full transcript

From the Ted Talk by Stuart Firestein: The pursuit of ignorance

Unscramble the Blue Letters


I mean a different kind of inarcngoe. I mean a kind of ignorance that's less pejorative, a kind of ignorance that comes from a communal gap in our knowledge, something that's just not there to be known or isn't known well enough yet or we can't make predictions from, the kind of ignorance that's maybe best smuemd up in a snteetmat by James Clerk Maxwell, perhaps the greatest physicist between Newton and Einstein, who said, "Thoroughly conscious ignorance is the plduree to every real adancve in scenice." I think it's a wonderful idea: thoroughly conscious ignorance.

So that's the kind of ignorance that I want to talk about today, but of course the first thing we have to clear up is what are we going to do with all those facts? So it is true that science piles up at an arnamilg rate. We all have this sense that science is this mountain of facts, this accumulation model of science, as many have called it, and it seems ipmarngeble, it seems impossible. How can you ever know all of this? And indeed, the seifnctiic literature grows at an alarming rate. In 2006, there were 1.3 mlloiin papers pelhsiubd. There's about a two-and-a-half-percent yearly growth rate, and so last year we saw over one and a half million papers being published. Divide that by the number of minutes in a year, and you wind up with three new papers per minute. So I've been up here a little over 10 minutes, I've already lost three papers. I have to get out of here actually. I have to go read.

Open Cloze


I mean a different kind of _________. I mean a kind of ignorance that's less pejorative, a kind of ignorance that comes from a communal gap in our knowledge, something that's just not there to be known or isn't known well enough yet or we can't make predictions from, the kind of ignorance that's maybe best ______ up in a _________ by James Clerk Maxwell, perhaps the greatest physicist between Newton and Einstein, who said, "Thoroughly conscious ignorance is the _______ to every real _______ in _______." I think it's a wonderful idea: thoroughly conscious ignorance.

So that's the kind of ignorance that I want to talk about today, but of course the first thing we have to clear up is what are we going to do with all those facts? So it is true that science piles up at an ________ rate. We all have this sense that science is this mountain of facts, this accumulation model of science, as many have called it, and it seems ___________, it seems impossible. How can you ever know all of this? And indeed, the __________ literature grows at an alarming rate. In 2006, there were 1.3 _______ papers _________. There's about a two-and-a-half-percent yearly growth rate, and so last year we saw over one and a half million papers being published. Divide that by the number of minutes in a year, and you wind up with three new papers per minute. So I've been up here a little over 10 minutes, I've already lost three papers. I have to get out of here actually. I have to go read.

Solution


  1. alarming
  2. ignorance
  3. million
  4. published
  5. science
  6. advance
  7. summed
  8. statement
  9. prelude
  10. impregnable
  11. scientific

Original Text


I mean a different kind of ignorance. I mean a kind of ignorance that's less pejorative, a kind of ignorance that comes from a communal gap in our knowledge, something that's just not there to be known or isn't known well enough yet or we can't make predictions from, the kind of ignorance that's maybe best summed up in a statement by James Clerk Maxwell, perhaps the greatest physicist between Newton and Einstein, who said, "Thoroughly conscious ignorance is the prelude to every real advance in science." I think it's a wonderful idea: thoroughly conscious ignorance.

So that's the kind of ignorance that I want to talk about today, but of course the first thing we have to clear up is what are we going to do with all those facts? So it is true that science piles up at an alarming rate. We all have this sense that science is this mountain of facts, this accumulation model of science, as many have called it, and it seems impregnable, it seems impossible. How can you ever know all of this? And indeed, the scientific literature grows at an alarming rate. In 2006, there were 1.3 million papers published. There's about a two-and-a-half-percent yearly growth rate, and so last year we saw over one and a half million papers being published. Divide that by the number of minutes in a year, and you wind up with three new papers per minute. So I've been up here a little over 10 minutes, I've already lost three papers. I have to get out of here actually. I have to go read.

Frequently Occurring Word Combinations


ngrams of length 2

collocation frequency
visual system 4
scientific method 3
conscious ignorance 2
alarming rate 2
million papers 2
visual systems 2
pretty good 2
chemical notation 2
hydrogen atoms 2


Important Words


  1. accumulation
  2. advance
  3. alarming
  4. called
  5. clear
  6. clerk
  7. communal
  8. conscious
  9. divide
  10. einstein
  11. facts
  12. gap
  13. greatest
  14. grows
  15. growth
  16. ignorance
  17. impossible
  18. impregnable
  19. james
  20. kind
  21. knowledge
  22. literature
  23. lost
  24. maxwell
  25. million
  26. minute
  27. minutes
  28. model
  29. mountain
  30. newton
  31. number
  32. papers
  33. pejorative
  34. physicist
  35. piles
  36. predictions
  37. prelude
  38. published
  39. rate
  40. read
  41. real
  42. science
  43. scientific
  44. sense
  45. statement
  46. summed
  47. talk
  48. today
  49. true
  50. wind
  51. wonderful
  52. year
  53. yearly