Complexity, Technology, Science, and Education

The evolution of scientific theories has always gone hand in hand with advances in the techniques and methods available to explore their implications.1 This partnership is particularly important now, when technological advances are opening new areas for experimentation, which in turn redefine the problems that can be approached scientifically. Recent work at the nanoscale2 is a good example. Work at this scale, including industrial applications, has been going on for more than a decade. Nevertheless the development of new technologies that permit the manipulation of matter at increasingly smaller scales of distance and time have transformed the field, highlighting changes in the dominant laws of physics at different scales and blurring the boundaries between disciplines. The implications of these and similar conceptual scientific advances for science education have not yet been coTHE JOURNAL OF THE LEARNING SCIENCES, 15(1), 5–9