Great Names Speaker: Neil Degrasse Tyson
This Tuesday, Hamilton College welcomed Neil Degrasse Tyson for a lecture in the Field House as part of the Great Names speaker series. If you’re not familiar with him, he’s an astrophysicist and director of the Hayden Planetarium. He also hosted the documentary series Cosmos: A Space Odyssey and has appeared frequently in the media. The first scientist to be a Great Names speaker at Hamilton, Dr. Tyson gave a very inspiring and enlightening talk about science literacy, while also entertaining the audience. As disappointed as I still am that Pluto is no longer considered a planet, NDT’s repeated call to “get over it” in response to this issue and several others was pretty funny.
Dr. Tyson discussed the difference between the “good” and “bad” types of several scientific fields – like physics, biology, and engineering. His talk really made it clear that our culture doesn’t value science at all. At one point, he joked about an ad featuring employees helping kids to get interested in science – and the flyer contained a mistake about a pretty simple concept of physics!
I thought it was really interesting that he showed us a lot of different pieces of currency from other countries that feature scientists, inventors, and mathematicians, pointing out that a lot of nations clearly value science literacy and scientific accomplishments. Unfortunately, NDT presented some data from around the world that shows the US is falling behind in terms of mathematic capability of teens and young adults, as well as the publication of scientific studies. These parts of the lecture were particularly important – I’m not a “science person” at all, and I have to admit that I’m not personally very interested in pursuing much more scientific knowledge on a deeper level, beyond keeping up with big discoveries and related news. However, I do think scientific research is important for our society to engage in on a general level, and I think everyone should have a basic degree of scientific literacy. Dr. Tyson encouraged the audience to consider the implications of a society that doesn’t value scientific progress, or that insists on holding everyone back because of the beliefs of a few.
During a short Q&A session at the end, someone asked how we should encourage young kids to get involved with STEM subjects. Dr. Tyson’s answer was great: “get out of their way”. He explained that often caretakers and educators accidentally discourage kids from being interested in science out of an attempt to curtail danger or mess. But kids should have as much freedom as possible when exploring the world around them. My mom used to be a preschool teacher, and she’s told me a few times about this one student she had who would spill his juice almost every single day because he wanted to look at what happened when he did that. She never got mad because she saw no harm in letting him foster his curiosity. I thought it was really cool when NDT shared a similar story about when his own daughter was transitioning out of using sippy cups. The first time she had a normal cup, she accidentally knocked it over and the milk spilled onto the table and through the slats onto the floor below. She stared at it and then poked her head underneath the table to keep watching it. He cleaned up the mess and gave her another cup of milk – this time she tipped it over again just to see what happened. Dr. Tyson explained that this is essentially a way of conducting a scientific experiment.
My takeaway from this is that we don’t all have to major in biology or chemistry or go on to do revolutionary research, but we should all take some time to understand how the world around us works, and remember that sometimes it can be pretty interesting.