It all Starts with Science

First, from Bill Bryson ...

Chapter 8: Einstein's Universe. p. 122 You may not feel outstandingly robust, but if you are an average-sized adult you will contain within your modest frame ... potential energy - enough to explode with the force of thirty very large hydrogen bombs, assuming you knew how to liberate it and really wished to make a point. Everything has this kind of energy trapped within it. We're just not very good at getting it out. Keep that in mind the next time you feel powerless. Talk about living up to your potential - what a challenge.

Chapter 9. The Mighty Atom p. 134 They [atoms] are also fantastically durable. Because they are so long lived, atoms really get around. Every atom you possess has almost certainly passed through several stars and been part of millions of organisms on its way to becoming you. We are each so atomically numerous and so vigorously recycled at death that a significant number of our atoms - up to a billion for each of us, it has been suggested - probably once belonged to Shakespeare. A billion more each came from Buddha and Genghis Khan and Beethoven, and any other historical figure you care to name. Makes me feel one with the universe, how about you?

and in the same chapter

p. 138 [Rutherford, winner of the 1908 Nobel Prize in Chemistry] wasn't even particularly clever at experimentation. He was simply tenacious and open-minded. For brilliance, he substituted shrewdness and a kind of daring....Confronted with an intractable problem, he was prepared to work at it harder and longer than most people and to be more receptive to unorthodox explanations. But not that tenacious, apparently...In the beginning, Rutherford worked on radio waves, with some distinction ... but gave up when he was persuaded by a senior colleague that radio had little future. I'm glad there were plenty of others to pick up where Rutherford left off. I draw inspiration from this and myriad other examples in this book, because the big leaps in knowledge tended to come from either accidents or from those "unorthodox explanations." We tend to grow comfortable with our status quos, it seems, and progress only comes when we are willing to shed our current realities in exchange for something better, if something at once weirder and harder to stomach. Change is not for the faint-hearted, it seems.

And from Natalie Angier, a good joke..

They told jokes, like the one about physicist Werner Heisenberg , whose famed uncertainty principle says that you can know the position of an electron as it orbits the nuclear heart of an atom, or you can know its velocity, but that you can't know both at once. To wit: Heisenberg is scheduled to give a lecture at MIT, but he's running late and speeding through Cambridge in his rental car. A cop pulls him over and says, "Do you have any idea how fast you were going?" "No," Heisenberg replies brightly, "but I know where I am!" "Now, you tell that at a cocktail party, and people will walk away from you," said Michael Rubner, a materials scientist at MIT. "Tell it in front of five hundred eighteen-year-olds at MIT, and they just roar." This, to underscore the relative disparity in science knowledge in our society. I hope you're not walking away from me now after repeating that joke!

I offer up these excerpts to encourage you to review what it is you think you know, and all that is out there that you may have forgotten since you were actively involved in formal education. There is so much to know in order to be able to put things in context and find new ways of doing things.

And, I'll close with one of my favorite lines from a comedy album I listened to while a freshman at Rice University in 1975 (usually, I'll admit here, with some illegal smoke circling in the air above me and my friends in the dorm room).

"Benjamin Franklin: The only President of the United States, who was never President of the United States." and "You know, a cave is really just a hole on its side." Everything You Know is Wrong by the Firesign Theater comedy troupe, October 1974