In April, I was asked to give a short speech to a group of
local students who participated in a science fair. I wasn’t
sure what to say to them, until I saw a newscast the night
before the fair. The story was some typically inaccurate fluff
piece giving antiscience boneheads “equal time”
with science, as if any ridiculous theory should have equal
time against the truth.
I sat down with a pad of paper and a pencil and scribbled
down this speech. I gave it almost exactly as I wrote it.
I know a place where the Sun never sets.
It’s a mountain, and it’s on the Moon.
It sticks up so high that even as the Moon spins, it’s
in perpetual daylight. Radiation from the Sun pours down
on there day and night, 24 hours a day—well, the Moon’s
day is actually about 4 weeks long, so the sunlight pours
down there 708 hours a day.
I know a place where the Sun never shines. It’s
at the bottom of the ocean. A crack in the crust there exudes
nasty chemicals and heats the water to the boiling point.
This would kill a human instantly, but there are creatures
there, bacteria, that thrive. They eat the sulfur from the
vent, and excrete sulfuric acid.
I know a place where the temperature is 15 million
degrees, and the pressure would crush you to a microscopic
dot. That place is the core of the Sun.
I know a place where the magnetic fields would
rip you apart, atom by atom: the surface of a neutron star,
a magnetar.
I know a place where life began billions of years
ago. That place is here, the Earth.
I know these places because I’m a scientist.
Science is a way of finding things out. It’s
a way of testing what’s real. It’s what Richard
Feynman called “A way of not fooling ourselves.”
No astrologer ever predicted the existence of Uranus,
Neptune, or Pluto. No modern astrologer had a clue about
Sedna, a ball of ice half the size of Pluto that orbits
even farther out. No astrologer predicted the more than
150 planets now known to orbit other suns.
But scientists did.
No psychic, despite their claims, has ever helped
the police solve a crime. But forensic scientists have,
all the time.
It wasn’t someone who practices homeopathy
who found a cure for smallpox, or polio. Scientists did,
medical scientists.
No creationist ever cracked the genetic code. Chemists
did. Molecular biologists did.
They used physics. They used math. They used chemistry,
biology, astronomy, engineering.
They used science.
These are all the things you discovered doing your
projects. All the things that brought you here today.
Computers? Cell phones? Rockets to Saturn, probes
to the ocean floor, PSP, gamecubes, gameboys, X-boxes? All
by scientists.
Those places I talked about before—you can
get to know them too. You can experience the wonder of seeing
them for the first time, the thrill of discovery, the incredible,
visceral feeling of doing something no one has ever done
before, seen things no one has seen before, know something
no one else has ever known.
No crystal balls, no tarot cards, no horoscopes.
Just you, your brain, and your ability to think.
Welcome to science. You’re gonna like it
here.
