Robert Ballard Interview (page: 8 / 8) Discoverer of the Titanic	Print Interview

You have indicated that, very soon now, you intend to make the biggest, most important climb of your whole career. What's that all about?

Robert Ballard: I'm excited about my marriage. I'd say that's the most important mountain, probably the tallest of all. Again, I revert back to Joseph Campbell. A person as an individual can only scale mountains so high. Man sees the world through a particular set of eyes. Woman sees it through a different set of eyes. It's like binocular vision. You can't see the world in stereo without both views -- slightly different, both valid -- that collectively show the world as you can never see it through one eye. To find your other half, that's what your mate is all about. I've been lucky and done that, and now I want to see the world through that binocular view. I want to know what she thinks about everything, because the truth is in between.

Is there also a new scientific project in store for you?

Robert Ballard: I've got a lot of challenges right now, but I'm not driven by anything right now, other than my marriage. That's as intellectual a challenge as any scientific challenge I can think of. I'm really homing in on that.

You've been doing some work with children. What's the project called, and what's it all about?

Robert Ballard: It came out of the Titanic experience, like so many things that changed my life. When I found volcanoes, and the hydrothermal system, I did well in the scientific community, but I was not flooded by letters from kids. The day I found the Titanic I started having thousands and thousands of pen pals: kids all around the world. Our book on the Titanic came out in eleven countries, and what we discovered was a fascination with high-tech adventure, at a time when children were dropping out of real science, not taking physics, not taking math. America's scientific literacy was plummeting. We are now seventeenth in scientific literacy in just the Western world. We saw an opportunity. Why are kids writing me letters if they don't like science? I'm a scientist. What I do is science. I need to communicate that to them. What's exciting about what I do is the moment of discovery. Unfortunately, you can't take kids down in your submarine, or out on your ships, in large quantities.

So we devised a project called the Jason Project. Remember that I am in an imaginary submarine at sea. I'm not down there, my robots are. I'm in my room. What if I built identical rooms and put them all over North America, and connected them by satellite? If a child entered one of these other rooms, they'd see what I see, when I see it. So I've built twelve of them. I went to teachers, and I said, give me your students, and bring them into this room, and I'll take them on the expedition. We signed up 250,000 kids. We told the kids that they couldn't get in the room unless they promised to study science for four months. We wrote a tough curriculum, in the physical sciences, where they're not just studying math and physics and chemistry, but robotics, telecommunications, the language of science. They studied it, no problem. They wanted to get in that room. See, you have to think of math as wind sprints.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. When I played college basketball, I'd practice for two hours, and just as I wanted to go to the locker room, the coach would say, "Give me 20 wind sprints." "I don't want to do 20 wind sprints." And he would say, "Do you want to play in tomorrow's game? Then you'd better do 20 wind sprints." And I did those 20 wind sprints, which gave me the stamina to survive four quarters of basketball. You will never sell a kid on mental wind sprints. You've got to sell them on the game, then they'll do the wind sprints. So what we wanted to do, is to show them what excitement exploration is, and sell them on exploration, on the quest for knowledge. Sell them on that, and how exciting it is and rewarding it is. And when you hook them, then they will go prepare themselves.

[ Key to Success ] Preparation

So every year, we mount an expedition somewhere in the world. This coming year, we are going to go to the Galápagos Islands, and the kids will go there live, through our technology base. But they don't get to go unless they study science. It's working. The first two years we had a half a million kids involved. And they are coming back. We are in our third year. They keep signing up for science. Lehigh University has joined the Jason network, and they are tracking the kids, and asking them the questions. We discovered that the excitement of exploration has no sex. It's as exciting to boys as it is to girls. The most formative point in a child's mind about science is between grades six through ten. Six through ten is when kids decide whether they are going to go into science or not, long before college. The game is over before they take their SATs. We've got the greatest university system in the world, but one of the worst pre-university systems in the world. I want to change that. And we are.

Great idea. Thank you, Dr. Ballard. It's been fascinating.

Robert Ballard Interview, Page: 1   2   3   4   5   6   7   8