Tracey: Dear Bill Nye.
My name is Tracey, and as of today it is my
19th birthday, and I’m pursuing my education
in the sciences thanks to the influence of
worldly educators such as yourself.
My question to you is: what do you think is
the most beneficial thing a scientist can
do for the community, and what do you consider
your greatest accomplishment as a scientist
and an educator?
All the best, and thank you for your contributions
to the generations ahead of you.
Bill Nye: Tracey.
I’m delighted that you are pursuing a career
in science.
We need as many scientifically literate people
as we can in our society so that when it’s
time to vote and make decisions about our
future we do it in an informed way with science
as the background.
So thank you.
This is fabulous.
As far as my contribution, that’s a very
nice question.
I think it’s getting young people excited
about science so that in the future we’ll
have scientifically literate people.
And what we want is for people — it’s
not just the facts.
The facts are great.
They often change as we learn more, but the
big thing is to get the process of science.
You make an observation, your eyebrows go
up, you say to yourself, "My goodness, what
caused that?"
And then you come up with an idea or a hypothesis
of what made that effect happen, this phenomenon
that you observed.
And then you come up with a way to test it.
You test it and then you see what happened
and compare what you thought would happen
with what did happen.
And you’re comparing your hypothesis to
the outcome.
If we can get that across to as many people
as possible we can, Tracey, dare I say it:
we can change the world.
That’s a great question.
