Tomorrow's Science Heroes?

An anonymous reader writes "As a kid I was (and still am) heavily influenced by Carl Sagan, and a little later by Stephen Hawking. Now as I have started a family with two kids, currently age 5 and 2, I am wondering who out there is popularizing science. Currently, my wife and I can get the kids excited about the world around them, but I'd like to find someone inspiring from outside the family as they get older. Sure, we'll always have 'Cosmos,' but are there any contemporaries who are trying to bring science into the public view in such a fun and intriguing way? Someone the kids can look up to and be inspired by? Where is the next Science Hero?"

Comments

Tyson

[melikamp]

I am currently going through a Neil deGrasse Tyson phase.

Re:Tyson

[skorch]

What I like most about Neil DeGrasse Tyson is how he's so deeply passionate about science, the scientific process, and the very philosophy of inquiry into the nature of the universe. He is able to evangelize science, and bring that often overlooked but much needed emotion to the conversation about what could otherwise be very dry and boring subjects.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Ai-VvboPnA

Now if you can watch this and not be moved in some way, then I'm sorry, but it is my humble opinion that you are broken. This passion is a quality that almost every good preacher, salesman, or spokesman knows and yet so many science teachers can't seem to figure out: You need to engage your audience passionately, and make them feel the importance of what you're saying, not simply explain it to them.

Richard Dawkins

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm 19, and Dawkins has been an enormous influence on me. A few years back he was one of figures that helped me jetisson religion, and ever since I've had a greater curiousity about science.

Re:Richard Dawkins

[williamhb]

I'm 19, and Dawkins has been an enormous influence on me. A few years back he was one of figures that helped me jetisson religion, and ever since I've had a greater curiousity about science.

While Dawkins is a "famous" "scientist", his fame is not mostly for his science, but rather for his vehement anti-religion stance, and his popular-press non-peer-reviewed (and in my opinion startlingly unrigorous and intellectually sloppy) books bagging religion and spirituality.

As a practicing research scientist I would actually go so far as to say that Dawkins gives a bad impression of science -- as a career where it's acceptable to be bigoted and systematically unpleasant to people. And that unfortunately plays into what is perhaps the biggest barrier to the recruitment of new scientists: not "Is science valuable?" but "Do I really want to spend forty years of my life working in an environment like that?"

Even Dawkins's job title "Professor of the Public Understanding of Science" is an anomaly that gives a false impresson. Most professorships are named after what the professor researches, whereas Dawkins does comparatively little research into how the public understands science, and instead spends a great deal of time pontificating on what their understanding of science must be in order to be acceptable to him.

Re:Richard Dawkins

[bertoelcon]

RELIGION IS FUCKING STUPID.

Religion may be stupid to you, but it is the single factor that has influenced the majority of actions of humanity for as long as history can track.

How long has science been the major influencing power?

Re:Mythbusters does it

[Weedhopper]

It still generates interest and gets kids thinking so Mythbusters gets a thumbs up from me but let's not pretend like they're rigorous. I wish they'd do more end of the show disclaimers ; things they did right/wrong, etc. Science isn't science if you're not considering all the faults and sources of error in your experiments.

Re:Sorry, No.

[RightwingNutjob]

BZZT. False. Science rests on the belief that order and rationality exist in the universe. The prerequisite of "I can show/demonstrate/repeat" is a faith that the universe is not chaotic, and that if I drop an apple and it fell 100 times that last 100 times I tried it, there's a damn small chance it'll hover the next time. And it's a real leap of faith to extrapolate the order to the timescale of billions of years, as is common practice in computing things like the Hubble Constant, and modeling evolution by natural selection and random variation of traits over hundreds of generations. We geeks share this faith in an ordered universe. Except that pinko atheists scream bloody murder about religion while making this substantive leap of faith, and normal people like me conclude that God wrote the immutable laws of mathematics and physics.

Re:Sorry, No.

[infaustus]

Einstein's belief in God is what lead him to make his stupid "God doesn't play dice" comment. If one of the greatest scientific minds ever to exist can be crippled by religion, then I have good evidence science and religion are incompatible.

Re:Sorry, Yes

[Anonymous Coward]

Honestly, to all openly religious people who consider yourself modern thinkers (at least the ones that read slashdot), you need to start to separate yourselves from the religious people who believe in an endgame. Not to quote a hideous documentary, but humanity will never survive until we get over the psychological addiction to hoping for an end to it all.

Re:Smirking Pluto Killer - Not My Favorite

[arb phd slp]

I dislike that Neil deGrasse guy, he was quite the smirking "I'm smart and you're not" during that whole Pluto isn't a planet anymore crap. I'm with Michio Kaku as my favorite science enthusiast and speaker. He's smart, he's enthused and he didn't go around on the Tonight Show smirking about how Pluto isn't a planet. I'm also looking to punch whoever it was that decided Brontosaurus wasn't a proper name for the Brontosaurus too. (shakes fist in fury)

You're a little late on that one. The peer-reviewed paper that showed that the "brontosaurus" was really an apatosaur was published in 1903.

I'm a Michio Kaku fan, too and have been since I read his book Hyperspace 15 years ago.

Re:Sorry, No.

[spire3661]

It is ENTIRELY possible to believe in a creator and still accept the true wonder of the universe. Religion does not mean the same thing as faith. Organized religion as set forth by the religions 'clergy', for the most part is tailored to control the populace. People LIKE to be controlled, its comforting to some. Why have police when you can force your people to police themselves through guilt?

Re:5 and 2 years old?

[Anonymous Coward]

Not necessarily true. I've got a 7 and a 4yo. My wife and I were in the exact same situation as the OP a few years ago and did the best we could with random sources, family science experiments, youtube videos, and so on, and it's amazing how certain things stay with them. It's probably a mistake to expect the kids to be able to take a test after each session, but over the weeks, months, and years, it's surprising how often ours have asked follow-up questions or have have asked if something they have experienced is related to something we talked about in the past.

Michio Kaku

[astonish]

All the names listed above do the trick and a special note goes out to the cognitive scientists: Pinker, Dennett, Minsky, etc.

Carl Sagan was an even rarer breed though. More than just popularizing science: making it understandable and curious, he brought it to a deeper almost spiritual level and let you see both how your day to day life was a part of something so unimaginably huge and fantastic while simultaniously making a good case for our species to push the frontiers.

I don't think anyone can compare. If I had to try I'd pick Michio Kaku, he's a definitely more down to Earth than Sagan, but still great.

P.S. For a bit of history and sociology in the mix I really really suggest you pick up Connections (Season 1) and The Day the Universe Changed by James Burke. It stands beside Cosmos as my favorite TV series and will get your kids interested in economics, sociology and history on top of science.

Good luck with that

[Gothmolly]

Today's kids are being taught that feelings are more important than logic, that 'social justice' is more important than the actual kind, that there's no difference between winning and losing, and that causality is just a conceit of the rich. They'll grow up and become government housing administrators, or city employees, or socialized/unionized construction workers. They'll grow up with a hatred of science, of objectivity, and of individuality, it will all be replaced by compassion, empathy and team spirit.

Sorry for your loss.

At that age? (mine are 5.5 and 3.25)

[frooddude]

Bill Nye, my kids have the theme song memorized.

Sid the Science Kid. Not bad really, drives the whole "it's not magic, figure it out!" thing.

And just to throw in some non-TV things:

Lego for the fine motor skills and figuring out how to make something cool

Find a sport your kid is into. I can't stand baseball and I like soccer (playing at least), I don't know if it's genetic or what, but my son is much the same. Sports are cool because of things like gravity and all his friends.

Best physics presenter I've seen so far

[Anonymous Coward]

Brian Cox.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brian_Cox_(physicist)
http://www.imdb.com/name/nm2207118/

Re:Sorry, No.

[Hylandr]

Religion and Science are 100% incompatible. Religion = "I Believe", Science = "I can show/demonstrate/repeat".

Then show us your replication of the big bang. - Repeatedly. You certainly didn't observe it, you can't repeat it. By those terms there is no reasonable means by which you can authoritatively demonstrate it. Science is just yet another form of religion. You believe in the educated guess of someone else.

F1

[vigmeister]

Get them to follow F1. The competitive nature and the inherent coolness of racing cars will get them hooked. The breadth in sciences covered by the sport is pretty cool ranging from the biology of weight loss from dehydration of the drivers to the electronics behind precision timing. It is a breathtakingly awesome sport even when none of the competitors are performing well.

P.S. Be very careful to make sure they do not start watching any other programming on SpeedTV!

Cheers!
--
Vig

Forrest M. Mims III

[ocularDeathRay]

gotta go with Forrest M. Mims III. I know there are some people out there rolling there eyes because of his stance on intelligent design, but you are missing the point. This is the guy who wrote all the books about electronics radio shack used to sell. Those books are still available, although the price is a little higher now that the shack doesn't stock them. I just saw them at Fry's though, so I know they are readily available. I started reading those books and tinkering with electronics in the 4th grade. It gave me a lifelong love of electronics and science. I still rely on the stuff I learned from those books twenty years later. Check out his website. Whether or not you agree with his conclusions, his inventions and experiments are exactly the kind of stuff I would want my kids to do.

Kaku's a barking moron

[Man On Pink Corner]

He tried his damnedest to kill the Cassini/Huygens mission that has given us knowledge about Saturn and Titan second only to the Voyager program. ("OMG teh evil Plutonium is going to be magically smushed up n an asplosion and kill us all!")

Never mind that the risks were virtually nonexistent, even if you didn't bother to weigh them against the knowledge we stood to gain. He's no different from the tin-foil hat crowd who tried to shut down the LHC with lawsuits because we might all get swallowed by a black hole.

Michio Kaku has little credibility in my book, because I have no idea whose side he's on... science's, or woo-woo Earth First nutcases.

Re:Kaku's a barking moron

[Man On Pink Corner]

The link I posted would be amusing if it weren't so dumb. Kaku spends paragraphs explaining in detail how the scientists and engineers designing RTG-equipped missions were a bunch of reckless morons, and how a launch accident with an RTG would bring a catastrophic civil disaster on the scale of those depicted in zombie movies. Then, at the height of the wharrgarbl, he tosses in the point that such world-ending accidents had already occurred several times. Um, OK, I guess the RTG encapsulation wasn't so flawed after all, seeing as how we're mostly still here.

As I recall, after President Clinton irresponsibly failed to step in and abort the Cassini launch, Kaku turned his attention and that of his PR agent towards warning us of the OMGWTFBBQ scenarios that would no doubt follow the probe's gravitational-boost flyby of Earth.

He may have done some good work in the past but this sort of lameness needs to be seen as a career-limiting move for a professional scientist. I'm all in favor of being really, really careful with radioactive stuff, but the fact is, it's not dignified for a PhD physicist to go full retard. What will the creationists think?

You're asking the wrong question

[Hojima]

Going back on topic here, what you really want is a way to get them into science. Kids are already curious and easily amused, so you've already won half the battle. Just get them science toys, videos, and equipment, and take trips to aquariums, science museums, and planetariums. I remember my first microscope. I was eight and I wouldn't put the damn thing down. You'd be surprised how much people get inspired by the sheer beauty of science. And if you really want to geekify them, get them Lego Mindstorms. A science hero to look up to usually comes after they start learning more and see who discovered what.

Re:You're asking the wrong question

[tommyhj]

I have to agree to this. Especially getting them a microscope seems to be effective (worked on me too). I never found any science heroes - probably because I early on perceived the scientific community as standing together behind the scenes, and leaving the science presentation to other, more capable people.

And anyway - real heroes never die, so just use all the old ones! Start with some of the old Greek ones for basics :)

Brian Cox

[zoeblade]

Seeing as everyone else has Adam Savage, Neil deGrasse Tyson and Richard Dawkins pretty well covered, and you already know about Carl Sagan and presumably Richard Feynman and J. Bronowski, I should probably add Brian Cox to the list.

He's a particle physicist at CERN, and has an unrealistic level of enthusiasm for absolutely everything. It seems a good bet that the physicist in Sunshine was based on him, especially considering that he was the science consultant for the film. He's in a whole bunch of documentaries enthusing about how great the latest scientific discoveries are.

Re:Brian Cox

[Myrddin Wyllt]

I'd have to go with Brian Cox as well; his enthusiasm really comes across in the BBC documentaries he has fronted. Plus he was a Rock Star before getting his PhD (OK, keyboard player for one-hit wonders D:Ream, but still...). Plus he's married to a TV Sports presenter. Oh, and for anything maths related, Marcus du Sautoy has many of the same 'enthusiasm combined with real knowledge' qualities.

Re:Sorry, Yes

[phantomfive]

Religions are falsifiable (science is the un-falsifiable thing: it is a tool, not a proposition. How do you falsify a hammer? How do you falsify science?). Any decent religious system has ideas of the type, if you do X, then Y will happen. Let's investigate a bit, and see what some religions say:

Buddhism: if you follow the eight-fold path, your suffering will end. Extremely testable. If you follow the eight-fold path, and you are still suffering, then man, they led you astray.
Tantric yoga: do these exercises and meditations and eventually you will have a kundalini rising (enlightenment). So if you do them, and you don't have a kundalini rising, then you know tantra is worthless (either that or your teacher sucks).
The Bible: Those who believe shall be able to do miracles, such as drink poison and not get hurt, or heal the sick (Mark 15:17). So if you follow Christ and you can't do those things, then......yeah, you've just falsified it.
Daoism: 99% of the battle of daoism is figuring out what you are supposed to do. That is an ancient Chinese way of teaching.....but, if you ever do figure out what it is you're supposed to do, then you will be able to tap into the mysterious power of the Dao. If you figure out what you are supposed to do, and do it, and still can't tap into that power, then you've just falsified Daoism.
Mormonism: fast and pray oft, grow in humility, and you will be filled with joy and consolation. I really like Mormonism because it is even more scientific: it says all over the place things like, "if you have faith, God will give you anything that is good." It gives examples of people who became good enough that God gave them anything they asked for, and it says that you can do it too. It even directly gives an example of how to test these claims, and verify/falsify them. I like it because the more clear the promises, the more easily it is falsifiable.

See? If all you are saying is that some being out there exists who affects life on earth in some undetectable way, then yeah, it's pretty pointless. But any preacher who preaches that doesn't know his religion.

Re:Alton Brown

[Goldsmith]

I'm a scientist and I love Alton Brown's show!

If we were half as creative in our lectures, science classes would be much more popular (and make more sense to more people).

It is too bad that with very few exceptions, the "science" people most folks are aware of are actually cooks, special effects artists or politicians. It would be nice if more scientists were just known for good science.