Re: "Education still requires facts," Sept. 8.
When I was in elementary school, the whiz kid in our class (not the teacher) did a project which demonstrated that, "No two things are equal." But it wasn't until I had graduated from secondary school and was well into my studies for a degree in applied science that I learned "there are no such things as scientific facts; there are only theories, opinions and approximations."
My commitment as a scientist was not to find the right answers, but to find the right questions. And it wasn't until postgraduate studies that I learned: "Pure mathematics is a wonderful, philosophic language, but applied mathematics is the most inaccurate language ever invented by humankind" (because no two things are equal).
I also learned that we are each subjected to many thousands of changes every second of our lives. Everything is always changing; the only constant in the universe is change, and to maintain the status quo is an impossible fantasy.
These ways of thinking have served me well in contributing to the design, development and application of leadingedge technologies in communications and nuclear-electric generation and in contributing to community-service groups.
But if I had learned these things in elementary school, my contributions to society could have started sooner and been much more effective. If these are the kinds of "big ideas" of which the B.C.
Education Ministry is thinking, then I wholeheartedly support them.
Robert Radford
Duncan
