Everything All at Once: How to unleash your inner nerd, tap into radical curiosity, and solve any problem

by Bill Nye

  As a visitor to the National Archives, you begin by ascending a great many steps; it is an architect’s way to affect your senses. Climbing the wide stone stairs metaphorically (and literally) elevates your mind along with your brain. The building itself has a stately marble form, reflecting the United States’ long appreciation and emulation of ancient Greek columns and edifices, as well as the influential Greek experiments in representative democracy. In the main gallery, you’ll find a remarkable collection of documents. The museum’s displays change all the time, so you will see something different with each visit. When I visited, that collection was themed around the topic of legal rights, and it included copies of both the USA PATRIOT Act and the Magna Carta. Those rotating exhibits are a stirring reminder that the National Archives is, at heart, an enormous data-storage vault.

  As you make your way toward the back of the great hall, you’ll catch glimpses of dimly lit sheets of parchment. They are dramatically large, almost as big as a typical poster for a blockbuster movie or a bucolic National Park hotel, cluing you in about their historical importance. The first time I saw those documents, I was a young kid, not yet capable of comprehending what I was seeing. But my second encounter is etched in my memory. I was a teenager, and when I walked into the Archives, I remember thinking, “Hmmm, that looks just like the Declaration of Independence, and that other thing right next to it looks just like the US Constitution.” It took me several moments to grasp that I was seeing the real things—not prints or facsimiles, but the bona fide founding documents of the United States. Right there before me was Thomas Jefferson’s handwriting, setting forth a series of enormous ideas about freedom and independence on a very thin sheet of parchment.

  Talk about changing the world! The Declaration of Independence and the Constitution (along with the Bill of Rights—it’s right there in the National Archives, too) describe the principles for creating not just a new nation but a new kind of government. Jefferson, Franklin, James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, Gouverneur Morris, John Hancock, and the other founders mined history and contemporary political philosophy for the best concepts about how government should work. They took inspiration from the dreams that had already led generations of settlers to the New World: freedom from tyranny, fair representation, an escape from superstition and repression, and an ability to observe any kind of religious faith, even no religion at all. The separation of church and state was central to the idea of a thoroughly modern nation that would embody the Enlightenment ideals of liberty and reason.

  The potential for progressive change that’s built into the United States Constitution is reminiscent of Darwinian evolution and, more fundamentally, of the scientific method itself. Just as science doesn’t claim to attain absolute truth, the Constitution does not claim to achieve the utopian ideal of government. It promises “a more perfect union” not “a perfect union.” The founders understood that the documents they wrote were not going to include the last word (or words) about how to run a just and peaceful society. Instead, they acknowledged that the nation’s laws had to allow for change in response to new needs and new information, just as scientific theories change in response to new ideas and new data. Contrast that with the ways of a monarchy, in which a king can make laws unchallenged and order any action, including the lethal decision to go to war. Monarchy is inherently static—unless the people rise up in revolution. The American Revolution was, in a sense, a scientific revolution as well as a political one. Even with the antiscience forces emerging with the 2016 election, the system of government will adapt; change and a process of governance akin to the scientific method is built in.

  When you read the letters of Jefferson, Franklin, Hamilton, and the other founders, you see that the writing is florid, impassioned, full of a sense of gravity. I marvel at the risks those guys took. If the Revolutionary War didn’t turn out well, they all would have been shot or hanged or beheaded, depending on the winning general’s whim for what they were attempting. They accepted that what they were doing was more important even than their own lives.

  Just imagine the mood in the early summer of 1776, when breaking free from England changed from an abstract threat to a world-changing reality. Jefferson and the other authors of the Declaration of Independence could have crafted a document simply formalizing a military rebellion—and in part that’s what they did, listing the reasons for wanting to be rid of King George III. But they went much further. They were thinking, “If we could design this thing top-down, we could have a system that continually refines itself, that continually sharpens its edge; we would have a fantastic government.” Their defining sentence is so famous that it’s easy to forget how radical it was at the time: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

  The greatest intellectuals of the American colonies had gathered with a giddy sense of purpose. They were declaring independence not just from a king but from an entire system of thought. They were declaring that everyone has equal rights under the law—at least as far as they were able to extend that idea within the attitudes of the age. Equality remains one of the greatest goals for political progress around the world. The founders of the United States were still human, of course, working within the assumptions, biases, and ideologies of the day. Women were pretty much excluded from the Constitution when it was written. Black people were discussed as though they were two-thirds of Caucasian guys and gals for the census. Worse, they were treated as nonentities—property rather than people—when it came to voting and other basic democratic rights.

  In nerdy terms, you might say that the founders were creating the best system they could using only the information available at the time. Doctors of that period did their best to heal, even though they did not know very much about the germ theory of disease. Engineers produced helpful technologies, hindered as they were by the lack of a complete understanding of the laws of thermodynamics or the behavior of atoms. We don’t normally think of laws as things that people discover, but that is very much what was happening during and immediately after the American Revolution. A group of scholars pulled together the best examples of good governance that they could, limited though they were, and then sought to discover something even better. The founders were not all of one mind. They disagreed, fought, compromised, grudgingly accepted that a compromised achievement is better than an unattainable perfection. They went through all the trials associated with everything-all-at-once thinking and ended up with something marvelous as a result. Still flawed, of course; how else could it be? But the central ideas behind the Declaration of Independence and the United States Constitution were hugely powerful and important.

  From a scientific point of view, people are all just people. We are a single subspecies, Homo sapiens sapiens, with remarkably little genetic diversity. We are all descended from a common ancestor, and the regional variations that we call “race” are minuscule compared with our overall biological and genetic identity. Centuries before these ideas were established scientifically, Jefferson and the other founders established the same basic concept politically. In their system, nobody gets to be a queen just because there wasn’t a suitable man around, or because she married the right man. Nobody gets to be a king just because his father was a king. “All men are created equal” is the aspirational promise of a data-driven world in which people are judged on their actions, not the uncontrollable social circumstances of their birth.

  At this point you might be thinking, geez Bill, aren’t you getting a bit carried away with the “USA! USA!” and the “it’s all science!” angles here? I mean, it’s not like the founders were actual scientists. Ahhh, but—actually, that’s exactly what they were. I ain’t braggin’ on my people, but the guys we call the Founding Fathers were, almost to a man, “natural philosophers,” which is what we now refer to as “scientists.” They studied the way gover
nments had been set up before, treating history as their laboratory. They thought deeply about how to construct a system that would keep running smoothly and fairly, long after they were gone. They also studied the workings of the natural world. It’s not just Benjamin Franklin and his electricity experiments with glass rods and a hypothetical kite. He helped map the Gulf Stream. He invented bifocals, the lightning rod, a high-efficiency stove, an improved electric battery, and . . . um . . . a urinary catheter. Thomas Jefferson designed an improved agricultural plow, developed techniques for excavating archaeological sites, and published the first paper on paleontology in the United States. To me, it’s not a stretch to call this group the Founding Nerds.

  I feel a distinctly personal connection to them and their science-y ways. I can trace my family line back to Benjamin Nye, who set up shop in Massachusetts in 1656. (I wasn’t kidding about my local origins.) He left England searching for adventure, as well as for an escape from the intrusive commercial rules set up by the Church of England. In Scandinavia, nye means “new,” and indeed the Nyes were newcomers. First they left Denmark for England, and then they left England for the New World, restlessly seeking a better life each time. My ancestors participated in the Revolutionary War. They were seafaring and business people, adventurers who were always looking for the next thing to explore or invent. I’m one link in a long chain. My dad the tinkerer called himself Ned Nye, Boy Scientist. And my mom was “all that” when it came to chemistry and cryptography; she taught me to tackle puzzles with the same intensity that she went after World War II codes. So here I am fighting the old fight, some 240 years after Benjamin Nye and a couple of million other colonialists set this nation on its present course.

  Before I wander too much further, I want to say that I am very aware of our continent’s first peoples: those who walked or boated to North America in ancient days from Asia and were brutally forced from their ancestral homes by European settlers centuries later. It became a war, and as in too many wars, there were countless humanitarian crimes committed. It is difficult to compensate the victims fully. Despite the atrocities perpetrated both before and after the founding of the United States, I maintain that this nation’s government was (and is) a remarkable experiment, one that created mechanisms for moral as well as political process.

  As messed-up as my native country seems sometimes, people still come here from all over the world, and many more yearn to do so. They dream of working in the United States and of becoming American citizens. A big part of what makes them want to take their chances in a strange land is the fairness. The laws in this country recognize merit over pedigree. There is a kind of nerd honesty that was incorporated into the system from the start, and the United States still exemplifies it. The Constitution was intended to establish a government better and more humane than any that had come before. This is another key Enlightenment idea enshrined in the founding documents that I communed with at the National Archives: History progresses toward better conditions, and rational thought is what propels that process forward.

  Nerds treasure knowledge because it is what allows us to find answers and develop new solutions. It promises that tomorrow will be better than today—because we will make it so. That attitude is inherently progressive; and in that sense, there is no question in my mind that Jefferson, Franklin, Hamilton, and company were full-on nerdy progressives, too.

  Progress can be slow, but with time the consequences grow huge. That’s the way of any system that is built on a consistent, rational set of rules that allow ideas to compete and adapt. Just think how different the United States is today from what it was in 1789. The abolition of slavery was the most wrenching advance, but it was hardly the only transformative one. My great-grandmother raised a lot of eyebrows in my family in 1913 when she chose to skip attending to the needs of her 2-day-old first grandson (my uncle) and instead march in a suffragette parade, demonstrating for women to get the right to vote. She was outraged that half the population would be excluded from the chance to guide the government. I’m outraged, too, when I think back on it. But on another level, I think, “How cool is that?” Getting her place at the table of governance was more important than . . . well, almost anything else in her life. She finally got her wish in 1920 with the ratification of the 19th Amendment.

  I’ve seen democratic progress in my own lifetime, as well. When I was a kid, people in my hometown of Washington, DC, could not vote in presidential elections. It was a weird relic from the establishment of Washington as a federal jurisdiction, separate from every state. Keeping the people there out of presidential politics must have seemed like a good idea to those constitutional founders. “This town will be set aside, and people who work here will not be swayed by having to pick sides in the most important vote available to citizens of their country,” they might have reasoned. “And besides, we’re only talking about a few dozen hundred people.” But Washington grew to hundreds of thousands of people, and the arrangement became obviously unfair—so the law was changed. I was a kid, but I remember it clearly. My parents, both veterans of World War II, voted for president for the first time in 1964. That was just 1 year before the Voting Rights Act, another milestone in expanding and protecting American democracy. (Washington still doesn’t have full congressional representation; change takes time.)

  Such changes are possible because of the guys who crafted the documents hanging behind the thick, bombproof glass in the main hall of the National Archives. The authors of those documents were thinking deeply in the style of everything all at once. They knew that they were at the very beginning; they were creating from whole cloth or whole parchment, making the critical decisions that would shape everything that followed. They knew that they had to be utterly clear about their goals and relentlessly honest in considering all the potential consequences of their actions. They drew from the best-known intellectual sources (from Aristotle and Plato to Francis Bacon and John Locke) to find ways to reconcile a nation’s needs for strength and justice. They realized that they had a shot at making a big and lasting change in one government and in the nature of government itself. The musical Hamilton captures this spirit in one of its most memorable lines, when Alexander Hamilton passionately vows, “I’m not throwing away my shot!” He had a shot to change the world, and he took it.

  To my mind, the ongoing process of American political change is reminiscent of biological evolution. That’s what I was driving at before when I described our legal system as something that allows ideas to compete and adapt. The people who crafted the Constitution and the Bill of Rights realized that it was not enough to believe in the possibility of progress; they needed specific institutional mechanisms for enabling it. Drawing on Enlightenment philosophy, they came up with an approach to government that had intriguing parallels with Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection—and they did it a decade before Darwin was even born.

  The founders conceived a legal framework based on certain inviolable rules of liberty, tranquility, justice, and personal welfare, but they also allowed laws to adapt from the bottom up based on the will of voters. For example, we decided to drive on the right side of the street instead of the left. It’s in our laws, but that kind of detail is not in our Constitution. The president can direct the actions of the government, Congress can continually write new laws, and the justices of the Supreme Court can continually interpret the Constitution in the light of new social, political, economic, and scientific realities. In nature, better-suited organisms outcompete the less-suited ones. In a constitutional democracy, good laws can outcompete the bad ones or the less-good ones. The Constitution sets the ground rules, but it is the beginning, not the end, of the American legal system. From there, you can get innovations such as expanded voting rights, broader freedoms, and new governmental structures like, say, the National Science Foundation or the EPA. I’m amazed by all this reason-based foresight every time I visit the great hall of the National Archives.

  Whether or not
you make a pilgrimage to the National Archives—whether or not you are a US citizen or resident, for that matter—you can witness the legacy of that revolution. You do it all the time, because it is all around you in our roads, our power lines, our environmental regulations, and our constitutional protections. If you live in another country, you’ve still been touched by those powerful Enlightenment ideas, as well. The founding concepts of democracy, equality, and a rational approach to law are built into the freest and most productive political systems around the world. There is a deeply scientific way of thinking underlying those concepts.

  Whenever I work on a difficult project, I try my very best to resist thinking that “it’s done” as soon as it feels like I have reached the nominal end. Whether it’s an engineering sketch for a portable baseball pitcher’s mound or the script for an “audience connection” piece on my Netflix show, Bill Nye Saves the World, I recognize that the first-draft versions of things will almost always need more work. I strongly discourage the writers, producers, or editors from using the word “final” at the top of any document. Nothing is final on a TV show until it’s recorded and on the air. The same is true of any creative project. If you want to do good works, you have to build in the ability to change and adapt. Nature does it; so should we.