Nobel Prize winner makes science attractive

Nobel Prize winner and Harvard science professor Dudley Herschbach said a sense of wonder and romance should be added to the traditionally dry study of the sciences to an audience of Cal State Long Beach students and professors Friday.

"There are students here who are going to solve the problems their elders couldn't solve," said Herschbach to the students, who were spilling out the door of the Peterson Building 1 lecture hall.

Herschbach punctuated his lecture with jokes that drew laughter from the audience of about 200.

"You don't need to be bright to be a scientist, you just need to be persistent as hell," he said. Herschbach shared his unconventional teaching methods that are designed to attract students with different majors to science.

Herschbach stressed that there should be no competition between students.

"Science is not competitive," he said. "If you learn something, you have to tell the world."

The lecture, entitled "Sacred and Profane: Teaching Science as Human as well as Divine," covered the origins of science, which were based in the innate curiosity of human beings, he said.

Both science and religion originate people's struggles to understand nature.

"We wake up in an incredible universe," Herschbach said. "Science is one manifestation of how we react to that awe and wonder, religion is another."

"I don't see any conflict at all between science and religion," Herschbach said. "Both can be badly abused" and breed intolerance.

To understand human history, it has to be put into a scientific context, Herschbach said.

For example, to understand why Asian societies built up around rice, the student should be taught the scientific reasons for the selection of rice crops over wheat or other crops.

"Science should be made a part of our general culture," Herschbach said. Courses that don't tell the role of science in human history are "fraudulent," he said.

The use of parables, short stories designed to illustrate some truth or moral, should be incorporated into the teaching of science so that students can better grasp the reasons behind otherwise empty scientific formulas, Herschbach said.

"Parables transcend science, putting science in artistic and humanistic terms," he said.

"There were insights that perhaps I hadn't thought of before," said Nail Senozan, professor of chemistry and chairman the Chemistry and Biochemistry Department.

"I particularly liked his opinion that to make science interesting one must approach with  parables," Senozan said.

Herschbach won the Nobel Prize in 1986 for deciphering the "language" chemicals create as they interact with one another.