Scientists and technologists have many opponents and a few actual enemies, but our greatest real enemy is ignorance - both in others and in ourselves. The language we speak, mathematics, and the technical subjects that we speak about can be understood by anyone who has made a special effort to learn them. That effort, however, requires so much time and expense that most people are not willing to undertake it. Moreover, professional scientists require many years of formal training and must acquire study habits which continue that training throughout their lives.

Each science student must not only learn a substantial amount of factual information; he must also learn to think quantitatively and with rigorous honesty about his subject.

There has been a tendency in science to teach to those who learn easily and to forget the others. Those forgotten others, comprising most of our fellow citizens, are now coming back to haunt us as they respond to the demagogues of pseudoscience and antitechnology - a response conditioned upon their lack of understanding of science.

When I taught 300 students each year at the University of Califor-nia at San Diego, this skimming procedure was the norm. The students read the best chemistry text available; listened to three lectures by me each week; attended laboratory twice weekly; and endured examinations at two-week intervals. In addition, every evening (five days each week) I returned to the lecture hall and answered questions until no students remained. The same 30 to 40 students came each evening. I doubt that more than 25% of the 300 students learned much from the course or that more than 10% mastered the material.

One student learned a great amount of science from these freshman chemistry courses - the professor. I found that my active knowledge of my subject increased substantially. Obviously, I already had good passive knowledge, the ability to understand. Active knowledge, however, is understanding so complete that all aspects of the subject are spontaneously used in everyday thought and work.

I have noticed that many of the best research scientists prefer to teach general introductory courses. The poorer scientists frequently prefer to teach "advanced'' courses. They prefer specialized subjects close to their research fields that require little thought or preparation.

The desire to teach introductory courses is often explained in terms of the professors' enthusiasm for teaching and stimulation by young minds. I have often suspected, however, that desire to personally relearn the basics of their subject is a primary motivation. This is, of course, not admitted. How many chemistry professors would admit to less than perfect knowledge of freshman chemistry?

This learning takes place while one is lecturing. It is a mental process linked to oral presentation. I have also noticed that my best research ideas occur when I am speaking with others about the research - whether or not the listeners contribute to the ideas.

Now, with the six students in my home school, I am definitely not interested in skimming off only those who learn easily. I am determined that each will learn the material well. This is the sort of motivation that the educators of science and technology need to bring to society at large. If most of our fellow citizens remain ignorant about science and technology, we will continue to be in political trouble from those who misuse that ignorance to personal advantage. The same holds true for ignorance about the moral and practical advantages of free enterprise.

Our home school is entirely self-taught by the students. Science is not taught until mathematics through introductory calculus has been completed by means of the excellent Saxon Math series of books. (We recently interviewed John Saxon, the writer of these books. Interestingly, he does not think of them as self-teaching texts for use outside of organized classrooms, but they work very well in this use.) After the children finish Saxon calculus, they receive General Chemistry by Pauling and The Mechanical Universe - Mechanics and Heat, Advanced Edition by Frautschi, Olenick, Apostol, and Goodstein. When they finish The Mechanical Universe, they get Beyond the Mechanical Universe - from Electricity to Modern Physics by Olenick, Apostol, and Goodstein. They must read these books and work half the problems in the chemistry book and all of the problems in the physics books. They check their own answers and correct their own mistakes. They are also asked to read at their leisure (without a requirement to fully understand) the first volume of Lectures on Physics by Feynman, Leighton, and Sands. All of these books have been used as freshman texts for physics and chemistry at Caltech.

Zachary (age 18) is finished with this; Noah (age 17) is in the middle of it; and Arynne (age 15) has started it, having finished Saxon. All three have good math ability, with unrecentered SAT math scores of 750, 770, and 690 (a practice exam) respectively. The three vary, however, in their ability to absorb information from reading alone.

I noticed that Noah was experiencing a difficulty identical to my own experience when I was his age. One reads the book but doesn't really absorb it. Problem solving becomes an exercise in scrambling back through the text looking for formulas and combining these with computing tricks such as dimensional analysis. As the physics advanced, his error rate grew as high as 30%.

Then we read The Overnight Student by M. L. Jones, available from Louis Publishing, 1105 Inverness Lane, Bellingham, WA 98226, Ph. (206) 647-3229. This book advocates that the student become an oral teacher of an imaginary class.

Noah tried this. Now, for about an hour each day, he closets himself in the press room where we have installed the equipment used to print and mail Access to Energy. There, he teaches the physics orally in small segments to an imaginary audience as he reads through the book. Students are naturally shy. None of us has heard him do this.

It is remarkable how apparently quantitative and objective standards can actually enter our intellectual environment from subjective processes and, once there, become firmly entrenched. One night in the lab, as a graduate student, I decided to try to cleave a solid-phase synthesized peptide from its polystyrene support by means of a reaction in liquid hydrogen fluoride. I just guessed at the time and temperature that might work. Luckily, these reaction conditions worked, but I never found time to investigate further and determine the ideal conditions. During the next 20 years, this procedure was used in the synthesis of many thousands of peptides, but it was not changed. Each chemist carefully repeated the reaction conditions that I guessed in the lab that night as though these had been carefully determined experimentally. The procedure was acceptable, but it would have been much better if the reaction conditions had been optimized.

A combination of theory and experiment, the authors' basic hypothesis is that outfielders manage to arrive at the proper place to catch a fly ball by maintaining a linear optical trajectory or LOT. This is illustrated in Figure 1 reproduced from their paper.

Obviously, not all fly balls are tracked in this fashion. We have noticed, however, that outfielders who run and camp under the ball often need a little dive at the catch to make up for miscalculation of their position. On the other hand, it is marvelous that good outfielders make so many catches in which they are running all the way and arrive perfectly at the ball only just as it arrives at the ground. The LOT hypothesis explains this.

One of the book's many figures is reproduced below as Figure 2. From the World Resources Database, World Resources Institute / DSC Dataservices Inc., Washington, D.C., Figure 2 is normalized to 100 for 1979-1981. Although Paul Ehrlich's population bomb that would have left us all starving in the dark before 1980 turned out to be a dud, it is clear from this graph that we do have a developing food problem. What are we going to do with the looming enormous surplus?

Maybe the government could open a waste disposal site in Nevada because food is loaded with radioactivity, but what will we do until the disposal site is ready in 2050? There is one obvious solution - more people. This is one race that technology cannot be allowed to win!

More seriously, does this graph tell us anything about the millions of unfortunate people who are currently starving? There is a surplus of food, but there is also a surplus of government meddlers. Technology and free enterprise created the farming methods that have produced most of this food. If technology, free enterprise, and normal human compassion, where necessary, were allowed to distribute it, suffering by starvation could be as rare as smallpox.

The excesses of pseudoenvironmentalism and of New Age "naturalism'' are enough to cause a reaction of repulsion in anyone who thinks rationally and is interested in objective truth as opposed to mysticism. Conditioned by having correctly rejected seemingly endless claims that specific products of technology are creeping into our bodies to do us harm, there is a human tendency to reject all such possibilities without further investigation. This is a further harm that the mystics do. They discredit by association certain sensible considerations.

When I studied nutrition and cancer in mice many years ago, we determined dose-response curves for several individual nutrients. We also conducted the first rigorous laboratory experiments showing the beneficial effects of fruit and vegetable diets in reducing cancer growth. I was always looking for clues in the alternative health literature that might have merit, even though it was obvious that much of that literature is nonsense. Some of the things of interest were so politically incorrect that I used codes for them on my office chalkboard, so that visitors would not be offended.

in the laboratory was treated as a major event by health and safety personnel. Yet the Merck Index also says that occasional swallowing of metallic mercury is harmless. Breathing mercury vapor is the worst hazard. Of course, the dose makes the poison, but what about the mercury that most of us have in our amalgam dental fillings?

"The benefits and risks of dental amalgam'' by S. B. Corbin and W. G. Kohn, JADA 125 pp 381-388 contains some interesting data. They point out the great dental benefits of amalgam tooth fillings and estimate the cost of replacement of all existing amalgam fillings at about $248 billion. The extra cost of placing no new amalgam fillings is estimated at $12 billion per year. If we assume that one life is lost for each $10 million of waste (probably too conservative), amalgam fillings would need to kill 1,200 people per year to be the more dangerous. This would surely be detected. Loss, however, of a few weeks from each of a million or more lives by slight acceleration in physiological aging might be very difficult to detect.

Central questions, of course, are whether or not there is a mercury threshold or even a mercury hormesis effect. Rigorous answers to these questions are not known. Very high doses of mercury are fatal, and subclinical effects have been seen at doses about 10-fold higher than the normal human intake. Corbin and Kohn report, from a review of 1980s published research, that the usual intake from food, water, and air (mostly food) is about 2 to 6 micrograms/day/person. The median of wide-ranging experimental determinations of intake from amalgam tooth fillings is about 3 micrograms/day/person. So, an ordinary complement of amalgam fillings approximately doubles one's mercury intake. We do not know whether this is harmful, but most parents are forced to guess. My guess is that, where the economic impediment is not too great, parents should have non-mercury fillings put into their children's teeth.

While this study does not include every accident that occurred, it does include the most comprehensive list of accidents its authors were able to assemble through a substantial effort. Notice that the total of all accidental deaths in all five energy generation industries for the entire world combined was less than 20,000 or about 1,000 per year.

If we estimate that the existence of this wonderful energy system adds only 5 years to the average life expectancy (20 years may be more accurate), then (5,000,000,000)(5)/(30)(1,000)(60) = approximately 14,000 human lifetimes saved by energy for each life lost in energy accidents. (We assume 30 years of life lost for each accidental death and 60 years for the average life span.) Calculated another way, (60)(1000)(365)(30)(24)/(5)(10⁹) = approximately 3 hours of life lost to energy accidents per human lifetime. If all power were generated by nuclear plants, then, on the basis of the actual accident record, this 3 hours drops to about 1 minute. If air pollution deaths are included, the time lost rises - but not for nuclear power which produces no air pollution. Then, there are the lives lost in other activities related to energy generation and use. These, too, are fewer for nuclear power. See The Health Hazards of NOT Going Nuclear for those estimates.

We thought this sort of tyranny was supposed to be going out of style.

As the enviro war on column 7 of the periodic table intensifies, many species just have not gotten the apocalyptic message and many "polluters'' are proving unwilling to inform on one another. This includes a long list of malefactors such as marine algae, kelp, wood fungus, ice plant, mushrooms, cedar trees, and phytoplankton. "Mother Earth,'' too, just keeps belching from volcanoes vast quantities of CFCs as well as hydrogen fluoride and hydrogen chloride.

Gribble reports, for example, that the "global emission rate of chlo-romethane from the marine and terrestrial biomass is 5 million tons per year, whereas anthropogenic [human caused] chloromethane emissions are only 26,000 tons per year.'' He counts 2,000 different halogenated chemicals (containing fluorine, chlorine, bromine, or iodine) that are discharged into the atmosphere by natural processes.

These and similar enviro scams are, I think, beginning to run out of steam. While the counterarguments were bottled up in professional journals and enviro-friendly news media kept repeating the lies, the lies were able to thrive. Now, however, the pain of such things as refrigeration repression is beginning to reach the general public along with easily understood explanations of the truth.