Chatham-Kent native Kurtis Baute is trying to live his dream, one that will help educate others on the marvels of science.
But he’ll need our help to get there.
So far, as informative and interesting as his approaches have been to various subjects, it’s been a tough go.
Baute left his job as a science teacher in Vancouver a year ago to work to produce videos, shared via YouTube, to educate and entertain at the same time.
He’s detailed the history of the universe, through creating, placing and then dropping via chain reaction 13,799 dominoes. Each represented the passage of one million years of nearly 14 billion (13.799) years since the Big Bang created our universe.
As the dominoes fell, he discussed key occurrences in the universe’s progression.
All this was done right here in Chatham-Kent when Baute returned for a visit and made use of his parents’ warehouse near Jeanette’s Creek.
That pretty much started it all for Baute. Since then, he’s produced about a video a month pertaining to various subjects. Those included measuring the size of the Earth, using “just my bicycle and two sticks,” as he termed it.
He’s also run a marathon, with each centimetre of distance representing one year in human history; 42 kilometres represented 42 million years passing. His path? The backcountry roads of Chatham-Kent.
Want to learn about climate change? Spend 14 hours in a large “jar,” an enclosed cube, with 200 plants to hopefully scrub out the carbon dioxide you produce. Baute did.
These are some of his experiments he captured on video over the past year, all interesting and rather unique. And all very educational.
Baute delivers the information in a casual, energetic and informative manner.
He also has the perfect look for a science educator, including his mannerisms, somewhat disheveled hair, and most importantly, unbridled enthusiasm.
He’s entertaining and informative.
But he’s not pop culture. Perhaps if he blew himself up trying to launch himself into space, his video on that calamity would go viral.
What a fickle world we live in today.
Baute’s videos deserve a look, especially by fans of evolution, the environment, and by people from his home community of Chatham-Kent.
View his work at https://www.youtube.com/user/ScopeofScience
I’m writing to correct information found in the article Marathon of Science that appeared in the January 9 edition of the Chatham voice. This article implies that mankind has existed on the earth for 42-million-years. Nope.
42 million years for the age of mankind is way off the mark. Evolutionary history of primates can be traced back 65 million years. It is not correct to claim that modern humans (Homo Sapiens) came into existence only 20 million years after the appearance of the first primate. Modern humans bear little resemblance to the earliest primates.
Almost all archeology works attributed to modern humans are less than 100,000 years old, the vast majority 10,000 years or less. Studies of molecular biology reveal that the approximate time of divergence from the common ancestor of all modern human populations was 200,000 years ago. Anatomically correct modern humans do not appear in the fossil record earlier than that. According to the article “We spent 40-plus million years figuring out how to make a wheel”. Nope.
The wheel was invented in 3500 B.C. in Mesopotamia (modern day Iraq). That is approximately 5500 years ago.
On the bright side, at least the article was not trying to make the case that human lineage can only be traced back 5000 years.