92 Sneed Martin, Larson E. Whipsnade, Chester Snavely, A. Pismo Clam, J. P. Pinkerton Snoop­ ington, Mahatma Kane Jeeves­he was always the man on the flying trapeze. On the stage, on the silver screen, all through his life, he swung between the ridiculous and the sublime, using humor as a probe. Humor as a system of communications and as a Faraday's ignorance of mathematics contributed probe of our environment—of what's really going to his inspiration, that it compelled him to develop on—affords us our most appealing anti­environ­ a simple, nonmathematical concept when he looked mental tool. It does not deal in theory, but in imme­ for an explanation of his electrical and magnetic diate experience, and is often the best guide to phenomena. Faraday had two qualities that more changing perceptions. Older societies thrived on than made up for his lack of education: fantastic purely literary plots. They demanded story lines. intuition and independence and originality of mind. Today's humor, on the contrary, has no story line­ no sequence. It is usually a compressed overlay Professionalism is environmental. Amateurism is of stories. anti­environmental. Professionalism merges the individual into patterns of total environment. Amateurism seeks the development of the total awareness of the individual and the critical aware­ ness of the groundrules of society. The amateur can afford to lose. The professional tends to classify and to specialize, to accept uncritically the amateur groundrules of the environment. The groundrules "My education was of the most ordinary descrip­ provided by the mass response of his colleagues tion, consisting of little more than the rudiments serve as a pervasive environment of which he is of reading, writing, and arithmetic at a common day contentedly and unaware. The "expert" is the man school. My hours out of school were passed at who stays put. home and in the streets." Michael Faraday, who "There are children playing in the street who could had little mathematics and no formal schooling solve some of my top problems in physics, because beyond the primary grades, is celebrated as an they have modes of sensory perception that I lost experimenter who discovered the induction of long ago." electricity. He was one of the great founders of modern physics. It is generally acknowledged that —J. Robert Oppenheimer