Counting rocks: Maybe it’s enough

[ N.B. Yesterday I accepted the Issac Asimov Science Award from the American Humanist Society. This is my acceptance speech, which you can watch it over on YouTube. If my voice sounds off, it’s because I’m still recovering from #@$!(*^!@% Bronchitis.]

Memory is a strange and fickle thing. Not every moment is stred. Somewhere I lost the names of the dinosaurs that I knew when I was 5. Gone is the family tree of the Greek gods I memorised in 5th grade. There is an inexplicable alchemy to what is remembered — did you know, birds can’t fart, wombats poop cubes, and Ceres was a former planet more than 70 years before Pluto was even discovered. Somethings, I just can’t forget.

There is this one memory that stays with me. I was about 12 years old — a 7th grader — and I was getting teased for my intelligence as we all lined up to go inside that morning. I can remember the crowding, the noise, and his taunt of: “You just think you know everything!”

I still remember my retort “No. I. Don’t. … but someday I will.”

I was wrong, I will never know everything, but that hunger to try — to work each day to learn more and understand more, that hunger that pulsed through that pre-teenage me is what has carried me to become and stay a scientist.

Scientists aren’t people who know everything: we are people that strive everyday to expand humanity’s understanding of this universe we share.