Albert Szent-Györgyi won a Nobel Prize in 1937 for his work on Vitamin C. But his mind sauntered beyond the fields of biochemistry. He was interested in how people learn, and he thought that education got off to a bad start with its attitude toward books, which he called the main instrument of teaching.
There is a widely spread misconception about the nature of books which contain knowledge. It is thought that such books are something the contents of which have to be crammed into our heads. I think the opposite is closer to the truth. Books are there to keep the knowledge in while we use our heads for something better. Books may also be a better place for such knowledge. In my own head any book-knowledge has a half-life of a few weeks. So I leave knowledge, for safe-keeping, to books and libraries and go fishing, sometimes for fish, sometimes for new knowledge.
In my head, the half-life of book knowledge is considerably shorter. But sometimes a book will prompt a chain of thought. Reading E.O. Wilson’s memoire made me think of other scientists who had interesting — and surprising — qualities of mind.
• Source and note: Albert Szent-Györgyi, “Teaching and Expanding Knowledge”; Rampart Journal of Individualist Thought, Vol. 1, No. 1 (1965), pp. 24-8. It’s here:
https://fair-use.org/rampart-journal/1965/03/teaching-and-the-expanding-knowledge
This line of thought began with “Thinking, technique and writing,” Aug. 11, 2026. It’s here:
https://hebertaylor.blogspot.com/2026/08/thinking-technique-and-writing.html
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