At 21, given a few years to live. He made it to mid-70’s and changed the way we look at the universe.
Passing of Stephen Hawking
by CJ | Mar 13, 2018 | Journal | 22 comments
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So sad. 🙁
The world is a better place for his being in it. My present grief is minor because he lives on in his work, which is the basis for so much of our understanding of cosmology.
On a brighter note: 3-14 is pi day!
Well, I just glanced over at CJ’s link on the right side of my home page, and, he’s gone. I’m only up this late due to daylight-saving time adjusting my head-space and timing… Now, I guess it’s time to review his work in video (mine, netfl(e)x’s, youptubs, etc.) Sayonara, or however you spell that…
One of my first heroes of science. I sort of thought he would go on forever given the amount of time he had been ill.
“My goal is simple. It is a complete understanding of the universe, why it is as it is and why it exists at all.” –Stephen Hawking
After all, it’s only one universe.
Although I did not know the man, I could appreciate and admire his persistent courage.
We were so lucky to have him as long as we did. Thinking of that movie “The Mouse That Roared” — He was “the Brain That Soared.” One of our greatest Trailblazers, and a truly amazing man.
I emailed my daughter from work this morning as soon as I saw the news – she emailed back right away – marveling over his longevity and our opportunity to have that mind with us for so long. We will miss him.
A close friend of mine in Alaska had moved to the states to work for Intel; he came back to visit and we met on our beloved Delta River – during my lunch break. He told me he was chosen to ask Stephen Hawking a question when Stephen was going to be at a conference. I told him that Stephen had just recorded a soundtrack on a Pink Floyd album and I thought that was fairly interesting. I saw him again after his chance to meet and ask a question of Stephen and he said he had a hard time coming up with a question to ask him because all he could think of was “why did you do a recording with Pink Floyd?”
Well, why not? 😉 (Too contrarian?) 😉 — I think it shows his sense of humor and a love of life, good music, things outside of science. So, cool.
—–
I live with a handicap, and I’ve known several people, friends and family, who have had various physical limits (wheelchair, paralysis, etc.) that severely limited their physical bodies, and yet, they had beautiful spirits, wonderful hearts and minds.
So, sincerely, I am glad he can finally be free of his physical body’s limits, in order to soar. I hope that, if there is some next-door, alternate dimension or reality, a next life, whatever that is, that he and others I’ve admired, and people I’ve loved, would get the chance to roam free and do the things they missed or never could do in this life. I would very much hope that it’s true. I grew up believing in one particular religious faith’s version of that heaven. — I have come to think that perhaps all of us humans are so limited to such a tiny portion of the whole picture, that we have greatly misunderstood, all of us, what might actually be the whole picture, the whole tapestry, as though we see just one little bit and no further, that we can’t get it all at once. Yet? — I don’t know. But I would like to believe that there is something better for all of us, after we go through this life.
So…maybe a celebration is in order, that Stephen Hawking, a great thinker, a guy with a witty sense of humor, and much to offer — can now be free of a body that. had been a burden for too long, and now he can go exploring, maybe, do some of those things he missed doing when he was a young guy…or maybe go off and see some of the wonders of the universe he spent so many years trying to understand a little more.
And… he was kind enough to take a lot of us along with him to learn a bit more about our universe. He contributed a great deal to science. (And apparently a bit to a Pink Floyd album.) (and hey, some curious betting among other physicists, to fun and entertaining results.)
He’ll be missed, and there is a great space to fill now.
Last night I came to the realization that Stephen passed on Pi Day (3.14)- so appropriate! This morning I saw some curious facts. Albert Einstien was born on March 14, 1849 (also Pi Day)and they both passed away at 76 years of age. Galileo died on January 8, 1642, Stephen was born 300 years later on January 8th. I also believe we “see” only a tiny bit of a vast tapestry and connections and intersections in our lives have meaning beyond just coincidence.
No, it’s just a lack of understanding of “coincidence”, randomness, and statistics. Our brains didn’t evolve that way! We have to “learn” it, albeit imperfectly. It’s similar to the way Quantum Mechanics “makes no sense”.
Can you really say you understand why, if there are 25 or so people reading this blog, it’s better than even odds two of us will have the same birthday out of the 365 days of the year? The problem was featured by Martin Gardner in his April 1957 “Mathematical Games” column in Scientific American.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birthday_problem
Wow, I knew statistics was difficult (I had one class of it after highschool and only just scraped through), and coincidences are more likely than people think; but trying to read that wikipedia article really drove home that the statistical answers are very often not very intuitive at all!
And that the results of looking at similar-seeming questions in slightly different ways can mean the answers are very different.
The chance of 2 random people having the same birthday is 50% in a group of 23 and 99,9% in a group of 70; but if those 23 people walk into a room 1 by 1 your best chance of being the first one who’se birthday is matched is as number 20 (not 23); but if you want a 50% chance of your birthday being matched in a group of people you need 253 people in the group (a lot more than half the days in the year)…
It’s all explained in the article but none of it is anything I’d have guessed from my own “common sense”.
I can see (from the first examples) that random coincidences occuring between random strangers are even more likely than I’d thought. But on the second part of the example, once one part of the question becomes about a specific person, that chance is suddenly much smaller than I’d expect: you need more than half the possibilities to get to 50% chance.
That makes me wonder about the assertion that coincidences between Stephen Hawking and other historical very famous astronomers and scientists are likely to be statistically common.
1) You’re comparing to two dates for one specific person, like if you’re wanting to match your specific birthday in the second part of the example.
2) The total group of very famous historical astronomers and space philosophers that you are comparing him with is not that large. Double that number for 2 dates per person, and double it again because you have two dates for the subject to compare with, and it still doesn’t seem like a very large number of possible hits from which to derive the real hits Zinialin mentioned.
So why, despite the specific starting point / subject of the question, does the likelyhood of it being random statistical chance follow the first “much more likely than expected” rather than the second “less likely than half” part of the statistics?
Sorry if that last question gave the wrong impression. I don’t doubt Paul’s statistics, I was asking for help understanding why my “common sense” would guess so wrong, trying to get a handle on recalibrating that common sense.
I am mathematically challenged, and can’t really follow the equations in the wiki article, but maybe some of the clever people here can help me grasp some ideas of what sort of things to look at to determine the order of magnitude of the statistical likelyhood.
@ Hanneke, I gave my further take on this below, once in the main thread, once in reply to BCS.
Specifically, in response to this post, it may be enough to realize that things may well be more complicated than they seem, and, well, “modesty is a virtue”. No matter how much of it one MAY understand!
For example, when we were introduced to Differential Equations in Calculus class, one of my lasting “take-aways” was: DE enables us to take observational relationships into predictions as reliable as our observations, be it population dynamics or weather modelling. So now, when experts in these fields make predictions, I understand how they could be derived and give them due credit–something I see very little of these days.
You’re not alone in this, Hanneke. The human brain is particularly bad at understanding statistics, including estimating stats from personal observation. This also applies to me and my son (who majored in stats) and many other mathematicians.
Good mathematicians realise this and take a very objective and methodical approach to stats, knowing that the *intuitive* answer is probably wrong. My three kids each have a pigeon-pair (boy & girl) of children. This seems remarkable to us, but the probability of it happening is simply 1 in 8.
The maths itself, though often not too tricky, involves probability ‘arithmetic’, permutations, combinations, factorials, etc. which are not common to many people.
A couple of my weather forecaster friends enjoy the fact that most people’s memory of weather is particularly poor statistically, eg summers are getting cooler and coming later. This is not helped of course by a number of politicians and businessmen choosing the memory that suits their purposes.
Pi day? Only a coincidence in the US really, and neither of the events happened there:=). In the rest of the world it’s 14.3 (or 14/3). My birthday too, as it happens.
FWIW, pi day in the non-US world could be 22/7.
As a onetime mathematician and engineer, I also wouldn’t like to be associated with 3.14 as a representation of pi. Or 22/7 for that matter.
Peace.
Of course you are correct – just trying to have fun here…
How much of life is sheer, random chance and how much is in some way ordered or maybe unfolding instructions? Or how much is plot point A meeting plot point B, thus character or being A’ meeting char B’ ? What’s coincidence and what’s really connected?
Well, I don’t really know. I was brought up believing strongly in science, evolution, and so on, on the one hand, but very strongly in a religious faith in which there are meanings and moral choices and consequences and responsiblities, and so on, and free will rather than pre-ordained or predestined things we could not avoid, on the other. (That latter point was up for grabs, though, in serious Sunday school and sermon topics.) I grew up in a particular brand of that faith, where it was also expected that the individual believer was responsible for his or her own choices and actions, and had the responsibility to educate him- or herself and engage with others on philosophical and religious topics, in order to discover what was right and wrong, and if one found oneself lacking, to change your ways and do better as a believer.
And, well, in most respects, that’s pretty good, but so many people, my own family, and my own person, fell prey to the idea, unknowingly, that if you fail to live up to that, if you’re not perfect about it, then it’s your own damn fault, and you’ll suffer the consequences. In other words, straighten up and fly right, or shape up or ship out. — And in my case, in a moral quandary (and religious dilemma) because my developing sexual orientation was, surprise, not straight, and everywhere around me, including internalized, I believed I was supposed to be straight, a boy was supposed to like girls and not boys. Only…I liked boys, and didn’t know why, but I did. And trying not to, uh, did not work. (It just made me more acutely aware that I liked boys.) — Nowhere in my upbringing, including education in public school or Bible study and other such in a family or church setting…none of that said anywhere that I knew, back then, that it was OK for me to be gay. (I would later, on the internet, discover there were genuine, faithful debates and explorations on this, including discussions of translation issues, historical context, all the things that I’d learned to value in both (secular) literary criticism and in (religious) Bible study (involving, in how I was brought up, literary study too). (For example, I also had no idea that there was a similar debate in Jewish thought on the subject of being gay. So I thought the roots of my (Christian) faith utterly precluded it, because, well, I believed the modern English translations were valid. I didn’t know the issues, or that there had always been debate over it.)
So…how does that tangent relate here? — I have since come to believe that all of us, whatever our religious or non-religious perspective might be, various faiths, atheism, whatever — I think we all only get a tiny, tiny bit of how things intersect in a tiny portion of the overall thing that is the universe. I think we’re all, quite literally, those three blind men trying to describe an elephant, in terms of whatever this universe is. Is there a God? Are there angels? Are good and evil what we think they are, or is it something else? Every time I think I get my hands and head wrapped around an answer, there’s something else in life that only gives me more questions on what I thought I knew. I guess that’s good, but it’s also terribly frustrating, and can shake your (my) faith.
And I would still very much like to believe there is a good and merciful and caring God, and that good wins out over evil in the end. And in a heaven where I can see my loved ones, or even people I’ve never met, whom I admire. And, well, as I said above, so that I and people like me could get to do the things we never got to do, or that we never would be able to do, physically, in our earthly lives.
But I have grown to think that the concept of God that I grew up with was…too small, as great as that was supposed to be. Because I grew up believing I could never talk to my parents about my growing gay feelings, as a pre-teen or teen or even as an adult. My particular denomination is as divided as any other on the subject. (I still believe my parents would not have truly accepted this about me, and I don’t know if they would have ever come to accept it. This, despite that they were good and loving people, and sincere in their faith.)
So I think the concept of God I grew up with was too small for what the real world really is. I’m still, at 52 now, struggling to outgrow, unlearn, relearn, on the particular topic of my sexual side. I have seen many times, other cases where people of good faith…fall short in helping others, doing what’s right, and get caught up in keeping up appearances, or what is conveniently right for Sunday (or Saturday or Sabbath, etc.).
And I’ve seen that other faiths have their good points and understandings of what’s right and wrong, and it’s even written in the book I was brought up with, to be willing to read and listen to what those other people have to say, because there is wisdom and understanding in it. (I’m paraphrasing a particular well-known saying in the New Testament, but the idea is echoed in the Old Testament where it came from.)
So…? So there must be more to all this. Do some things happen because they were “meant to” or are they random chance? Heck, I don’t know, really. — They happen all the same.
And there are one or two events in my life, one involving dream-time versus real-world, that I have no logical, rational explanation for at all, and yet…that happened. I don’t know precisely the timing, so maybe in that one, I’m reading too much into it, but…it’s awfully close, in a way that ties in with other things that I know are real, and so…I have no scientific explanation for something that most people would say has a religious or supernatural explanation. — And unrelated, my mom had a near-death experience, and was always convinced there was an afterlife.
So…I have to concede that there’s maybe more to all this than I can possibly understand. I have many questions and some anger and disappointment, towards the “Big Guy” or “Big Lady” (or whoever/whatever God is.) — But ultimately, it seems like there’s more to the universe than I can possibly comprehend. That does not mean I should not still seek to understand as much as I can of it. I think that’s a necessary thing to survival, as well as a pretty good pastime in itself, for learning and for fun and for, well, enlightenment?
I find it curious that there is so much in common in human mythical and religious past, and that even modern physics says there are likely some very, very odd things about alternate realities, higher dimensions, a multi-verse, and so on. So…. Let’s say some of that is true in some way. Then if so, human life, the lives of other lifeforms here on Earth, a whole galaxy and beyond filled with amazing things… is only a tiny glimpse of what’s there.
Our science and technology seem so advanced, until we’re confronted with what we still do not know, what we still cannot resolve. Whether it’s how to cure and undo the effects of some disease or condition or injury, or whether it’s how to solve a global problem like hunger or poverty or warfare…or the nature of sex and gender…. Well, I don’t know, but there’s so much our science still cannot resolve and our philosophy still cannot resolve, and…and yet there has to be something better than all this. We have to be able to rise above it and be better.
And then I hear the current national and global news, and wonder how we have fallen down into the sewer of prejudice and hate and lack of basic compassion and decency. (Not everyone, everywhere, but too many worldwide in the past many months now.)
But…. Look, I deal with depression. I know what that is, too well, sometimes. But pulling the covers over my head and becoming a hermit (too close to my own answer in the past, too often) or hurting oneself (as others I’ve known have done) or harming others (as seems to happen way too often across the planet lately) — These are not the right answers. Give up? Kill ’em all and let God sort ’em out? No. Neither of those will work.
There has to be some better way around things, to find out how to improve things. We might not ever understand all of it. All right, fine. But we can work on a little of it, chip away at it here and there, and get to a bigger glimpse of the picture, maybe. I mean, that’s worth a shot. We do it when we fix things like cars or houses or treat broken legs. We repaint and repair. We kiss and make up with friends and lovers. So…why not?
I am frustrated, because there’s so much that does not work, so many things to question why they are so awfully the way they often are, when so many want things to be better.
I had started this as an answer towards coincidence and chance and whether there are connections that are “meant to be, fated, predestined.” And I really don’t have a black-and-white answer on that.
I ended up getting maybe too near religious discussion. I would hope it’s not too off-putting or too likely to cause folks to descend into verbal fisticuffs and hurt feelings. Because I hate that too, and I’ve felt on the receiving end of it before, online, and it’s not cool.
So… I’m putting it out there in hopes it’s OK.
Hmm, OK, yeah, looks like I’m still that romantic dreamer I used to be, after all. Well, fine. Good. somebody’s got to.
@BCS, Hans Asperger published his paper on the syndrome we named after him the year I was born. It was largely unknown and didn’t come into general consciousness until this century. I was never “diagnosed”, I did the matchup myself, of myself and my father, nearly a decade later. It has given me greater insight. This week I read a news that a genomic wide analysis confirms a largely genetic component, observed in my family. I have no doubt that like this aspect of what they now please to lump with autism, homosexuality will one day be found to be a predictable consequence of brain development.
It’s too glib to suggest we need a broadening of what we consider “normal”. Wrong, in the case of homosexuality, to attribute it biblically to a need to grow one’s “tribe” for self-protection. I think we are innately xenophobes to one degree or another–even though we now know that H sapiens bred with others “not of its kind”.
But there’s still a problem with interbreeding, that suggests xenophobia may be very, very ancient, even beyond H sapiens: “After years of sequencing the genomes of female Neandertals, researchers have finally got their first good look at the Y chromosome of a male Neandertal—and found that it is unlike that of any other Y in modern humans living today. Even though Neandertals and modern humans interbred several times in the past 100,000 years, the DNA on the Y chromosome from a male Neandertal who lived at El Sidrón, Spain, 49,000 years ago has not been passed onto modern humans, researchers report today in The American Journal of Human Genetics. The finding fits with earlier studies that have found that although living Asians and Europeans have inherited 1% to 3% of their DNA from their ancestors’ interbreeding with Neandertals, they are missing chunks of Neandertal DNA on their Y chromosomes. This has suggested that female modern humans and male Neandertals were not fully compatible…”
I think the thing is to understand that we, our brains, our ways of relating to, understanding, the world as it impinges upon us, have evolved over 1-200,000 years in the “natural” world as H sapiens (2-5 million years as similar ancestors), so we have inherent limitations. In the modern world, through the Scientific Method primarily, we have learned a great deal about how that natural world works, it’s mechanics if you will. We can describe it in considerable detail, perhaps make very accurate predictions, but always with two caveats! In the end, none of that is “part of us”.
1) Description is not explanation, does not answer “why?” Newton’s Law of Gravitational Attraction will get you to the moon, but doesn’t explain why his gravitational constant is positive, i.e. why matter attracts. Even Einstein’s General Relativity only tells us the masses are following geodesics in curved space-time, but ultimately why space-time is curved in this way, whether it has to be and not possibly some other way, not so much.
2) Understanding such complexities does not come naturally to us. Yes, we use mathematics to help us think about these things, but not in the way from infancy we can perceive certain things to be safe or dangerous. I’m tempted to point to emotions here. Take empathy for example, but as an Aspie, you see, empathy is only an interesting concept–IT is not part of me.
And it really gets worse than that. One must be careful about imagining that, “if things aren’t as I expect them to be, are as impossible seeming as I am told they are, then anything is possible!” That’s not true! But let me illustrate (bearing in mind that is is some 50 years since my college physics classes, but as an Aspie I have a very good memory).
I assume we all have an image of a hydrogen atom, a proton with an orbiting electron? We can understand that electron in its normal “ground state” can absorb energy, a photon, and be promoted to a higher energy state. Then later release that energy, another photon, returning to its ground state, and we can observe that radiated photon, “hydrogen alpha”, in the lab, from a star in another galaxy, even en masse from galaxies billions of light-years away, and know that hydrogen atoms are the same there as they are here. Not so bad, is it?
But if I tell you that electron isn’t “orbiting” the proton nucleus, like the Moon orbits the Earth, that we can’t localize it to any place in that atom, things start to get strange. How about that when that electron in that “excited” higher energy-state you might have imagined orbiting farther from the nucleus as some sort of electromagnetic “potential energy” (insert word here) to its ground-state you might have imagined being in closer to the nucleus [Note: because that’s the way textbooks often picture it!], it never exists anywhere between those two states, “in between” as you might have pictured it. I don’t know a non-misleading word to insert in the appropriate place in that sentence, “jump” is often used, but it’s misleading. It’s excited, then it’s not, and there’s a photon flying off, but what happened is REALLY mysterious. In that planetary image, the Moon is 240,000 miles away from Earth, suddenly disappears, and reappears 300,000 miles away, orbits there for a while, suddenly disappears and is back at 240,000, and nothing is detected anywhere in between? Naw, things just don’t behave that way! But they do.
I am reminded of a famous lecture Richard Feynman gave about Quantum Mechanics. (http://www.feynmanlectures.caltech.edu/III_01.html)
“‘Quantum mechanics’ is the description of the behavior of matter and light in all its details and, in particular, of the happenings on an atomic scale. Things on a very small scale behave like nothing that you have any direct experience about. They do not behave like waves, they do not behave like particles, they do not behave like clouds, or billiard balls, or weights on springs, or like anything that you have ever seen.”
So my point is, we have a real world. We can imagine all sorts of things. Our job is to keep those in correspondence. These days it’s easier for separation to happen. In our distant ancestors’ days, if one let that happen, one could become something’s lunch.
Hey, Paul. — It’s been years since I had high school chemistry, and I’m going to want to read over your explanation there again. I’m not sure it was explained that way to us back then. I remember it as “electron shells” that got “filled” as you added protons to the nucleus, and only a certain number of electrons would fit in each orbiting shell, and then they’d have to go in an orbit, a shell, further out. And they sort of whizzed around in an “electron cloud” anywhere in the circumference, orbital band, cross-section, of their orbit or shell. And presumably, each electron in a given orbital shell kept itself equidistant from its neighbors in the shell…somehow.
Then atoms could interact, attract, hitch together along their outer shells to make chemical bonds, and form the structures seen in diagrams.
For some reason, chemical equations balancing back and forth, that made sense to me in a mathematical way, and was “fun” or interesting, unlike accounting, which just bugged me, even though I could follow it mostly.
—–
Your assessment before that, that there are laws of physics and therefore limits on what is possible in the real, physical world we inhabit, that the physical world cannot, does not, violate its own physical laws, because they are self-limiting, makes sense. (Or the religious analogue is that God doesn’t break his own rules, because that would be both unnecessary and it would violate how the universe works; and why would God violate his own laws, just to get one thing done?) (Also noting, “he” and “she” don’t necessarily quite apply to that concept of the Deity.) Which seems to me to be close enough to say it’s, hmm, congruent.
In other words, yeah, certain things might be possible-yet-impossible, because they wouldn’t fit within the laws of physics within our natural, real-world universe, even though we can conceive of them in our imaginations. And that might not necessarily preclude them in some other dimensional domain where the laws of physics are different, say some alternate universe or reality in the multiverse, if we say that our observed universe might be just one reality among many, the idea of higher-order dimensions with a vast web of other realities, timelines, the multiverse idea.
And yes, because we’re humans, evolved from and related to apes, monkeys, primates, mammals, vertebrates, animals — We have a certain predisposed adaptation and only a certain set of senses, and so we tend to think, feel, imagine, in human-like, ape-like, mammal-like ways.
For example, dolphins, being sea mammals (and river mammals) have much of the same physiology we have. They have a lot in common with us as terrestrial mammals. Yet because their evolutionary ancestors evolved into swimming sea mammals, their bodies and brains and senses are adapted for that: they’re predisposed to think and feel and imagine in a “dolphin-ish” way. And in particular, they even have an entire sense that we don’t: built-in biological sonar, through which they can both “hear” and “speak.” Which must be really neat and really handy. hmm, and “handy” as in “hand with opposable digits to manipulate objects” wouldn’t translate too easily, though I’d guess they’d understand the underlying intent of, “useful and manipulatable, malleable by intelligent intention.”
Aside: Oh, heck, wait — Cetaceans can not only “hear” returned sonar waves and process those into an image-map, but they can also “speak/sing” sonar pings/clicks out into the surroundings, which is how they give out the pings to return as echoes they then “see/hear” as sound-maps of the surrounding volume of ocean. — Er, but what got me is — That means they could maybe also manipulate, modulate, how they produce those pings/clicks as a form of directed speech or singing, besides a sensory map data-gathering thing. I mean, I’ve heard they can send out pulses that may “stun” prey, but — Hold it, if they could also speak/sing (communicate) using sonar pings … oh, dang, that’s a whole other system than the sounds they make with their throats and blowholes and so on, their analogues to our speech-organs. — Whoa. Communication via sonar? But that would be…encoding and decoding information pulses in a highly compacted, efficient form, uh…wow. — Dang, has anyone investigated that? Surely so? Whoa….
(I’m not any kind of cetacean biologist or theoretical linguist for cetaceans. I’m not sure how you’d start with their “whale song” regular vocalizations. But their bio-sonar as a form on top of that, or combined with that…. Oh, dang, someone should be studying the heck out of that. Please use it, whoever’s out there in cetacean biology / linguistic theory.)
Dang, that just blew anything else I was going to write, clear out of the water. — Oh, that is a terrible, terrible pun. Oh, ow….
I’d be happy if some research team borrowed that and studied it. I would sort of presume they have already been looking into it, and I’m an idiot for it just having occurred to me. Whatever. Dang! Wow!
What you’re describing is the standard model of atomic structure that has been devised to enable us to “understand” what they are well enough to organize observations and make reliable predictions of chemical reactions. But it’s only a model of reality and it has failings. Go read the Feynman lecture(s).
What I’m saying is: we all try make sense of things with an internal model we make of how the external world behaves, how things interconnect and influence each other, so’s to make predictions that enable us to get through our day. (Should I get up and go to work? Will the company I work for still be in business on payday?)
But, in these days when our civilized lives are less directly connected with the functioning natural world, our models seem (based on human behaviors I see) to be more like meta-models with less secure underpinnings connecting to that natural world. It’s like for most of us, our model of the natural world stopped developing somewhere around the 17th or 18th Centuries, and we started developing our metamodels on top of that.
So, as an 18th Century model is a very imperfect explanation of, say, biology and ecology, the way we respond to forest exploitation, or even Texas textbook selection, go awry. I’m suggesting we need to remedy those underpinnings with real effort.