"Nothing new under the sun"

Recently I had the privilege of giving the opening keynote address at Columbus State Community College's "We Are STEM" event, where a couple hundred high schoolers toured the campus and engaged in a bunch of STEMy demos.

As I was preparing my notes it struck me just how old STEM really is. Technologies like fire and stone tools predate homo sapiens as a species - and hence, for the curious, beat the development of art, music, and religion by a couple million years.

We've been engineers for a fantastically long time too. Take the city of Damascus, continuously inhabited for at least 5,000 years. Its name is so old that we don't even know the language that it comes from or what it means. And we have evidence of abandoned settlements dotting the globe for at least the past 10,000 years.

Our prehistoric ancestors kept tally marks in bone fragments around 20,000 years ago, and as soon as agriculture became a thing the study of geometry went right along with it.

The modern conception of science is relatively young, not even 400 years old. The concept of falsifiability - a bedrock of our view of how science ought to work - was only fully developed in 1932! But the spirit of science and its open inquiry into how nature works has its roots in philosophy, which stretches back untold millennia.

STEM may be a new name, but the traditions are anything but.