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rvdemerchant.bsky.social
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rvdemerchant.bsky.social
People I Mostly Admire - Episode 145 with @neildegrassetyson.com is a real gem. I enjoyed the whole episode. I love this quote about teaching and meeting students 90% of the way. Fitting for #math and #science. freakonomics.com/podcast/neil...
EVITT: But at the same time, you’re also a humanist. Because no scientist talks about impressions. And somehow you managed to transcend data and put that together with emotion in a very interesting way. I think that’s your secret sauce. What do you think? TYSON: Well, it could be. That’s just, I think, socialization? My parents were social animals. They had dinner parties a couple of times a month. I had exposure to what it was to entertain, to interact with people, to conduct and hold, sustain, end, begin a conversation. So I would say that as an educator, if I just face the chalkboard and talk, then you have to meet me 90 percent of the way there. Well, if that’s what I’m doing, then I’m a lecturer. But if I turn around, face you and meet you 90 percent of the way to where you are, then I’m an educator. And doing so means I have to think about, what are you thinking about? What are your receptors for learning? What is your capacity to retain information? How can I influence that? What words do I use? How long should my sentences be? Should there be an infusion of humor so that you’ll smile while you’re learning, you associate good feelings with the new thoughts, and you come back for more? This is what I have honed over all these years. By the way, a lot of the tap roots of that landed in my very first book, Merlin’s Tour of the Universe. In there are rhymes and poetry and sentence structure that is intended to draw you in, to get you to want more, to make you smile, to make you laugh. So, I don’t mind calling it a secret sauce, but I don’t want it to be a secret.
November 24, 2024 at 6:12 AM
rvdemerchant.bsky.social
People I Mostly Admire - Episode 145 with @neildegrassetyson.com is a real gem. Enjoyed the whole episode. Love this quote about nomenclature which is so fitting for #math and #science. freakonomics.com/podcast/neil... (1 of 2)
EVITT: Since when is science done by a vote? Imagine if they voted on whether Darwin’s theory was right or Copernicus’s theory was right? Number one, they would have voted the wrong way — TYSON: We’re not voting on what science is true or not. We’re voting on nomenclature. You can’t really communicate unless everyone knows what the nomenclature is. If you discover a comet, what are the rules for naming a comet so that there’s consistency? What are the units of measure we should use when we’re talking about this phenomenon in the universe versus that? And so the question was given that the word “planet” was never formally defined since ancient times. In fact, the last time it was defined unambiguously was when “planet” — from the Greek planétés, meaning wanderer — when we had the seven wanderers, the sun, the moon, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn. That’s the last time it was defined unambiguously. So they created categories of planets. If I say “dwarf planet,” you will know the object is large enough to be spherical, because gravity makes that happen, but not so large that it owns its band around the sun. There are thousands of other objects orbiting the solar system at Pluto’s distance. It does not command a space the way what we’re calling planets do. Henceforth, Pluto’s a dwarf planet. There’s an asteroid called Ceres, which was big enough to be a sphere. That got promoted from being an asteroid to a dwarf planet. Now, if you want to just call everything that orbits a star a planet, I don’t have a problem with that. It just renders the word completely useless. After you say, “I discovered a planet orbiting a star,” then we have to play 20 questions before I even know what kind of object you’re talking about.
November 24, 2024 at 6:10 AM