Bill Nye Explains the Scientific Method and His Greatest Accomplishment in Life | Big Think

Tracey: Dear Bill Nye. My name is Tracey, and as of today it is my 19th birthday, and I’m pursuing my education in the sciences thanks to the influence of worldly educators such as yourself. My question to you is: what do you think is the most beneficial thing a scientist can do for the community, and what do you consider your greatest accomplishment as a scientist and an educator? All the best, and thank you for your contributions to the generations ahead of you.

Bill Nye: Tracey. I’m delighted that you are pursuing a career in science. We need as many scientifically literate people as we can in our society so that when it’s time to vote and make decisions about our future we do it in an informed way with science as the background. So thank you. This is fabulous.

As far as my contribution, that’s a very nice question. I think it’s getting young people excited about science so that in the future we’ll have scientifically literate people. And what we want is for people — it’s not just the facts.

The facts are great. They often change as we learn more, but the big thing is to get the process of science. You make an observation, your eyebrows go up, you say to yourself, "My goodness, what caused that?" And then you come up with an idea or a hypothesis of what made that effect happen, this phenomenon that you observed.

And then you come up with a way to test it. You test it and then you see what happened and compare what you thought would happen with what did happen. And you’re comparing your hypothesis to the outcome. If we can get that across to as many people as possible we can, Tracey, dare I say it: we can change the world. That’s a great question.