Klaas Bals' Blog

Let's make a better world in 2008!

Via Eskimokaka.

Zoals ik eerder al zei heb ik omwille van teveel spam comment moderation opgezet, waardoor alle comments in een lijst komen te staan die ik moet goedkeuren. Ik haal hier echter enkel de echte spam comments tegen, de rest publiceer ik gewoon.

Philip Tobias, a paleontologist, made a quote that I like in a documentary called Overleven: Homo Futuris:

Evolution is the exception, extinction is the rule.

I've nearly finished the book A Short History of Nearly Everything written by Bill Bryson. (I've actually read the translated Dutch version called Een Kleine Geschiedenis van Bijna Alles. I received it as a birthday gift a month ago. I'm not good at reading books because I read so slowly, so I typically buy and get more books than I finish to read, but this time I read this book of more than 600 pages in less than a month, which may sound slow for most of you, but it is a big achievement of me. Well... not actually an achievement of me, rather than an achievement of the book!

It was one of the best books I ever read. It talks about the history of everything in all aspects and from all perspectives. It talks about how science became to be what it is today: chemistry, physics, biology, geology, paleontology etc, and it does this in a very understandable way, so that anyone can read it, whether you have a background in science or not. Some interest in science is of course necessary to start reading the book.

It not only talks about how things where discovered, but it also talks about the persons that did the discoveries, and their characters. In so many cases the people doing the amazing discoveries or inventions where not very average people. Of course they were smarter than average, but also socially they were either very eccentric. For example many were extremely shy in that they discovered theories and wrote books about them but didn't dare to show them to anyone, which lead to situations where a great new theory was waiting for its discoverer to die, so that it could become public. Or the opposite: some people were very egocentric, egoistic and opportunistic. Also, many theories and discoveries got stolen, which means today we recognize the wrong people for some theories.

Apart from the important discoveries, I learned many small seemingly unimportant things. For example that Celsius, the one came up with the scale of temperature that we use today, was called 'Anders' with his first name. (Actually, the original scale that Anders Celsius came up with had 0° for the boiling point of water and 100° for the freezing point.) I'll be able to refer to him when Dutch speaking people look amazed when I say them my son is called 'Anders', and ask me to repeat that name several times, because in Dutch there is a word 'anders' which means 'different'.

Another seemingly unimportant thing is that Albert Einstein couldn't speak before he was 3 years old. He was perceived as a bad student, and was not perceived as being very intelligent. Einstein was a patent examiner. At the same time in his life when he wrote the paper on the theory of general relativity, he asked to get a promotion at his job, but they didn't give it to him.

My opinion

What I learned from this book is that you must not fear to do things that are not inline with what most people believe or think to be the 'truth'. Many of the important people discussed in the book where at the time not perceived as being intelligent, did not have 'normal' social skills, ... I do think all of the important people discussed in the book only have these two things in common: focus and perseverance.

It doesn't matter what your personality is, how well you fit into any society, how much you know about a subject: do what you think you need to do and follow you intuition.