Wanted: Bold Thinkers

Much of science today is grant-dependent and discourages dreamy, out-of-box thinking – who wants to fund mistakes? “I really think of [Tesla] as one of the last people inventing on his own,” Samantha Hunt tells Kurt Andersen. “He didn’t have funding from the Department of Defense or Columbia University.” And she warns that Tesla’s visionary approach to science is all but extinct. “We have the term experimental artist, experimental writer,” she suggests, “but why don’t we have the term experimental scientist, someone who’s really trying to cross these boundaries?”
(Originally aired: January 25, 2008)

â?? Samantha Hunt reads from her novel The Invention of Everything Else