Sciencey Heroes For Young Children?

An anonymous reader writes "Unhappy that all his friends have heroes he knows nothing about (they've all chosen hockey players — actually a hockey player: Sidney Crosby), my eight-year-old son asked me if I would find him a 'cool hero.' When pressed to define 'cool,' he very earnestly gave me this list of acceptable professions: 'Astronauts, explorers, divers, scientists, and pilots.' A second and only slightly less worthy tier of occupations includes 'inventors, meteorologists, and airplane designers.' To be eligible for hero status, an individual must be (1) accomplished in one of these fields, (2) reasonably young (it pains me to report that Dottie Metcalf-Lindenburger, NASA's youngest astronaut and now just 31, barely makes the cut), and, critically to my naive son's way of thinking, (3) respected by third graders nationwide. Ignoring that last criterion, or not, what heroes would you suggest from the sciences as people whose lives and accomplishments would be compelling to an eight-year-old mind?"

Comments

Dottie Metcalf-Lindenburger is 35...

[King InuYasha]

Dottie Metcalf-Lindenburger is 35 as of this year, not 31....

Re:Dottie Metcalf-Lindenburger is 35...

[WrongSizeGlass]

Dottie Metcalf-Lindenburger is 35 as of this year, not 31....

To be fair, I don't believe math was a requirement listed by his son.

Re:Dottie Metcalf-Lindenburger is 35...

[sumdumass]

His kid probably asked the question 4 and a half years ago and it took this long to get published on slashdot. His math is probably good.

Here's a few

[mknewman]

Mythbusters Adam and Jamie, Dean Kamin, and even Mike Rowe come to mind.

Re:Here's a few

[AnonymousClown]

They're TV performers - none of them studied science academically - what? Russian Lit and no college for the other one?

Neil DeGrasse Tyson would be my best suggestion.

Re:Here's a few

[Anonymous Coward]

XKCD Zombie Feynman says, "so what?" They've got the spirit of it, if not the formalism and rigor.

This is even more the case since we're looking at examples for young children who need the showmanship and wouldn't appreciate the difference anyway.

Re:Here's a few

[spinkham]

Brian Cox, aslo known as the "rock star of Physics". Works on the Large Hadron Collider, has his own TV series on the solar system, was in the 2009 "sexiest men alive" issue of People, and played the keys for some semi-famous 90's bands. Not too shabby.

Re:Here's a few

[jordanjay29]

They have done quite a bit to advance the public's thinking of science, and without passing through years of deadlocked science conferences, unread magazine articles and academic review.

Then again, they've done this without those kinds of checks, which means that their science could be (and has been proved to be, on revisits of myths) incorrect.

Re:Here's a few

[Martin Blank]

The willingness to revisit myths is a hallmark of the scientific process, though. They have a hypothesis -- the myth -- and collect initial evidence to determine a certain level of plausibility. They then move to large-scale experiments. In some cases, their experiments disprove the hypothesis. However, upon peer review (using the term loosely), problems with their experiments may be pointed out, and they revise and rerun the experiment. Sometimes the original results are overturned, and they can, to some degree, form a theory.

The Mythbusters are the first to claim that what they do is more entertainment than science. You just don't often hear things like "Jamie wants big boom" coming from real scientists. But normal people learn from their abbreviated process anyway, as you said, and that's what is important right now.

Re:Here's a few

[Anonymous Coward]

The average layman won't be affected by any of this "research". They merely demonstrate the scientific process in a shortened form. Why is that so deplorable to all of you? They didn't say "I ate a bagel today and don't have cancer. BAGELS CURE CANCER!!!!!" They're testing wives' tales. If they teach people the basics in "think of a question/topic, make a reasoned hypothesis as to what happens, find a way to test it, get some results, OH WAIT someone pointed out an error ==> retest it, have a conclusion" that's what's important. Get off your high horse.

Re:Here's a few

[Anonymous Coward]

You just don't often hear things like "Jamie wants big boom" coming from real scientists.

Thus proving that you dont actually know any real scientists.

Re:Here's a few

[Boomerang Fish]

I'd have to agree with this on the level of likely media awareness of a young child... if you're looking for heroes he won't have to explain, then these are probably the most scientific... not rigorous in the sense of a University Physics lab, but a heck of a lot more rigorous than most anything else that gets wide media attention... identify what to test (myth), give initial hypothesis (explanation), identify how to test, revise if necessary, test, scale up, come to conclusion, revise in later shows, re-test, etc.

Other "heroes" to consider might be internet entrepreneurs, who while not being scientific themselves, managed to take new technology in directions not grasped before... Facebook, Google, Netscape... might be more commercially oriented than you want, but still, it's an area your son and his friends will know well soon, if he doesn't already.

Unfortunately true scientific or mathematical skill comes with a lot of background work and most don't get the credit they deserve, even when older, but definitely not while they're still learning.

I told my daughter (now 17) that true skill takes time, and the flashiness of athletes and movie stars almost always dies quickly... a few make it, but thousands don't. I tried to teach her (I hope successfully, and her math and science grades suggest I might have succeeded at least a little bit...) that a hero is one who sticks to her guns, as long as the evidence supports her, and isn't afraid to admit when they were wrong and change their theories. The hero is one true to the search, not the result... cause it only takes one bad result to take you down.

Hope this helps in some small way :-)

--
I drank what?

Re:Here's a few

[stiggle]

Einstein was a patent clerk.
Da Vinci was a painter.
Priestley was clergy (he discovered oxygen, & invented carbonated drinks).
Since when was a lack of university education & a job in the field a requirement to be a scientist - all you need is the ability and interest to investigate the subject. Even better if you can encourage the next generation to become interested too.

Studying science academically just means you're taught what everyone else already knows and your thinking is moulded by your lecturers.

To make decent and safe explosions, you need to be a physicist as well as a chemist, and I'm sure most pyrotechnicians don't have either of those to degree level.
 

Re:Here's a few

[stiggle]

Their research is the most important possible for the kids of this generation.

No kid is going to get excited about science and go "yay, I want to be a scientist and study string theory". They are more likely to want to play with focusing mirrors to make fire, to use high pressure water hose to make jetpacks.

Mythbusters shows that you can make cool & interesting stuff at home which will get kids interested in becoming the next generation of scientists and engineers.

Re:Here's a few

[DavidTC]

Dude, the layman has no idea how science works at all.

Almost no one in this country can even give an brief summary of the scientific method. Almost no one knows how science works at all, in any manner. They can't give any explanation of what scientists actually do or how they do it.

Complaining about the Mythbuster's lack of rigor is like complaining about how teaching Maxwell's equations ignores quantum effects.

And I'll point out that science doesn't require rigor. Or, more specifically, it requires as much rigor as the field requires. As the Mythbusters are operating in their own field of 'urban legend', perhaps that field has exactly as much rigor as that field wants.

You want more rigor, you start doing scientific research in that field and start complaining about their lack of rigor, until then, shut up...you don't get to define how much rigor is needed for random field of science. Different fields have different accepted standards. Until some distinguished 'urban legend' institutions start criticizing their lack of rigor, and stops using their results, they have enough.

Re:Here's a few

[cowscows]

Yeah, the reality of science (like the reality of just about any other field you can choose for a profession) is that 95% of what you do is completely boring. Almost every job in the history of the world is like that, and will continue to be so until those lazy ass computer scientists finally figure out Artificial Intelligence and we can truly have machines do all of the mundane tasks.

Real science takes lots of dull repetitive work. Good, useful results have to be weaseled out of mounds of noisy data and dead ends. That kind of work is not fun to watch, and is certainly not going to appeal to kids or get them interested in science. For every touchdown that Drew Brees throws, he's spent hours watching film, running drills, and working out in the gym, yet for some reason the NFL doesn't try to make us watch all those hours of boring work. They show the good stuff, and that's what keeps people interested in football. The Mythbusters sort of do the same thing for general science.

Age is a Problem

[TheWanderingHermit]

His friends are all looking at sports heroes and you're looking at people with long careers. There's a big difference.

Athletes only have a few decades in which they'll do well, then they retire. So it's easy to find a younger athlete as a hero: as they get older, they lose it.

But almost all the other professions take time to get experienced in. They require learning and years of experience to excel, other than something like astronaut, which can include younger people.

Too bad you can't include people like Chuck Yeager or Wiley Post.

Re:Age is a Problem

[pla]

But almost all the other professions take time to get experienced in. They require learning and years of experience to excel, other than something like astronaut, which can include younger people.

Actually, you have that backward. Astronauts require YEARS of training, which usually doesn't even start until they've had a reasonable distinguished early military career.

Most of the "rock stars" of science made their contributions while still quite young... Einstein published on special Relativity at 24, James Watson (of Watson & Crick) published on the structure of DNA (which he later admitted to "discovering" while trippin' balls) at 25. Alan Turing published his On Computable Numbers... at 24 and built the world's first real computer at 32.

I could go on.

Re:Peter Parker?

[Culture20]

Back in the day, real photographers were all chemists. Thus the photography link with a chemistry kit (and web fluid).

Carl

[hyperion2010]

So what if he's dead. ;_;

Adventurer / Surgeon / Rock Star

[Culture20]

Buckaroo Banzai

Carl Sagan

[Ninja Programmer]

There is no other.

Re:Carl Sagan

[syousef]

There is no other.

Be careful with role models. By all accounts he was a brilliant science popularizer and a better than average scientist. But he was also petty and arrogant and thought a lot of himself and treated women badly. Read one of the biographies. I think that is what you should teach kids - that even their heroes and role models may be exemplary in one or more areas of life without being perfect or even acceptably good in other areas. Therefore only emulate the good, and don't be disheartened when you learn about the bad.

That said every child should watch COSMOS at least once and read a few of his books. Pale Blue Dot and Demon Haunted World would be my recommendations (though I'm sure some of the more religious types will disagree with the latter).

Re:Carl Sagan

[houghi]

But he was also petty and arrogant and thought a lot of himself and treated women badly.

Sounds like he is on par with the current sports heroes.

Behold, Captain Entropy!

[Ikronix]

...the superhero with the power to wait patiently while supervillains expend too much energy, returning them to an inert and nonthreatening state!

Space!

[wetlandjack]

Werner von Braun, Hermann Oberth, Robert H. Goddard, Yuri Gagarin. -Space nut, out.

Who needs a hero?

[Anonymous Coward]

You kid seems smart. Maybe ask why he feels the need to have a hero? And why this hero needs to pass some sort of test of being 'accepted by your kids peers' ?
I understand the need for kids to fit in somehow, but maybe he can transcend this.

Re:Who needs a hero?

[Oxford_Comma_Lover]

> Maybe ask why he feels the need to have a hero?

Isn't that kind of like asking why you need to visit the moon?

Heroes inspire us to make ourselves better than we are.

Re:Who needs a hero?

[Tekfactory]

Because our brains are pattern matching engines and we need to see patterns in order to recognize and or emulate them.

The fitting in part is a necessary part of growing up and we don't have a better way to do it yet.

Why has nobody mentioned Michio Kaku yet? I know he's too old, but he's the only one on TV right now with the old Carl Sagan vibe.

Also Phil Platt for Bad Universe if there were more episodes.

First Robotics competetion

[drjohnretired]

How about a whole team of heros. See http://www.usfirst.org/ While I do not like everything about the program, the students really do catch some of the excitement of science and engineering.

physicist!

[Anonymous Coward]

Richard Feynman!

Lets start showing reruns

[btlyger]

Bill Nye the Science guy was the only educational show that was actually cool to watch. Lets get another season of Bill Nye and teach these kids how to make volcanoes.

Phil Plait

[Colonel Korn]

AKA The Bad Astronomer. Read Death from the Skies with your kid - it's quite entertaining and has a persistent message that rational thought is superior to sensationalism.

Neil deGrasse Tyson, astrophysicist

[Allyoop]

Neil deGrasse Tyson I wish I read his book "The Universe Down to Earth" when I was in grade 9. I think it would have greatly shaped my school pathway for a 'real' science career. http://www.haydenplanetarium.org/tyson/

what?

[X_Bones]

no love for the safe-crackin', bongo-playin', Challenger-investigatin' Richard Feynman?

Re:Jeri Ellsworth

[pelrun]

Actually, Ladyada is Limor Fried.

But both of them are absolutely hero material.

Youres or his?

[icegreentea]

Is this list for him, or is really for you? =P

Joking aside, tell him about Joseph Kittenger and Felix Baumgartner. Kittenger was the pilot/sky diver involved in Project Excelsior. The highest/longest sky dive in history. 15 minutes of free fall. Felix Baumgartner is a dare-devil currently trying to break that record. He's being sponsered/supported by Red Bull (come on, thats instant cool), and Kittenger is consulting on the whole thing. If all goes to plan Baumgartner will break the sound barrier. With his body.

If he wants famous aircraft designers, two giants that come to mind are Ben Rich and Kelly Johnson, both of Lockheed Skunkworks fame. Unfortunately, they're both gone from this world... the days of airplanes being a single person's brain child is quickly faming (if not gone). If you wants some famous pilots, probably the single most important pilot would be John Boyd. One of the best fighter pilots ever, he also went ahead and pushed an entire generation of air force fighters into service, developed an entire engineering metric on comparing the performance of fighters, and then went ahead and revolutionized the way we fight wars (look up Maneuver warfare... all of the official doctrines of the armed services are based on his ideas).

Wile E. Coyote

[martin-boundary]

My science hero is Wile E. Coyote. He's the reason I became a scientist in the first place. As a kid, I had always been very impressed by how even the simplest scientific approach would always allow Wile E. to capture all those pesky Road Runners with ease.

I can honestly say that without him as a role model, I would never have become a physicist or discovered how to paint the dimensional portal which brought me to this world years ago.

Unfortunately, the rules of physics seem to be slightly different here for some reason, and I have been stranded ever since. Oh well...

Re:Wile E. Coyote

[SteveFoerster]

I can honestly say that without him as a role model, I would never have become a physicist or discovered how to paint the dimensional portal which brought me to this world years ago.

So what you're saying is that you're from Cool World?

Okay, but seriously, you'd probably like Phineas and Ferb, as would the kid in question. Not being real I guess they don't qualify as role models, but they're definitely worth watching until a real world role model shows up.

Re:Wile E. Coyote

[PolygamousRanchKid]

When I applied to MIT anno 1980, part of the application process was to write an essay titled, "What is my favorite cartoon character and why." So this was essentially a "Who's your hero" question. I chose Wile E. Coyote. The focus was about his persistence: despite that all his ingenious attempts to catch the Roadrunner with cockamamie contraptions failed, he never gave up. He always came up with something new to try.

The admissions folks loved it, and I got a call from the local MIT rep to come by for a chat. I was accepted, but chose Princeton instead. The application essays for Princeton were more difficult. I had to write a "Personal Statement" and an "Engineering Statement." No topics were given; "just write something about something." This was a more subtle way of saying, "find the hero in yourself." How children choose their heroes is determined by the values that they have developed under the guidance of their parents. If the parents are big hockey fans, a hockey player will probably be a hero for their children. If the parents take their children to science museums, a scientist will probably be a hero.

At any rate, don't underestimate the potential of writing about Wile E. Coyote.

Oh, and in defense of engineers, I took 300 and 400 literature classes at Princeton. After I submitted my first essay for one coure, the Preceptor called my aside after the class. She asked me point blank, "You're engineering student, aren't you?" She went on to say that engineering students wrote the most comprehensible essays, which were always structured very well. She complained that the literature majors' essays were more insightful, but tended to meander to the point of confusion.

Re:Wile E. Coyote

[Gravitron 5000]

Are you familiar with the teachings of Rube Goldberg? His method, while fundamentally similar, may shed some light on your problems.

Re:This should be obvious to all

[MachDelta]

I believe that's supposed to be written...

"Cap-tin Jean-Luc-Pic-ard ofthe U-S-S En-ter-prise" /technobeat

NIKOLA TESLA

[Anonymous Coward]

See subject-line...

APK

P.S.=> He's a PRIME EXAMPLE of that "once in a generation mind"... apk

Re:NIKOLA TESLA

[Urza9814]

EXACTLY what I was here to say. He doesn't quite fit the criteria, but what 8 year old _wouldn't_ love him? He's _CLASSIC_ mad scientist! Only problem is that you'd have to spend some time explaining who he is. But seriously - the world as we know it would not exist without him...and this is the same man who was thinking of death rays, worldwide free wireless electricity, global communications - he damn near thought of the internet before we even had electricity!

clever nick name

[arbitraryaardvark]

i dont know an obvious answer. i'm kind of out of touch with 8 year olds, but they havent heard of carmack or musk and think that tesla's a band.
wil wheaton isn't famous enough, oh i dunno maybe he is do kids these days watch next generation reruns on spike?
he pops up on eureka and csi and that one with the nerds... now and then. i guess 8 year olds dont watch the guild. or know who randall munroe is.
hey how about richard branson? a lot of 8 year olds are virgins these days.

My 2 cents

[bradgoodman]

I don't have many idols, but I really idolize Howard Hughes (That's the pre-insane Howard Hughes).

The dude was a pilot and all - but he went on to really design and build these planes. He was such a "hands-on" guy, a real genius and innovator. I never knew any of that about him before watching some movie about him. I'd recommend the same.

My 8 year old daughter's idol is Buzz Aldran. I totally respect the guy too. Aside from obviously being the second guy on the moon - he was (I think) #1 in his class at MIT after doing his thesis on Orbital Docking manuvers - before any such thing was actually done.

Aside from just "flying the spaceship" and "walking on the moon" - even today, he continues to innovate in the area of space travel. He has a web site where you can see not just some of his old stuff, but new stuff as well. He's not just part of history, he's really part of the present.

Willy Messerschmitt

[germansausage]

Airplane Designer Hero - got to be Willy Messerschmitt!

explorer/diver

[tloh]

Robert Ballard

Re:Mark Zuckerberg

[aevan]

He wanted heroes, not super villains.

Airplane (Spaceship) Designer

[NonSenseAgency]

Burt Rutan, spaceships have got to be waaay cool to an 8 year old.

Re:the youngest billionaire in the world of course

[jordanjay29]

I don't think 8 year olds are allowed on Facebook. It's 13 and above, last I checked. Larry Page or Sergey Brin would be more worthy heroes, I'm sure the kid uses Google at least once a week, versus using Facebook never.

Fails #2 but...

[mbenzi]

Sylvia Earle http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sylvia_Earle should be a hero to all 3rd graders
Watch her TED Talk http://www.ted.com/talks/view/id/467 , it's fascinating.

Saul Griffith

[banjo D]

He may be slightly too old to fit your criteria, and probably no 3rd graders have heard of him, but Saul Griffith is a certified Genius (so says the MacArthur Foundation, anyway) and does interesting and inspiring work.

Elon Musk

[francium de neobie]

PayPal, SpaceX, Tesla... you can literally change the world with technology, and get reasonably rich doing that.

Ok...

[geminidomino]

Admit it... that was a major "proud papa" moment.

Thor Hyerdahl and the Kon-Tiki crew were my heroes

[dbIII]

Not only did they test out a migration theory by sailing across the Pacific on a balsa wood raft, half of them were extreme badass commandos that blew up a Nazi nuclear facility in WWII.
Then there's the Easter Island stuff. While crappy TV shows say "who knows why these roads go into the sea" Thor put on the scuba gear and found they were boat ramps. When the crappy TV show said "who knows how the statues were erected" Thor asked the locals, put on a huge BBQ for them and they showed him how it was done.
Then of course there are plenty of other examples of people in science doing things kids will find heroic - vulcanologists in rubber boats on acid lakes, polar explorers and many others.

Another Brian

[Anonymous Coward]

How about another Brian, a bona fide rock star (i.e. older than most people on /.) and also astrophysicist. Took a detour from his PhD work to play lead guitar for the British rock band Queen. Finally finished his PhD in 2007. Is one step from away from knighthood.

Ray Kurzweil

[BlueMonk]

He's an inventor, scientist, author, futurist, musician and probably plenty more I don't even know about. And he's still alive... and hopes to be alive forever due to evolving technology.

Re:Find a hero for me, daddy?

[camperdave]

I thought it was a parent's job to hunt around for acceptable role models for their kids.

Gee! I always thought it was a parent's job to *BE* an acceptable role model for their kids.

Ada Lovelace

[cuckundu]

Should be everyone's hero...

Re:Jeri Ellsworth

[Bob Cat - NYMPHS]

Jeri Ellsworth is known as 'Jeri Ellsworth'.

http://www.youtube.com/JeriEllsworth

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeri_Ellsworth

http://www.jeriellsworth.com/

Race cars, pinball, electronics...

http://www.google.com/search?q=racecars+pinballs+electronics+c64

How about these guys?

[Geoffrey.landis]

"...The recipients include the engineer behind the digital camera, the Intel team that designed the first computer microprocessor, and the inventor of the adhesive 'super glue.'”

http://blogs.voanews.com/breaking-news/2010/11/17/obama-honors-scientists-and-engineers/

Reasonably young??

[fishexe]

To be eligible for hero status, an individual must be (1)...(2) reasonably young (it pains me to report that Dottie Metcalf-Lindenburger, NASA's youngest astronaut and now just 31, barely makes the cut), and, critically to my naive son's way of thinking, (3)...

Since when do 8-year-olds know the difference between 45-year-olds and 30-year-olds? They were all just grown-ups to me when I was that age. There were, like, 4 categories of people: kids, big kids, grown-ups, and old folks (technically a subset of grown-ups, but distinguished by completely gray/white hair and large amounts of wrinkles). I don't think I became aware of the difference between 45 and 30 until I was at least 11.

Re:Reasonably young??

[keith_nt4]

I don't think I became aware of the difference between 45 and 30 until I was at least 11.

Impressive. I don't think i knew the difference until I was...30.

Galois

[onionman]

Galois (look him up!!) is long dead, but he was quite possibly the greatest genius ever to walk the planet. Too bad he was killed in a sword fight when he was 20. As a teenager, he solved a centuries-old math problem and created a fundamental branch of advanced mathematics.

Re:Galois

[kumanopuusan]

he was killed in a sword fight

That explains why he lost, since Galois died of a gunshot wound.

Re:Galois

[sureshot007]

he was killed in a sword fight

That explains why he lost, since Galois died of a gunshot wound.

I think "genius" might be too strong of a word....

Why young?

[lawpoop]

Why do they have to be young? When I was in middle school, my hero was Einstein.

But, I don't think you're going to find a 20-year-old science hero, like you would a 20-year-old sports hero. To really have a science career, you have to have a PhD, and then some career after that. I think the best you can do is a 30-year-old with promising research, or a 20-year-old whose a promising genius, or made a great invention. Other than that, you're looking for a person who has a PhD + 10 years' work behind them.

Warning about Sidney Crosby

[Bob Cat - NYMPHS]

While he is a fine young hockey player, and I fully expect him to lead his team to a Stanley Cup, there is one thing that every eight year old should know about him before indulging in any form of 'hero worship'.

HE HAS COOTIES!!!

Steven Hawking

[ondigo]

I don't know if the average 8 year old would find Hawking heroic, but a kid as thoughtful as this poster's might well do so. And when are we going to get a Steven Hawking action figure? (Irony intended, but not in a mean way.)

Re:Outreach

[FrameRotBlues]

Luckily, someone did a rewrite.

http://imgs.xkcd.com/blag/spirit_rewrite_unknown_author.png

Re:Find a hero for me, daddy?

[QRDeNameland]

Find your own hero, kid.

Better yet, if you think your kid has a love for science, tell him that both "coolness" and "hero worship" are antithetical to real science. Science is not a popularity contest, nor is science made great because it is done by a great scientist. Good science stands because it withstands further scientific challenge, and the personal characteristics of the scientist do not matter one bit.

Then past that, remember that no matter how things may appear, as a parent *you* are always going to be your child's most significant role model and whatever sports stars/rock stars/entertainers "heroes" your kid cycles through growing up will be largely irrelevant to how s/he fares in life.

League of Scientists

[abkaiser]

January/February of 2011, you'll get the first book in the League of Scientists. It's about a group of science geeks in seventh grade who use science and critical thinking to solve seemingly-supernatural mysteries. Seems to be right in line with the poster's request.

[Disclaimer: I'm the author.]

Lord British!

[trickofperspective]

Teenage video-game prodigy and self-made astronaut Richard Garriott!

Re:Scientific method != science

[walshy007]

I think the grandparents point is you don't need a university degree or any formal qualifications in order to 'study'

You can learn the current state of the art independent of any such institutions.

Using the scientific method does not mean that you are doing science. For example you could conduct a criminal investigation using the scientific method but that does not mean that what you are doing is science.

By that definition no applied use of science would be 'doing science' and for example physics students at university would not be 'doing science' because what they are learning has already been done before.

Science does not need to be new to still be science.

Magnets can affect Lead too

[Roger W Moore]

A whole program trying to deflect bullets with magnets. Aren't they made of lead?

Ever heard of Lenz's law? There is a very simple demo of it where you can make an aluminium ring jump off the pole of an electromagnet - this would work fine for lead as well. Not to mention paramagnetism and diamagnetism (not sure which applies to lead) - all materials containing atoms will interact with a sufficiently strong static magnetic field.

Bill Nye the Science Guy

[ukemike]

This series from the 1990s is somehow owned by Disney, despite it being funded by the National Science Foundation and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (in otherwords the taxpayers should own it). I tried to find a way to buy the show on DVD but all I could find was the educational institution price of something like $700 for the whole series. That was obviously absurd, so I found it via bittorrent. Anyone who reads this site should also be able to find it.

It's great fun and educational. My son loves the show. He asks to watch it. We've been watching it since he was 2 or 3. Now in second grade he's way ahead of his class in science and math.

Bill Nye! Bill! Bill! Bill!

Re:the youngest billionaire in the world of course

[walshy007]

Because he couldn't possibly be getting most of that back as profit now could he?

web designing

[saiyom123]

Two Latina mothers are heroes in the new banana book, Small Changes Big Results from the Frances Payne Bolton School of Nursing at Case Western Reserve University. Their adventure is to actualize a convalescent affairs for their accouchement and families and action obesity. The animation moms are like real-life moms in Latino acreage workers' families, who are anxious about the growing blubber botheration a allotment of adolescent children, says Jill Kilanowski, abettor assistant at the Frances Payne Bolton School of Nursing at Case Western Reserve University. As allotment of several analysis projects, Kilanowski advised over 200 accouchement on farms abreast Fremont, Willard, Urbana and Tipp City in Ohio and South Haven, Michigan. web designing company in chandigarh thanks

Re:Jesus Christ is my #1 Science Hero!

[mwvdlee]

We're looking for science heroes, not science fiction heroes.

Re:Scientific method != science

[Roger W Moore]

You train to do science by repeating classical experiments.

True, but training to do something is not the same as actually doing it.

Re:only one true hero relevant for him

[dargaud]

Christa McAuliffe

Meh... School teacher only put there for PR reasons.

Re:Scientific method != science

[Internetuser1248]

Who said you got to STUDY to be a scientist?

Being a scientist means doing original scientific research i.e. something that nobody has done before, otherwise it is called history.

This seems like an absurd view of science. None of the definitions i got from google say anything about originality directly. Perhaps you would care to furnish us with the one from your dictionary just so we can have the same true understanding that you have.

In the meantime I don't think I even understand how to measure originality. How am I to know what has been known in the past? If information is lost to the scientific community (eg. the burning of the library at Alexandria) is a subsequent study of that subject not science? What if I am stranded on a desert island, and I use the scientific method to work out how to grow/prepare food and work out which plants are poisonous. It seems like something very akin to science and I wouldn't call it history. Perhaps you are thinking of the value of science. If sufficient study on a subject has already been conducted then further scientific study has no value. Many of the definitions linked refer to something like this. The difference is that science is a noun not a verb. One is not producing science if ones results are already known. the definitions speak of producing solutions to problems for example. One cannot produce solutions to problems that are already solved. The scientific method is the method by which one builds science, not all applications of the method produce science, but any application that produces useful results has produced science. Another example might be if you do some scientific study that has never been done before, but you refuse to give me your results. I might do the same research to solve my problem, which is that you wont tell me your results. I might then achieve the same results as you and therefore solve my problem. The knowledge i would gain from this fits every definition of science on that list (except the band and album titles).

Discussions of originality aside, the quotes you responded to also stand, you dont have to study to do science, even by your own definition, and there are not only uneducated people doing reasearch by the scientific method, there are even some that are thereby producing original science as aresult.

Emily Rosa - She's still young (early 20's)

[VShael]

As a 9 year old girl, she debunked the whole Therapeutic Touch nonsense, with a sensible experimental design.

If it helps, she grew up to be a smoking hottie, as well as having brains to burn. IMO, young kids could look
up to her for both her critical thinking skills, and the way she was no swayed by arguments-from-authority of
the "we're older than you, so we know better" sort.

Re:Jesus Christ is my #1 Science Hero!

[c6gunner]

No. But I've never taken LSD.