Many people acquire new interests throughout their lives, but there seems to be a real hurdle for many people who become interested in science or a related subject after they leave school. My local paper publishes a Sudoku puzzle with the reassuring comment that it "requires no math". Richard Feynman said (in his famous lectures "The Character of Physical Law") that "what we really mean by mathematics is careful reasoning". Do Sudoku puzzles require no careful reasoning? Surely the whole joy of these puzzles is the joy of careful reasoning!
Something is deeply wrong with our educational system when people with a deep hunger to exercise their powers of careful reasoning see no connection between this and the math they learned in school. I think that math and science teachers are judged on how well they teach their pupils the specific techniques on the syllabus, and they concentrate on these, and somehow forget to mention the philosophy of careful reasoning that underlies them. Also, it seems natural to ask children to study first those areas of knowledge that are well settled, so that the most efficient way of teaching the technique has also become settled. Unfortunately, the most efficient way of teaching the technique is rarely the kind of thought process that could possibly have led to the discovery in the first place. Somehow all the 'juice' has been squeezed out in the process of making learning 'efficient'.
The Japanese developed a tradition of 'Geometry for Fun'. I will never understand why they abandoned this in favor of the Western tradition of 'School as a way to drive children to suicide'.
The same thing happens in science. I am happy to pay taxes to hire biology teachers in the hope that American children will come to understand why Darwin's theories are good science and creationism is not, however well it is clothed in scientific jargon. Sadly, biology teachers seem to spend little time pursuing this goal. Instead, they drill children in memorizing the names of the parts of flowers; pistil, stamen etc. It is true that any child who later becomes a botanist will find it advantageous to be able to discuss comparative flower anatomy without using phrases like "the little dusty spikes in the middle" but that seems to me of comparably little value. However a multiple-choice test on names of flower parts is easy to construct and mark, enabling biology teachers to demonstrate they have achieved something. Sadly, in any long-lived bureaucracy, measurable but useless activities always have priority over useful goals.
In software engineering, where I have spent my professional life, the life-draining measurement is the KLOC, or thousand lines of code. In Cringely's PBS program, Steve Ballmer ridicules the idea of measuring accomplishment by lines of code, but it remains the standard for those organizations that try to measure productivity.
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This book is a remarkable example of a man who, in his retirement, began to study ancient Greece, and managed to write a national best seller (non-fiction) on the subject. No doubt professional historians will sneer at the book (partly because it is written in a way that can be understood by non-historians) but in every practical sense it was a success. Is it possible for someone who was not a career scientist to do something similar for science? That is the attempt I will make here.
This book can be regarded as the result of the author's joy in rediscovering science. But why did an outstanding professor of Eng. Lit. wait until his sixties to do so? His semi-autobiographical novel suggests that he originally wanted to be an architect - a not wholly unscientific background. His university has great science departments - the Cavity Magnetron was discovered there, partly by my first father-in-law. Why did Lodge find the hurdle so great?
I intend to create web pages, with links following below here, that try to reduce the hurdle, and show that math is more fun than Sudoku, that science is more fun than superstition, etc.