Wanted: Bold Thinkers
Much of science today is grant-dependent and discourages dreamy, out-of-box thinking – who wants to fund mistakes? “I really think of [Tesla] as one of the last people inventing on his own,” Samantha Hunt tells Kurt Andersen. “He didn’t have funding from the Department of Defense or Columbia University.” And she warns that Tesla’s visionary approach to science is all but extinct. “We have the term experimental artist, experimental writer,” she suggests, “but why don’t we have the term experimental scientist, someone who’s really trying to cross these boundaries?”
(Originally aired: January 25, 2008)
â?? Samantha Hunt reads from her novel The Invention of Everything Else
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