When you go and ask someone to fill up the following blank
The __________ scientist, 9/10 people will fill out "Mad" as the first choice.
Not cool, not smart, not hip, not brilliant.
How did that come to be?
Ages ago, in cave man times, when all the males went out to hunt and the females were gathering assorted stuff, one of the dudes/dudettes came up with a way to sharpen instruments.
Going by the fact that this is a sterotype post and also by the fact that this this "Novel way of increasing sharpness on blunt instrument using a two step method", assigned to the sole inventor "Smartperson Cavedweller, Cave #77, Mammoth Springs, USA" was done by a person doing more thinking than sharpening, the rest of the people in the hunting group, especially the ones doing all the hard work with the blunter instruments decided to get even by coining a term "Nerd".
Nerd stood for Neanderthal exiled from rest of herd and that made the person go work on the next invention which became some kind of WMD and wiped out a lot of the other neanderthals for a long time.
That is when they coined the term "The mad scientist". This person was originally cool but was not appreciated, and we now have the term "mad scientist"!
It is high time that Scientists had a cool quotient, no?
Everyone keeps asking at Research conferences "What can we do to make science cool and appealing to our youth?" and they have round table sessions with free lunches!
If these kids take to science, they are going to become scientists and if only madness is associated with being a scientist, they might not go that route.
Make scientists cool, if you want to make science cool.
What say you?
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