Here is a really scary idea: When it comes to asking questions, when it comes to knowledge, sometimes no one out there has found the answer. No one knows. It doesn't matter how many books you read or how smart the people are that you study. No one knows.

You study anything long enough, you reach the fringes of what's known, and beyond that nobody knows, Scientists are aware of this, but generally students aren't. They think the answers are always in the back of the book, it's something you'll be taught next year. School doesn't teach you to think, it teaches you to learn the right ideas and repeat them, with the almost religious believe that there is a right answer and somebody knows it. But that's not true.

There comes a point where someone will be asking you questions and challenging you to find your own answers, and trying to give the "right" answer won't work. Because if no body has the right answer, what you need is not to know the right answer, you need to know how to think for yourself, how to go out and study what's out there, how to ask the right questions, how to sift through the information you have and come up with a working answer. It probably won't be the "right" answer, but it'll work to get you to the next question. Learn to ask the questions and to look for answers. The next thing, is to stand up straight and face it like an explorer.

We are at the start of a whole new field here. There are no textbooks for most of this, and what textbooks there are almost certainly have the wrong answers. We stand alone at the cutting edge of some fast unknown area full of wonders, and we either stand there, accepting the unknown and willing to move forward, or we run screaming like little girls in the arms of science and "safe".

Angel, 2014-11-27