3min chapter

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#173: Lessons from Geniuses, Billionaires, and Tinkerers

The Tim Ferriss Show

CHAPTER

The History of Science

"i love the inevitablle, inevitableness of the ideas. I like hav one idea built on another," he says. "I could totally see this one encounter veering me off into becoming a scientist of some type."

00:00
Speaker 2
I don't kno if i could do it justice. And the history of science would be onumer two.
Speaker 1
I think a, you know, i, i suppose i do, i don't know that i do science. I do engineering. Now, i think a lot about science, but i love the ideas. I love the inevitablle, inevitableness of the ideas. I like hav one idea built on another. And when you really have a great history of science teacher who sort of tells the story of how these things shaped culture, shape the world, it makes science something more than just the formulas or the equations or the theorems or the ideas that you learn in a fairly dry science text book, no matter how much they've art, art made t artsy with side bars ngraphics. It's the there were people involved, and it wasn't at all like, at the time, they might have been hugely controversial ideas, and it wasn't so obvious at the time that, like, you know, the calculus was right, or that, you know, air was a thing, or that germs were a thing, and how much controversy and how much humanness there were around these ideas. I loved that, because i think i sort of see it on a day to dayba, when you're inventing stuff, it feels totally nuts at the time, n yu're like, as anybody like, think this was worth while.
Speaker 2
Well, i it also makes me think of a dinner i just had last week, which was an incredible, rare opportunity. But i had a chance to go to a small group dinner with jim watson, of watson and crick and, i mean, he's got to be, i don't know, exactly, late eighties, maybe a maybe, i may be nineties, and completely lucid. And i was two chers away, you know, as one person separated from him, a so, co discoverer of the double helix. And iit turns out, i didn't realize this, but he has probably half a dozen other discoveries that would have been anyone else's life work. And he has acollection of them. And but i remember having had a number of short conversations with him, and also overheard a lot of his fascinating conversations with other folks ad rember, thinking that if this were 25 years ago, i could totally see this one encounter veering me off into becoming a scientist of some type. I mean, just that one encounter. Could totally see it by a sort of meeting someone who embodies all the things that felt irrelevant when they are being thrown at by someone who is far
Speaker 1
lesser, far
Speaker 2
lesser, and just not passionate or particularly interested in conveying it to me in a compelling way.

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