Science Quote by George Wald

Teaching, in George Wald's telling, is less a performance than a live experiment with the results arriving in real time. The line refuses the fantasy of the lecturer as a one-way transmitter of wisdom. Instead, it casts a room full of students as instruments: their faces are data. Confusion, boredom, flickers of recognition, the sudden stillness when an idea lands - all of it is feedback, and Wald is blunt about its usefulness. Information "keeps coming back" not as applause but as measurement.

The intent feels characteristically scientific: observe, iterate, correct. Wald isn't romanticizing pedagogy; he's arguing for a method. Watch closely enough and you can detect where the model fails, where the explanation is overspecified, where you're accidentally speaking to your own expertise rather than to theirs. The subtext is a quiet rebuke to professors who treat lecturing as scripted authority. If you're not scanning faces, you're not actually teaching; you're reciting.

Context matters here. Wald built his career on seeing - literally, through his Nobel-winning work on the chemistry of vision - and the metaphor carries that precision. He believed science was a public good and resisted insulation from society; in that light, the classroom becomes a miniature civic space where accountability is immediate. You can't hide behind credentials when the audience's expressions tell you, second by second, whether your ideas are communicating or merely occupying the air.