Science: A Lifelong Interest of Mine Darren L. Miller

People love to complain about how “useless” mathematics is in everyday life:

•“How will cubic factoring help me get my dream job?”

•“How is the quadratic formula going to stop global warming?”

Typical.

If not mathematics, they often set their sights on physics or chemistry:

•“How can the coefficient of static friction fix our nation’s multi-trillion dollar debt?

•“What does Gibbs free energy have to do with anything?”

Again, no surprise — I hear students ask these exact questions all the time. Don’t listen to them.

Science — math, physics, chemistry, and engineering — is everything. At each and every level of interaction or motion, far more is at work than what meets the eye. Little do they know, the complainers, that their voices, the same voices that scoff at the teaching of sciences in schools, underestimate the complexity of the many phenomena at work even in speaking a single syllable. Whether it be sound resonance, as in the case of this vocal protesting, or some related occurrence, science is unavoidable, and undeniably important.

Even when nobody else would think to, I have learned to take science by the reins and embrace it. Science can be implemented in even the simplest actions. For example, when walking around a...