My daughter came home with a book from the school library yesterday - a little American book explaining how magnets work.
It was nice, informative little book with some interesting experiments in it - for example how to make a compass - but there was one thing in it which struck me as odd.
Talking about magnetite, it said that the rocks had been in the earth for thousands of years and had become magnetised by the earth's magnetic field.
That's thousands of years, not millions.
Is this a sop to creationism, or is there some innocent explanation to this? Perhaps they suppose that small children might not understand the concept of millions, or might it be something to do with the occasional reversal of the earth's magnetic poles?
Maybe I've become oversensitised because of the "kick in the teeth" debates on here, but it just seemed weird to me.
It was nice, informative little book with some interesting experiments in it - for example how to make a compass - but there was one thing in it which struck me as odd.
Talking about magnetite, it said that the rocks had been in the earth for thousands of years and had become magnetised by the earth's magnetic field.
That's thousands of years, not millions.
Is this a sop to creationism, or is there some innocent explanation to this? Perhaps they suppose that small children might not understand the concept of millions, or might it be something to do with the occasional reversal of the earth's magnetic poles?
Maybe I've become oversensitised because of the "kick in the teeth" debates on here, but it just seemed weird to me.
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