(A high school teacher who participated in the Leadership Modeling Workshop
series posted this on the project's listserv list yesterday. It's a
beautiful quote and it illustrates the power of modeling, so I repeat it
here.)
The teacher said,
Last Thursday this year's Nobel Prize winner in Physics, Stephen Chu, was
interviewed on the Jim Lehr News Hour and when asked why he went into physics
he gave the following answer. I couldn't believe my ears- he was validating
Modeling!! I taped it and showed it to my students and thought you all might
be interested in what he said so I've transcribed his answer below:
"There is the inherent simplicity and beauty of physics. It's the kind of
thing where you can take nature and describe it in terms of mathematical
models and the mathematical models allow you to reach far-reaching
conclusions and then you can test those conclusions by going back in the lab.
The whole structure of making progress in this way seems so appealing. So if
I really understand what is going on I should make a quantitative prediction
of what is going on and go into the lab and check it. You cannot in the end
fool yourself - you have to make a prediction, go into the lab and test. It
is a very satisfying feeling because in the end it means that once you've
established this connection between experiment and the model of how nature
works, you begin to believe it. From there you go on to the next step and the
next step, and so in this process of going very slowly, building very slow
little steps, from the time of Galileo when modern physics really began,
we've come very far by taking incrementally little steps."
Jane Jackson (Prof.of Physics, Scottsdale Comm Coll--on leave)
Dept.of Physics, Box 871504, Arizona State Univ,Tempe AZ 85287
602/965-8438 FAX:965-7331 http://modeling.la.asu.edu/modeling.html
Genius must transform the world, that the world may produce more genius.