October Sky...and a Rant

So I just finished watching this movie, and it's a good movie. I highly recommend it to anyone looking for a good movie to watch. It's a true story about 4 high schoolers growing up in a small coal town in WV in 1957, who get inspired to take up rocketry when they see Sputnik fly overhead. So it's a great story about how even these poor, rural kids with nothing but imagination learn a ton about science on their way to learning how to build mondo rockets and win a national science fair, and win scholarships to college and their tickets out of the coal mine. Great movie, great story.

And then it just pisses me off, because I know that similar stories happened in many fields, not just these guys with rocketry. And I know that that's where so many of the greatest minds came from, and that's how they got their start in science. And I know that this is becoming basically IMPOSSIBLE in today's world.

If I tried to go out and build the rockets that these kids did in the 50s, I would be arrested. Sure, any bozo can build a little 1 foot rocket with the little tube engines from the hobby shop, but what's exciting about that? You don't learn anything from it, you don't learn the chemistry of making the propellant, you don't get excited about it. The main character turned into a leading NASA scientist because of his initial interest in rockets and how he was able to build his own. Now, it's impossible for that same thing to happen.

The same is true for home chemistry. It's becoming more difficult to practice home chemistry everyday. In some places, you will get put on meth lab watch lists just for buying an Erlenmeyer flask, and many chemicals are impossible to buy as a hobbyist because of drug and terrorism laws and prevention programs. The home chemistry set is a thing of the past. And people wonder why science education is declining, it's because there's nothing interesting a kid can do with science anymore! Not even in school anymore, because kids aren't allowed to handle anything, the teacher does it all and you watch from a distance with your goggles on, and mixing water with ice comes with a "don't try this at home" warning.

And I can see the same thing happening with lasers. How many people here learned TONS about electronics, got inspired to take up optics, physics, materials science, electrical engineering because of the coolness of what you can do at home with laser pointers? By my estimation, it's very likely that this website has and will lead 100 or more young people to go into fields of education that tey otherwise would not have. It inspires young people to love learning and science. And yet, as the pattern is going, (Australia 1st, the UK and USA coming soon, other countries following), this hobby, which inspires young people into scientific fields where the brightest minds are needed, is disappearing. Home chemistry and home science are largely gone and are still disappearing before our eyes, and lasers will follow.

And somehow we're still supposed to be able to convince kids they'd rather put in tons of extra work and effort to go into weird fields, even while removing most of teh reasons that people have always gone into those fields?


Ugh. Sorry, rant over. I just love the movie, but then get so mad when I realize what has happened in this world since those times, and how the things in that movie can never happen again. At least we still have lasers for now to get people into those fields of science.

I completely agree with you on everything you have said. It is truly saddening to me how difficult it is to pursue the things I am passionate about. Chemistry is one of my favorite things of all time, and acquiring chemicals and glassware has proven to be quite a challenge in many cases. I would not be surprised if I was arrested for this very reason, as well as my lasers.

I am not breaking any laws, however, I am still at risk of being on a watch list. My room is filled with laser and chemistry-related substances, some of which could be quite toxic. I have to order all of my chemicals online, and some of them are proving hard to get.

Your ideas about scientific education are absolutely accurate; I can't believe nobody else sees it. I have been discouraged many times from my hobbies, and I am looked at suspiciously anytime I mention chemistry.

Matter of fact, the difficulty of which I have encountered getting chemicals is soon going to acheive the opposite effect: if I am not able to perform the experiments which allow me to learn science using proper reagents, I will make my own. When I run out of hydrochloric acid, I will replace it with chlorine water. The current attitude towards young scientists has only made it worse in so many ways to learn about chemistry.

This sickens me.

-Mark

rocketparrotlet said:

I completely agree with you on everything you have said.  It is truly saddening to me how difficult it is to pursue the things I am passionate about.  Chemistry is one of my favorite things of all time, and acquiring chemicals and glassware has proven to be quite a challenge in many cases.  I would not be surprised if I was arrested for this very reason, as well as my lasers.

I am not breaking any laws, however, I am still at risk of being on a watch list.  My room is filled with laser and chemistry-related substances, some of which could be quite toxic.  I have to order all of my chemicals online, and some of them are proving hard to get.  

Your ideas about scientific education are absolutely accurate; I can't believe nobody else sees it.  I have been discouraged many times from my hobbies, and I am looked at suspiciously anytime I mention chemistry.

Matter of fact, the difficulty of which I have encountered getting chemicals is soon going to acheive the opposite effect: if I am not able to perform the experiments which allow me to learn science using proper reagents, I will make my own.  When I run out of hydrochloric acid, I will replace it with chlorine water.  The current attitude towards young scientists has only made it worse in so many ways to learn about chemistry.

This sickens me.

-Mark

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Come to Canada, we trust everybody : Im not sure how it is here, but 'watch list' isnt in our vocab. so its a start

Completely agree with you, I was kinda interrogated exhaustively before I could buy a 1kg bar of dry ice (which I couldn't buy in the end, but I am going to go to another distributor to see if they let me buy it).


"WHAT ARE YOU GOING TO USE IT FOR?!"


"...fun?"

Thanks guys, glad it's not just me.

I also just remembered a story I heard awhile back about how a few people actually do "get it". I think it was in Texas, USA, maybe somewhere else though, where the state legislature was trying to pass a bill to get more controls (maybe a watch list, maybe permitted buyers only, I don't remember) on chemistry equipment to try and stop people from making crystal meth. One of the legislators realized the idiocy of some of the things on the list, and decided to show exactly how stupid it was. For his example, he brought his own personal coffee maker into the legislative chamber and said (paraphrased) "Under this law, this coffee maker, an item which every person here likely owns, contains THREE of the controlled items on this list: a Pyrex liquid container, a hot plate for heating that container, and a filtering apparatus. As written, this law would seek to regulate the sale and possession of coffee makers as controlled items, making every person who ever makes coffee a criminal suspect."

At least that's what I read, but I'd certainly believe it.

its getting so hard to get fun stuff.
Especially for the younger generation.