Carl%20Sagan%20-%20The%20Demon%20Haunted%20World

THE DEMON-HAUNTED WORLD
it with the tin plate!' In his boyhood, he was fascinated by bugs,
grubs, rocks, flowers, lenses, machines. 'It was humiliating,' later
recalled his Aunt Jane, 'to be asked so many questions one
couldn't answer by a child like that.'
Naturally, by the time he got to school he was called 'Dafty' -
not quite right in the head. He was an exceptionally handsome
young man, but he dressed carelessly, for comfort rather than
style, and his Scottish provincialisms in speech and conduct were a
cause for derision, especially by the time he reached college. And
he had peculiar interests.
Maxwell was a nerd. He fared little better with his teachers than
with his fellow students. Here's a poignant couplet he wrote at the
time:
Ye years roll on, and haste the expected time
When flogging boys shall be accounted crime.
Many years later, in 1872, in his inaugural lecture as professor of
experimental physics at Cambridge University, he alluded to the
nerdish stereotype:
It is not so long ago since any man who devoted himself to
geometry, or to any science requiring continued application,
was looked upon as necessarily a misanthrope, who must
have abandoned all human interests, and betaken himself to
abstractions so far removed from all the world of life and
action that he has become insensible alike to the attractions
of pleasure and to the claims of duty.
I suspect that 'not so long ago' was Maxwell's way of recalling the
experiences of his youth. He then went on to say,
In the present day, men of science are not looked upon with
the same awe or with the same suspicion. They are supposed
to be in league with the material spirit of the age, and to form
a kind of advanced Radical party among men of learning.
We no longer live in a time of untrammelled optimism about the
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