I say to the grown-ups, ‘If you want to deny evolution and live in your world that’s completely inconsistent with everything we’ve observed in the universe that’s fine. But don’t make your kids do it.’
We are special in the sense that we can know our place in the cosmos. We can know our place in space. We are at least one of the cosmos’s ways of knowing itself. That fills me with reverence and joy.
If we raise a generation of students who dont believe in the process of science, who think everything that weve come to know about nature and the universe can be dismissed by a few sentences translated into English from some ancient text, youre not going to continue to innovate.
It fills me with joy to know that we can pursue these answers. It is an astonishing thing that we are — you and I are one of the ways the universe knows itself.
Apparently there is redundancy in memory: You store the same memory in different parts of your brain for accessing at different speeds. That speed would depend on the frequency of use and the importance of the knowledge.
I tell personal stories associated with aspects of the theory, and I hope they are interesting and compelling. I don’t feel you’re going to change a grownup’s mind in one reading. People have to be exposed to scientific ideas over and over again for years. It’s also not a textbook.
