Question: what's the importance of learning science?

Ian Cade answered on 19 Nov 2014:

In learning about scientific discoveries you (should) learn about how these discoveries were made. Namely, careful observation, formation of a reasonable hypothesis, and then testing of this hypothesis.

From an individual perspective, this technique is uniquely powerful when it comes to understanding the world around you. (it is generally considered that having an understanding of the world around you is a useful ability… at the very least you don’t end up walking around in a constant state of confusion).

From the perspective of society, it is important for its members to have an understanding of science in order to be able make sensible decisions, and vote for reasonable policies.

– for example ‘should we invest in fossil fuel, fission or fusion power generation?’ in order to answer this you need to have some idea of what each of these are, their costs and the risks associated with each. This last element of understanding risk or the negative implications is tricky, humans on the whole have a very poor natural grasp of risk and probability. An understanding of the science behind something allows you to make a better calculation of risk (in the above example the obvious risks of fission are the problems of radioactivity… but then again radioactivity is also a problem with coal power (there are quite a lot of radioactive elements in coal)… and coal power emits CO2 leading to global warming … etc etc…)

From my perspective it was important to learn about science because I like science and I recognised it would be difficult to convince anyone to employ me to do science without being able to convince them that I knew something about it.