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[交流] MRS: education is all

http://prospect.rsc.org/blogs/cw/?p=728


Tue 27 Nov 2007

MRS: education is all
Posted by Richard under MRS Fall meeting 2007 , Conferences , News

Harry Kroto, discoverer of the buckyball, 1996 Nobel laureate, and past RSC president, has just been awarded another honour here at the Materials Research Society Fall meeting in Boston, US -  the inaugural Fred Kavli distinguished lectureship in nanoscience. In his lecture Sir Harry, wearing a charismatic bright orange shirt, namechecked Galileo, Dante, Thomas Paine, Walt Whitman, Richard Feynman, Albert Einstein, John Cornforth, Carl Sagan, Abraham Lincoln, and Ian McKellen (with whom he was in a play at school). With a scattergun of inspirational quotes, he touched on the responsibilities of scientists as citizens; the devil of religious and moral certainty; the demise of the meccano set that inspired him as a child; the world’s obsession with celebrity; and, above and beyond all, the need for educating future generations about science.

Kroto discussed his amazing outreach work, including the Global Educational Outreach Initiative, which aims to provide a globally accessible cache of quality science and technology material for teachers to use in classrooms. He’s also founded the Vega Science Trust, which provides some very interesting science TV, including many Nobel Laureate interviews. There’s a danger that all these worthwhile educational initiatives may end up as lone voices drowned out in a profusion of sub-standard cool science YouTube videos, but if anyone can pull them together into something more coherent, Kroto may be the man.

For all his renaissance man quotes, Kroto seemed rather downbeat about the future of humanity (a question put to him at the end); ‘irrationalism is stalking the world,’ he said. But he’s kept his sense of humour, pointing out that the Mexican children enjoying balancing models of C60  on their heads (in a video shoot of one of his recent workshops) were the only ones who’d found a use for buckyballs so far…
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http://prospect.rsc.org/blogs/cw/?p=728
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