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Yet instead, Sagan was punished by the scientific community for his public endeavors. The persecution began as early as the 1960s, when Harvard University denied him tenure. Nobel laureate Harold Urey, a chemist who had previously served as one of Sagan's mentors, helped quash his chances with a nasty letter objecting…
A 2008 analysis by the Project for Excellence in Journalism found that if you tune for five hours' worth of cable news you will probably catch only one minute's coverage of science and technology—compared with ten minutes of "celebrity and entertainment," twelve minutes of "accidents and disasters," and "26 minutes or…
But the reflected light-waves do more for us than this. They not only make us see things, but they make us see them in different colours. What, you will ask, is this too the work of the sunbeams? Certainly; for if the colour we see depends on the size of the waves which come back to us, then we must see things…
But people often ask, what is the use of learning all this? If you do not feel by this time how delightful it is to fill your mind with beautiful pictures of nature, perhaps it would be useless to say more. But in this age of ours, when restlessness and love of excitement pervade so many lives, is it nothing to be…
When you have reached and entered the gates of science, how are you to use and enjoy this new and beautiful land? This is a very important question for you may make a twofold use of it. If you are only ambitious to shine in the world, you may use it chiefly to get prizes, to be at the top of your class, or to pass in…
...there is nothing which can better deserve your patronage, than the promotion of science and literature. Knowledge is, in every country, the surest basis of public happiness. In one in which the measures of government receive their impression so immediately from the sense of the community as in ours, it is…
We must not believe the many, who say that only free people ought to be educated, but we should rather believe the philosophers who say that only the educated are free.
Daniel Kunitz is a friend of mine from college. He's spent his life as an innovative junior and senior high school social sciences teacher. Want the students to understand the Constitution of the United States? You could have them read it, Article by Article, and then discuss it in class but, sadly, this will put most…
At school, boys are fidgety, difficult, inattentive, and slow to learn, compared to girls. Nineteen out of every twenty hyperactive children are boys. Four times as many boys as girls are dyslexic and learning disabled. "Education is almost a conspiracy against the aptitudes and inclinations of a schoolboy," wrote…
Seibel: You mention four disciplines: music, graphics, mathematics, and text those are about as old as humanity. Clearly there are powerful ideas there that are independent of computers—the computer just provides a way to explore them that might be hard without the computer. Is there also a set of interesting…
You know the old story about the telephone and the telephone operators? The story is. sometime fairly early in the adoption of the telephone, when it was clear that use of the telephone was just expanding at an incredible rate, more and more people were having to be hired to work as operators because we didn't have…
He says things like, "Do good stuff." He says, "If you don't do good stuff, in good areas, it doesn't matter what you do." And Hamming said, "I always spend a day a week learning new stuff. That means I spend 20 percent more of my time than my colleagues learning new stuff. Now 20 percent at compound interest means…
"My boy is having his problems being a serious student," I told Eddie. "Well, your studying is very important," Eddie said, while the boy sat smiling a smile that said: an old person his about to hand out some Wisdom. Could this please be over fast? "You know, a jet plane burns its greatest energy taking off; but once…
In the hectic pace of the world today, there is no time for meditation, or for deep thought. A prisoner has time that he can put to good use. I’d put prison second to college as the best place for a man to go if he needs to do some thinking. If he’s motivated, in prison he can change his life.
I don’t think anybody ever got more out of going to prison than I did. In fact, prison enabled me to study far more intensively than I would have if my life had gone differently and I had attended some college. I imagine that one of the biggest troubles with colleges is there are too many distractions, too much…
Let me tell you something: from then until I left that prison, in every free moment I had, if I was not reading in the library, I was reading on my bunk. You couldn’t have gotten me out of books with a wedge. Between Mr. Muhammand’s teachings, my correspondence, my visitors– usually Ella and Reginald– and my reading…
Many who today hear me somewhere in person, or on television, or those who read something I’ve said, will think I went to school far beyond the eighth grade. This impression is due entirely to my prison studies.
Omni: Does that limit the number of people who can contribute, or even understand what's being done? Feynman: Or else somebody will develop a way of thinking about the problems so that we can understand them more easily. Maybe they'll just teach it earlier and earlier. You know, it's not true that what is called…
My cousin, at that time, who was three years older, was in high school and was having considerable difficulty with his algebra and had a tutor come, and I was allowed to sin in a corder while (LAUGHS) the tutor would try to teach my cousin algebra, problems liek 2x plus something. I said to my cousin then, "What're…
My father dealth a little bit with energy and used the term after I got a little bit of the idea about it. What he would have done I know, because he did in fact essentially the same thing--though not the same example of the toy dog. He would say, "It moves because the sun is shining," if he wanted to give the same…