Education Quote by Eric Allin Cornell

There is a quiet act of rebellion tucked into Cornell's modest brag: the real engine of expertise, he suggests, is not compliance but appetite. "Bubbling over" makes knowledge sound less like a credential and more like pressure in a sealed vessel. Facts accumulate because they have to, because curiosity keeps feeding the reaction. That metaphor matters coming from a physicist: it frames learning as an energetic process, not a moral one.

The sentence also slips a shiv between the ribs of conventional schooling. Cornell doesn't claim school was useless; he simply demotes it. "Paying close attention" is the polite, institution-approved pathway, and he treats it as incidental. The credit goes to "voracious and omnivorous" reading, a phrase that refuses the idea of a tidy syllabus. Omnivorous implies mixing genres, disciplines, and difficulty levels; voracious implies speed, hunger, and a willingness to be overwhelmed. He's describing a self-built curriculum powered by compulsion.

Subtext: talent isn't merely innate, but it is self-directed. Cornell isn't selling a romantic lone-genius myth so much as a practical recipe: if you want a mind that "bubbles", feed it constantly and indiscriminately, then let it sort itself out. In the context of a scientific career - where breakthroughs often come from unexpected cross-pollination - this is also an argument against narrow specialization too early. The line flatters autodidacts, yes, but it also challenges educators: are we rewarding attention, or cultivating hunger?