Honorable Forum: If students learn nothing else, skepticism, especially about themselves and authority, is a pretty good start.
From: What Do You Care What Other People Think? (concluding essay, "The Value of Science") by Richard Feynman, p. 245 "The scientist has a lot of experience with ignorance and doubt and uncertainty, and this experience is of very great importance, I think. When a scientist doesn't know the answer to a problem, he is ignorant. When he has a hunch as to what the result is, he is uncertain. And when he is pretty darn sure what the result is going to be, he is still in some doubt. We have found it of paramount importance that in order to progress we must recognize our ignorance and leave room for doubt. Scientific knowledge is a body of statements of varying degrees of certainty-some most unsure, some nearly sure, but none absolutely certain." I think this book, especially from around page 212, is a particularly useful bit of thinking by a great mind wrought from an ordinary human who took some extraordinary leaps. The entire book is well worth reading, but this essay (p. 240-248) in particular should be required reading for every student of science--and for that matter, everybody. It's not that genius is rare, it is that it is abused. Don't let this happen. WT
