Richard Feynman
In his autobiography, Richard Feynman relates a funny story about censorship at Los Alamos. While he was there, his wife and his father liked to send him codes to crack. This made the Los Alamos overseers nervous, and they were always calling Feynman on the carpet because of his “illicit” correspondence.
For example, Feynman wrote to tell his wife to tell her about “cute” number you get when you divide 1 by 243. (Remember, he was Nobel-Prize-winning physicist, he had strange ideas about beauty.) His letter was sent back, and the censors accused him of using code. He argued that it wasn’t code, since anyone could divide 1 by 243 and get the same sum — the very definition of undisguised information.
When BP had to be coerced into revealing video footage, I was thinking of Feynman’s story, and the irony of this happening in our current age of TMI. Like Feynman’s “cute” data, the unedited footage is as as close to a raw “fact” as anyone can get — it’s just a picture of oil leaking. There’s no voiceover, there’s nothing to sway the viewer. And yet BP did not want to make it available. This isn’t even about politics, it’s about basic access to information.
Things only got worse with the Texas schoolboard’s final decisions about what to include in textbooks. It is entirely possible to “skew” historical data (they can call it “social studies” as much as they want, it’s still history) as the board claims; but the answer to this isn’t Orwellian language control. It’s giving students access to the raw data of history — as early as possible, as often as possible. Screw the textbooks, let’s get those kids some sourcebooks.
The board has no understanding of this, however, because they are not professional historians. I’m always ticked off by the assumption that history is something anyone can do well — unlike, say, physics, or most other disciplines you could get an advanced degree in. I don’t see textbook people arguing about the “correct” interpretation of particle motion, even though that’s basically what physicists do at their own conventions. At the textbook level, the existence of, say, neutrons is a given, so there’s no need to address the higher-level arguments over how they move.
But with history, these yahoos want to limit access to basic information, the historical equivalent of not telling kids that neutrons exist. Which just shows that biologists and businesspeople (who make up the majority of the textbook board) shouldn’t try to do history — or make recommendations about it.