Epistemic standards for “Why did it take so long to invent X?”
I was reading a popular OER Astronomy textbook yesterday.  Long sigh.  &quot;Why did it take so long to...&quot;?  Regrettably not. &quot;How very long will it eventually take to...&quot;, write an intro Astronomy textbook, that doesn&#x27;t bungle the color of the Sun?  I still don&#x27;t know of a single one.  With true-color in a leading image, and in illustrations.  With no misconceptions about yellow stars, or scattering to yellow, or blackbody color, or color perception.  With explicit mention of stellar classification color&#x27;s non-perceptual white-point of blue Vega.  With correctness from clarity, not from ambiguity and omissions.  Such a text could have been written any time in the last few decades.  People have been suggesting it.  So how many more decades will we wait?  It&#x27;s a mistake to confuse systemic communication, coordination, and incentive dysfunction, with &quot;people don&#x27;t care&quot; (as the interventions needed are different)... but they do superficially look so similar.<p>Similarly, atoms are taught very poorly, even by the incoherent standard of chemistry education content.  I&#x27;m currently trying to decide whether to create a little exemplar of better, to speed up too-long conversations about transformative content improvement. &quot;Atoms are little balls&quot;; interactive <i>accurate</i> simulations; real pictures.  Consider those pictures.  There are <i>lots</i> of wonderful images and videos of atoms... on peoples&#x27; drives.  Not in papers, for space.  Not on lab websites, for why bother, when few visit. Rarely on youtube.  A few show up in talks, also space constrained, also rarely on youtube.  So to achieve a minimal standard of &quot;when introducing a thing, <i>show the bleeping thing</i>&quot;, would require a lot of mucking about, asking after images, educating about copyright... sigh.  At least accurate electron simulation is getting easier with time, with open-source python replacing expensive commercial replacing good-luck-with-that fortran.  And yet, for how long will student understanding and careers suffer from rubbish content?  One more year?  5?  10?  25?  More?<p>As with individuals, society has a great deal of &quot;yeah, I really should do that; been meaning to; but I just haven&#x27;t gotten around to it yet&quot;.