My experience is, you go talk to kindergarten kids, or first grade kids, you find a class full of science enthusiasts.

And they ask deep questions.

What is a dream?

Why do we have toes?

Why is the moon round?

What's the birthday of the world?

Why is grass green?

These are profound, important questions.

They just bubble right out of them.

You go and talk to twelfth grade students, and there's none of that.

They've become leaden and incurious.

Something terrible has happened between kindergarten and twelfth grade, and it's not just puberty.

You could give Aristotle a tutorial, and you could thrill him to the core of his being.

Aristotle was an encyclopedic polymath, an all-time intellect.

Yet not only can you know more than him about the world, you also can have a deeper understanding of how everything works.

I'm not saying you're more intelligent than Aristotle or wiser.

That's not the point.

The point is only that science is cumulative, and we live later.

You don't have to be a scientist.

You don't have to play the Bunsen burner in order to understand enough science to overtake your imagined need.

And fill that fancied gap.

Science needs to be released from the lab into the culture.

It's like we've forgotten who we are now.

Explorers, pioneers, not caretakers.

But knowledge is preferable to ignorance.

Better by far to embrace the hard truth than a reassuring fable.

If we crave some cosmic purpose, then let us find ourselves a worthy goal.

It would be very healthy for the human species if there were less discouragement and more scientists.