Our excellent friend Mr. Wizard

Community (This content is not subject to review by Daily Kos staff prior to publication.)

Thursday June 14, 2007 · 3:36 PM PDT

2007/06/14 · 15:36

In his on-camera experiments, Mr. Wizard always left a few blanks for his grade-school partners to fill in, and his grade-school viewers came away from the show not only knowing something new, but also feeling like players instead of spectators. Don Herbert would ask his partner, "Why doesn't water freeze if you stir it?" And a million little brains would race to figure it out. All the clues were there, kinetic energy, crystal lattices, hydrogen bonds, in the simplest possible terms.

After so many years, it was still a shock to see his obituary. Our excellent friend is gone!

Mr. Wizard paced his show for understanding and communication, like Mr. Rogers, and completely unlike Sesame Street and other stupefying electronic babysitters. Almost everything on TV teaches children to expect flashing lights and loud noises every second of every day. If you want to make someone thoughtless, that's a very good start.

In 1960, big science wasn't so different from the little science of Mr. Wizard. A cowboy like Jim Watson could prowl the halls of an ancient, crumbling lab and cobble together one of the greatest scientific achievements in the history of the world! Why not you or me? How much did the rods and bolts in the model of DNA cost at the Cavendish? It wasn't $9,000,000,000 to look for the Higgs boson!

Science is slow, and silence is essential to most of it. In 1960 silence wasn't just a luxury for golf courses and remote green suburbs. For children growing up in small towns, it was always just a step away. Even in New York, there weren't so many jumbo jets and helicopters that most of us couldn't find a place to shut it all out. You could sit and think, if you wanted to, and here was someone to teach us how to do it!

"Why doesn't water freeze when you stir it?" And then... silence. No bells and whistles, no CGIs, just a kid on TV, with a furrowed little brow, and the rest of us, in California and Kansas and the Carolinas, furiously thinking.

This content was created by a Daily Kos Community member.

Make YOUR voice heard!

Our excellent friend Mr. Wizard

Comments are closed on this story.