Taking in the stunning show of color, Alzate’s scientific mind posed an important question that would enlighten our understanding of the Solar System: how and why were “the Northern Lights” so close to the equator? The 18th century Mexican scientist would help the world come to understand that the borealis is actually caused by radiation from space, not–as it was thought–radiation coming out of the Earth. Another Mexican scientist, Francisco Dimas Rangel, picked up where Alzate left off and figured out that the borealis was, in fact, tied to the Sun. And yet, their stories are just two of many left unknown to most American students. Their names aren’t prone to come up in the same lessons as their peers in Europe. The same is true for Joaquín Velázquez de León, who joined a global effort to calculate the distance from the Earth to the Sun. He’s even unknown to students sitting in Southern California classrooms, mere hours away from the mountaintop in Baja California where he gathered his data. “Scientists like Johannes Kepler, Tycho Brache, and Sir Isaac Newton made concrete predictions about the Solar System,” said Whittier College physics professor Jordan Hanson. “But the people who actually figured out the distance to the Sun and showed that it’s in the middle, and that Venus is going in front of us, and that’s why this all works, were from Mexico. And there were also French people who went to Tahiti, and there were people who went to other parts of the world. But we don’t really talk about that in your basic physics or astronomy middle school science class.” However, Whittier College gives these scientists their time in the sun.
For years, Whittier professors have shown students the scientific contributions of Latin America–most recently, in a course led by Hanson: The History of Science in Latin America. By opening students’ eyes to the myriad ways studies of the natural world have flourished there, Hanson hopes students come to more deeply appreciate the knowledge of others. Plus, for those who share a heritage with those countries, the course can become a source of deeper appreciation of their cultural history. Students flocked to Hanson’s course, now in its second year. As a small college, Whittier classes are typically about 10 to 20 students. But this fall, about 30 have enrolled—science and humanities majors alike. Over the semester, they cover everything from Alzate and ancient Mayan math to cutting-edge cosmic ray research in Chile and the modern medical insights that have come out of Peru. “[When] we go over the sources and talk about the story about the aurora, sometimes people, they feel joy, they are surprised,” Hanson said. But in the end, “people also aren’t so surprised because, after all, people all across time and different nations do science.” As an example, he uses the fact that, for ages, the indigenous people of Peru knew how to stave off malaria with cinchona bark. As the story goes, the Spanish quickly realized that the people they had colonized knew something they didn’t. Once the life-saving quinine was extracted from the bark, an effective treatment for a disease that had devastated the world began to spread. Hanson hopes such examples help drive home one of the main points of the class: the enormous benefit to paying attention to people who are different. It’s a topic he also covers in a separate course about expeditions: Norwegian explorers were successful because they applied what they learned about physics and nutrition from their encounters with the Netsilik Inuit. In that spirit, he encourages his students to share knowledge from their own experiences with the class. They’ve talked about the medical benefits of onion skin, and how sage could help the respiratory system. At the end of the semester, they each share an example, either from their own family or from Latin American history, in a digital storytelling project. “It’s a course about not knowing everything. It’s a course about trusting other humans that they have discovered something,” he said. “This [course is about] being curious, and if people are different than you, they might have something to teach you.”
