Well if we talk about what is it that we
should train children and adults because I think we need lifelong education to
do. It's not rote learning, which unfortunately it's still the model of
education throughout much of the world. I think actually the United States is
better than a lot of other areas in terms of having more flexible approaches to
what it is we're trying to get children to do.
I'm old enough to remember December 31st,
2000. In fact, I wrote an OP-ED that appeared in the New York Times the very
next day. It was about the coming of the year 2001 and what would surely be the
incessant comparisons people would make with the film 2001, itself made in
1968. So finally the future had arrived. What's the checklist? How are we
doing?
The main message of my work over the past
decade or more has been a fairly basic message and that's that every single
human being is creative. But then as with anything one has to put statistical
parameters around what that means, and what I've found, is that in the United
States and around the world our society is really divided into people who are
principally paid to use their creativity at work and those who may be quite
creative but they're principally paid to use their physical labor or they're
involved in low-skill service work.
physics? Well,
sometimes math leads. Sometimes physics leads. Sometimes they come together
because, of course, there's a use for the mathematics. For example, in the
1600s Isaac Newton asked a simple question: if an apple falls then does the
moon also fall? That is perhaps one of the greatest questions ever asked by a
member of Homo sapiens since the six million years since we parted ways with
the apes. If an apple falls, does the moon also fall?
Heartburn occurs when acid from the stomach moves backwards from the stomach,
up into the esophagus.
