The final episode of "Cosmos: A Spacetime Oddyssey" has left us with a very important lesson. Thank you Dr. Neil deGrasse Tyson for the amazing and powerful speech that underscores the very pillars of Science. As an engineer and aspiring scientist myself, I want to teach my children how science and human ingenuity can practically solve any problem there is to stumble upon.
5 SIMPLE RULES OF SCIENCE:
By: Neil deGrasse Tyson, Astrophysicist / director of Hayden Planetarium
(Courtesy of Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey)
How did we, tiny creatures living on that speck of dust, ever manage to figure out how to send spacecraft out among the stars of the milky way?
Only a few centuries ago, a mere second in cosmic time, we knew nothing of where or when we were. Oblivious to the rest of the cosmos, we inhabited a kind of prison, a tiny universe bounded by a nutshell.
How did we escape from the prison? It was the work of generations of searchers who took five simple rules to heart.
(1) Question authority. No idea is true just because someone says so, including me.
(2) Think for yourself. Question yourself. Don't believe anything just because you want to. Believing something doesn't make it so.
(3) Test ideas by the evidence gained from observation and experiment. If a favorite idea fails a well-designed test, it's wrong. Get over it.
(4) Follow the evidence wherever it leads. If you have no evidence, reserve judgment.
And perhaps the most important rule of all...
(5) Remember: you could be wrong. Even the best scientists have been wrong about some things. Newton, Einstein, and every other great scientist in history -- they all made mistakes. Of course they did. They were humans.
Science is a way to keep from fooling ourselves, and each others.
Only a few centuries ago, a mere second in cosmic time, we knew nothing of where or when we were. Oblivious to the rest of the cosmos, we inhabited a kind of prison, a tiny universe bounded by a nutshell.
How did we escape from the prison? It was the work of generations of searchers who took five simple rules to heart.
(1) Question authority. No idea is true just because someone says so, including me.
(2) Think for yourself. Question yourself. Don't believe anything just because you want to. Believing something doesn't make it so.
(3) Test ideas by the evidence gained from observation and experiment. If a favorite idea fails a well-designed test, it's wrong. Get over it.
(4) Follow the evidence wherever it leads. If you have no evidence, reserve judgment.
And perhaps the most important rule of all...
(5) Remember: you could be wrong. Even the best scientists have been wrong about some things. Newton, Einstein, and every other great scientist in history -- they all made mistakes. Of course they did. They were humans.
Science is a way to keep from fooling ourselves, and each others.