Science Museums Are Failing Grown-Ups
30th September 2011
In fact, if you think about how little time most adults have spent actively learning accurate information about science and scientists, it’s a little amazing that more people aren’t equally confused.
And, sadly, many of those confused people wind up in politics and The Media … with results as you see them.
We graduate high school knowing that Issac Newton discovered gravity, the general anatomical location of our stomachs relative to our hearts, and what happens when a car travelling 30 miles per hour crashes into a brick wall. At some point, probably in grade school, somebody told us about the scientific method, but not how that actually plays out in the real world. We learn the basics. We memorize some charts.
And then we live our lives in a world where science is much more complicated, and constantly changing.
Indeed, a world in which an ignorant public lives under a constant cloud of nameless fear generated by professional hand-wringers whose livelihoods depend on scaring the daylights out of people who’d just rather go about their lives in peace. But unfortunately that doesn’t seem to be on the program.