research reveals that stunt doubles did not perform for Eartha Kitt and Lee Meriwether. However, the daughter of the latter is Lesley Aletter, who became a professional stunt woman and is now, and I quote, the Co Governor for the Stunt Peer Group of the Television Academy. This stuff just doesn’t end.
**garden snail
***cucumber plant
