THE CURIOSITY GENE - POINT OF UNCERTAINTY

Tell my experience? My experience is. .

. You go talk to uh to  kindergarten kids or first grade kids, you find a class full of science  enthusiasts um and they ask deep questions. What is a dream?

Why do we have toes? Why is the moon round? What's the birthday of the world?

Why is grass green? These are profound important questions. They just bubble right out of them.

You go and talk 12th grade  students and there's none of that. They've become leiden and incurious. Something terrible has happened  between kindergarten and 12th grade, and it's not just puberty.

You could give Aristotle a tutorial, and you  could thrill him to the core of his being. Aristotle was an encyclopedic  polymath, an all-time intellect. Yet not only can you know  more than him about the world, you also can have a deeper  understanding of how everything works.

I'm not saying you're more intelligent than  Aristotle or wiser. That's not the point. The point is only that science  is cumulative, and we live later.

You don't have to be a scientist. You don't have to play the Bunsen  burner in order to understand enough science to overtake your imagined  need and fill that fancied gap. Science needs to be released  from the lab into the culture.

It's like we've forgotten who we are. . .

Explorers, Pioneers not Caretakers. But knowledge is preferable  to ignorance better by far to embrace the hard truth than a reassuring faith. If we crave some cosmic purpose,  then let us find ourselves a worthy goal.

It would be very healthy for  the human species if uh there were less discouragement and more scientists.