Chapter Summary Of Richard's Wordsmithing

This chapter is about how Richard organized his report and how he rewrote it 23 times. He would write something, then a team would help him rearrange what he wrote. Richard called this “wordsmithing”. Richard and the team of people helping him write disagreed on a lot of things in his report. Richard’s was upset because he had done all this work just for his report to be in the appendix. He felt they were making to big of a deal about a report that would not be part of the main report. Richard went over his work many times, you have to do this physics as well. It is important when doing calculations and writing things for physics that you go back and check your work. It is easy to make mistakes or to word things weird, so it’s a good idea
The first reason discussed is that scientific knowledge allow people to make and do all kinds of things. Of course people can do bad things with science, but people can also do good things. People used science to cure cancer, go to space, and even to make cars. Science is something everyone is familiar with. The second reason is they intellectual enjoyment someone can get from science. Some people find it rather fun to learn and read. Getting enjoyment from science is just as important as getting enjoyment from laughter or anything else. It is fun to discover new things about the world, and it is even more fun to apply that knowledge. The third reason science is valuable is not written as clearly as the others. Everyone is ignorant in some subject, and in order to become less ignorant there must be progress. In science there has to be progress. No one can say they have the answer to everything, otherwise the human race would come to a halt. There would be no progress and no discoveries. Science is what drives the world. All three of these reasons can be applied to physics class. The knowledge gained from this class allows us to do so much. We learned the laws of nature, and now we can apply that to everything. I also feel that learning is fun. Sometimes there would be a really tough concept or problem that I could not figure out, but when I finally did I was so happy. I was happy because I understood the concept and would get a good grade, but I also now just had that knowledge and to me knowledge is very powerful. The third value of science to me is more of a rule. There must be progress, and we made progress everyday we came in and learned about physics. We learned all these things and we can now go out and apply these concepts and build off of them. Richard’s message in this chapter was very well received. He did a great job of making science seem exciting and