It Takes alot of Mistakes

I was just reading letters to the editor of the journal "Physics Today". They brought up a serious problem in our education system, maybe even a problem in our society's educational philosophy. In short, the problem is in how we treat mistakes.

Most of us have experienced the embarrassment of making a mistake in school. If we gave the wrong answer or came up with a new idea for solving a problem and it didn't work, we usually suffered some emotional pain due to how such mistakes are viewed. In reality, all progress in science requires that we come up with some ideas, hypotheses or processes that just don't work out at all. If we didn't try these things, we would never have found out that they didn't work, and we wouldn't have learned just why they didn't work. Without this knowledge, we can't zero in on the ideas or processes that do work.

I suppose we need to accept that we are never quite at our destination when it comes to understanding nature. When we realize that none of our answers are definitive, maybe we can deal with slowly building our knowledge and quit expecting to have a complete answer in our lifetime. The best we can possibly hope for is to contribute some new knowledge either about what does or even doesn't work. Expect to make some mistakes, and do something! Explore an idea, try an experiment and push it far enough to find out just how wrong you are. That is how progress happens.

troy@starkeffects.com
http://www.starkeffects.com