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Sciencey Heroes For Young Children?

Posted by samzenpus on from the how-about-godzilla? dept.

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?"

42 of 614 comments (clear)

  1. Dottie Metcalf-Lindenburger is 35... by King+InuYasha · · Score: 4, Informative

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

    1. Re:Dottie Metcalf-Lindenburger is 35... by WrongSizeGlass · · Score: 3, Funny

      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.

    2. Re:Dottie Metcalf-Lindenburger is 35... by sumdumass · · Score: 3, Funny

      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.

  2. Here's a few by mknewman · · Score: 3, Insightful

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

    1. Re:Here's a few by spinkham · · Score: 4, Informative

      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.

      --
      Blessed are the pessimists, for they have made backups.
    2. Re:Here's a few by Martin+Blank · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

      --
      You can never go home again... but I guess you can shop there.
    3. Re:Here's a few by stiggle · · Score: 3, Insightful

      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.

    4. Re:Here's a few by DavidTC · · Score: 3, Insightful

      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.

      --
      If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
  3. Age is a Problem by TheWanderingHermit · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

    1. Re:Age is a Problem by pla · · Score: 3, Interesting

      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.

  4. Re:Peter Parker? by Culture20 · · Score: 3, Interesting

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

  5. Carl Sagan by Ninja+Programmer · · Score: 5, Insightful

    There is no other.

    1. Re:Carl Sagan by syousef · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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).

      --
      These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
  6. Behold, Captain Entropy! by Ikronix · · Score: 4, Funny

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

  7. Who needs a hero? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  8. Lets start showing reruns by btlyger · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.

  9. Phil Plait by Colonel+Korn · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.

    --
    "I zero-index my hamsters" - Willtor (147206)
  10. Neil deGrasse Tyson, astrophysicist by Allyoop · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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/

  11. what? by X_Bones · · Score: 5, Insightful

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

    --

    the coolest club on /.
  12. Re:Jeri Ellsworth by pelrun · · Score: 4, Informative

    Actually, Ladyada is Limor Fried.

    But both of them are absolutely hero material.

  13. Youres or his? by icegreentea · · Score: 3, Informative

    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).

  14. Wile E. Coyote by martin-boundary · · Score: 5, Insightful
    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...

  15. NIKOLA TESLA by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    See subject-line...

    APK

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

  16. clever nick name by arbitraryaardvark · · Score: 3, Funny

    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.

  17. Willy Messerschmitt by germansausage · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Airplane Designer Hero - got to be Willy Messerschmitt!

  18. Re:Mark Zuckerberg by aevan · · Score: 5, Informative

    He wanted heroes, not super villains.

  19. Airplane (Spaceship) Designer by NonSenseAgency · · Score: 4, Insightful

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

  20. Re:the youngest billionaire in the world of course by jordanjay29 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

  21. Elon Musk by francium+de+neobie · · Score: 4, Interesting

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

  22. Thor Hyerdahl and the Kon-Tiki crew were my heroes by dbIII · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

  23. Another Brian by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

  24. Ray Kurzweil by BlueMonk · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.

  25. Re:Find a hero for me, daddy? by camperdave · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

    --
    When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
  26. Reasonably young?? by fishexe · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

    --
    "I don't care about the Constitution!" --Bill O'Reilly, November 17, 2009
    1. Re:Reasonably young?? by keith_nt4 · · Score: 4, Funny

      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.

      --
      "UNIX is very simple, it just needs a genius to understand its simplicity." -Dennis Ritchie
  27. Galois by onionman · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.

    1. Re:Galois by kumanopuusan · · Score: 5, Funny

      he was killed in a sword fight

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

      --
      Use of the words "good", "bad" or "evil" is almost invariably the result of oversimplification.
    2. Re:Galois by sureshot007 · · Score: 4, Funny

      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....

  28. Re:Outreach by FrameRotBlues · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Luckily, someone did a rewrite.

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

  29. Lord British! by trickofperspective · · Score: 3, Informative

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

  30. Re:Jesus Christ is my #1 Science Hero! by mwvdlee · · Score: 4, Funny

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

    --
    Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
  31. Emily Rosa - She's still young (early 20's) by VShael · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.