Much has been written, here and elsewhere in the blogosphere, about the media's willingness to give a couple of kids their 15 minutes for challenging scientific orthodoxy, despite the fact that in both cases, the young Galileo-wannabe figures were dead wrong. Now someone has finally summed it all one in one pithy sentence:
I'd like to caution especially my younger readers that you may be very smart, but you should assume that you are making a mistake if you find yourself thinking you are smarter than every scientist in the world put together. (Michael Tobis, Wired Science)
Thanks, Michael. My thoughts exactly.
More like this
The title is of course a reference to Alice in Wonderland, and particularily to the quote about believing 6 impossible things before breakfast (which Eli Rabbet
"You may have genius. The contrary is, of course, probable." - Oliver Wendell Holmes
After three college years when I would think, "Hey, wait a second- I don't buy what this teacher is telling me. I bet what I'm thinking is totally new and unique!" and finding later that it hadn't been, I sorta got this message.
I'm super-fancy-smart. But me reading this chapter of the history book doesn't make me qualified to overturn it all.
Funny how the closer I got to graduation, the more I found myself respecting degrees.
Some things are wasted on the young, even aside from youth itself (thank you GBS), and a word of caution is among them.