Knowing how things work is important, but I think that's an incomplete view of what science literacy is or, at least, should be. Science literacy is … - Neil deGrasse Tyson

Not that anybody asked, but If you accumulated all the flora, fauna, and metal that your True Love gives you each day in the “Twelve Days of Christmas” song, you would own 12 Trees, 40 Gold Rings, 140 Humans, and 185 Birds of 6 different species.

If Rational Arguments no longer work in US governance, it’s evidence of a deeper problem in our educational system, which favors what to know over how to think — how to critically analyze, process, & verify information.

Seems like a bad time to cut funding for Public Education.

Creativity is seeing what everyone else sees, but then thinking a new thought that has never been thought before and expressing it somehow. It could be with art, a sculpture, music or even in science. The difference, however, between scientific creativity and any other kind of creativity, is that no matter how long you wait, no one else will ever compose "Beethoven's Ninth Symphony" except for Beethoven. No matter what you do, no one else will paint Van Gogh's "Starry Night." Only Van Gogh could do that because it came from his creativity.<p>Whereas in science, you can't just make stuff up and presume that it is a proper account of nature. At the end of the day, you have to answer to nature. Since everyone has nature to answer to, your creativity is simply discovering something about the natural world that somebody else would have eventually discovered exactly the same way. They might have come through a different path, but they would have landed in the same place.<p>Even though we name theorems and equations after the people who discover them — Newton's laws of gravity, Kepler's laws of planetary motion — somebody else would have discovered them afterward. It's that simple. Your creativity is not a boundless creativity.