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In adding more on inspiring of the young, as to science (and I would add mathematics). I have found that when science and/or mathematics is presented as if "we know it all" (especially if presented as a bunch of "facts" that must be learned and "accepted") little if any inspiration takes place!

I never would have gone into science if I thought we already "knew it all"! How boring! I may as well go into engineering: Simply apply what we already know in new and creative ways.

It's when students are presented with the fact that there is a vast expanse of what we don't know, or at least to what we are not so sure about even if we think we have a reasonable idea. These frontiers are the exciting parts!

I suggest one read the 1979 Omni magazine interview with Feynman. (I have it in "The Smartest Man in the World" chapter of Feynman's "The Pleasure of Finding Things Out.") It's chock full of the exciting possibilities, especially when new experiments present us with unexpected facts!

I have talked to a number of graduate students and practicing scientists and mathematicians, and, invariably, what got them interested was not how much we already know, but the expansive possibilities of the unknown!

So let's not forget to be humble and let the young know there is so much we don't know, and even how the history of science suggests that in solving these last unknowns, at least in science, we may find that what we now think we know may have to be replaced with something new.

Feynman has a definition of science that I believe is applicable here:

And that is what science is: the result of the discovery that it is worthwhile rechecking by new direct experience, and not necessarily trusting the race experience from the past. I see it that way. That is my best definition.

(This is from the "What is Science?" chapter of Feynman's "The Pleasure of Finding Things Out.")

So science is not just about what we know, but what we don't know and our continual rechecking, and healthy self doubt, over what we think we already know.

David