Nathan Boll: What Else Is Out There?
The Story Collider
Story Collider, Inc.
4.4 • 824 Ratings
🗓️ 8 July 2016
⏱️ 12 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Nathan Boll was an excellent physics student -- up until the day he suddenly dropped out. Nathan Boll is a Christine Mirzayan Science and Technology Policy Fellow with the National Academy of Sciences and a Space Policy Graduate Fellow in the Elliot School of International Affairs at George Washington University. He has a B.S. in Mathematics from the University of Montana Western and an M.S. in Space Science from the University of Michigan. Nathan’s work is primarily focused on the development of international cooperation for the exploration and development of space, and in supporting STEM education initiatives, such as the NASA Space Academy.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | A science story, huh? |
| 0:04.0 | Is NYU scientists a... |
| 0:06.0 | It felt... |
| 0:07.0 | I felt right. |
| 0:08.0 | And I just thought, well... |
| 0:10.0 | It was that golden moment. |
| 0:12.0 | Because science was on my side. |
| 0:15.0 | ...theid... Hi, everyone, I'm Ben Lilly, and welcome to The Story Collider, where we bring you true personal stories about science. |
| 0:30.9 | This week's stories from Nathan Ball. It was recorded in March 2016 at the Coshlin Museum as part of a collaboration with the Merzion Science and Technology Policy Graduate Fellowship. |
| 0:45.2 | I love math. I love math and I love science, and I love them both because they are exact. So when I was a |
| 0:57.0 | student, I loved getting an answer to 10 significant digits better than anything else I can |
| 1:02.8 | imagine and I hated. I was so mad when I would be judged based on somebody's opinion and I wrote a poem |
| 1:09.3 | and it wasn't good enough. |
| 1:18.8 | Well, why? Prove it. Prove it. So that was, that was me as a little kid. Now, I was in kindergarten. I remember telling my parents all the time how hard it was going to be for me to |
| 1:22.6 | decide between going to an Ivy League school and Oxford. And they're like, Oxford. And I'm like, yeah, why not? |
| 1:29.9 | I mean, I thought I knew what I was doing. I invented crazy science fair projects. I borrowed teeth |
| 1:36.9 | from a classmate, soaked them in soda to see which one was most corrosive. It was Coke, by the way. |
| 1:43.4 | I put plants in the microwave to see if I could maybe get them to sprout extra leaves or something like that, and they all, you know, they died. |
| 1:52.0 | So I put my mom's houseplants in their place and in my project, and she's not, she doesn't know about this yet. |
| 1:57.6 | She's going to hear about it when she listens to this recording. |
| 1:59.8 | So, hi, Mom. But these were the sorts of things that I did as a kid. I was trying to be a mad |
| 2:07.3 | scientist. I'm into high school. I thought I knew what I was doing. I was going to get ready for |
... |
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