Bigfoot: The Science Of Heroic Meteorology

The human race has spent almost all of its existence searching for and building a wealth of knowledge. But what would knowledge be without application? This is why it is absolutely necessary to link facts and theories across disciplines of knowledge. The world around us does not consist of isolated occurrences, rather, everything is connected in one way or another. Therefore our knowledge of these occurrences also needs to be connected in order for our survival as a society. This simple fact is evident in the science of dynamic meteorology, the encounter of one man with Bigfoot, and the way that we explain phenomena though math and physics. As our ability to forecast storms increases and mobile technology allows more people to be alerted …show more content…
Biologists believe that no ape-like creature could go undiscovered by modern science for so long without creditable evidence. A large ape called Gigantopithecus did exist, but died out about 300,000 years ago (Wayman, 2012, para. 1). This begs the question: how does one decide which source is truth when two sources contradict? Clearly, the superiority of either current science or Native American legends are in question. Many people may claim that science is more trustworthy due to the fact that we put so much faith into scientific explanation in today’s society. Science generally incorporates reason as a main way of knowing, while legend incorporates imagination, emotion, faith, and memory which are not as accepted as reason. Despite this, Native American cultures still have a strong belief in Bigfoot, which is confirmed by sightings of this creature. By accepting that some disciplines will contradict each other, it is important to examine your values in order to decide which you will accept as knowledge. Many people in the US respect the word of scientists as truth, thus they believe that Native American legends are not creditable ways of proving Bigfoot’s existence. Native Americans rely on their elders and legends to tell them about the world, thus they stick to their legends as truth and accept Bigfoot’s existence as fact, not belief. In the case of Bigfoot, we may never know who …show more content…
For example, a concept in calculus called derivatives will tell where the maximums, minimums, and zeros of a function exist while also telling if a function is increasing, decreasing, concave up, or concave down. This concept is used to explain how position, velocity, and acceleration are all interrelated. Essentially, position is the original function [f(x)], velocity is its derivative [f’(x)], and acceleration is the derivative of velocity [f’’(x)] (Larson, 2014, p. 124). Alone, math and physics equations work, but how can combining information from different disciplines help inform knowledge and understanding? Through combining these two fields better synthesized information can be used in the application of gaining knowledge. For example, in a school-sponsored club I am involved with, I have to drop a bungee cord and weight from a certain height and figure out where it stops above the ground. I had learned in calculus the concept of derivative and in physics I had learned about the position and velocity equations. For a whole year, I never associated the two in the problem of bungee drop. Recently, I got to graph the position of the falling weight, and found that the shape of the graph resembled a parabola. Then I realized that the lowest point of the parabola was where the velocity was zero, and also the point in which the weight stopped above the ground. Theoretically, if I took the