quotes

"Leaders are those who first say what future generations take as common sense." --me

"If the entire age of the earth were compressed to a single year, the 21st century would correspond to a quarter of a second in June."

Regarding the second quote, I think one of the big hurdles in learning science is coping with vast ranges of orders of magnitude. Two examples from either end of the spectrum:

1) If the sun were the size of a cantaloupe, earth is the head of a pin and the nearest star (alpha centauri) would be 1000 miles away.

2) If an atom were the size of a football stadium, the nucleus would be a watermelon seed on the fifty-yard line.

To give people a sense of scale, I think we need more scale models that drive this home. Colleges and universities should try to make more of these. Boston has a cool scale model of the solar system, with planets scattered around the city. I could envision doing the same thing at Stanford, with the planets of the solar system set up along the path on Palm drive. Also I could see doing a cool time line of history on campus, maybe around campus drive. That really helps give people a sense for the length of time required for evolution to do its work. And for the relatively short duration of human civilization relative to the history of the earth.