Science Matters Quotes

“Most funding for American scientific research comes from the federal government (your tax dollars at work).”
― Robert M. Hazen, Science Matters: Achieving Scientific Literacy

“we proposed eighteen great ideas of science that we felt framed virtually all discoveries of the natural world and all advances in technology. We could not have foreseen many of the remarkable developments of the past two decades—nanotechnology archaea, LEDs, cloning, dark energy, ancient microbial fossils and deep microbial life, evidence for oceans of water on Mars and lakes of methane on Titan, ribozymes, carbon nanotubes, extrasolar planets, and so much more. But all of these unanticipated findings fit into the existing framework of science. The core concepts of science have not changed, and we are unable to point to any fundamentally new scientific principle that has emerged during the 1990s or 2000s. Accordingly, while every chapter has been significantly updated, we have added only a single new chapter on the explosion of advances in biotechnology. We conclude that the experience of the past two decades underscores the value of the great ideas approach to achieving scientific literacy.”
― Robert M. Hazen, Science Matters: Achieving Scientific Literacy

“To function as a citizen, you need to know a little bit about a lot of different sciences—a little biology, a little geology, a little physics, and so on. But universities (and, by extension, primary and secondary schools) are set up to teach one science at a time.”
― Robert M. Hazen, Science Matters: Achieving Scientific Literacy

“We live in a world that operates according to a few general laws of nature. Everything you do from the moment you get up to the moment you go to bed happens because of the working of one of these laws. This exceedingly beautiful and elegant view of the world is the crowning achievement of centuries of work by scientists. There is intellectual and aesthetic satisfaction to be gained from seeing the unity between a pot of water on a stove and the slow march of the continents, between the colors of the rainbow and the behavior of the fundamental constituents of matter. The scientifically illiterate person has been cut off from an enriching part of life, just as surely as a person who cannot read. Finally,”
― Robert M. Hazen, Science Matters: Achieving Scientific Literacy

“the education of professional scientists is often just as narrowly focused as the education of any other group of professionals, and scientists are just as likely to be ignorant of scientific matters as anyone else. You should keep this in mind the next time a Nobel laureate speaks ex cathedra on issues outside his or her own field of specialization. Finally,”
― Robert M. Hazen, Science Matters: Achieving Scientific Literacy

“Intense study of a particular field of science does not necessarily make one scientifically literate. Indeed, it has been our experience that working scientists are often illiterate outside their own field of professional expertise.”
― Robert M. Hazen, Science Matters: Achieving Scientific Literacy

“For us, scientific literacy constitutes the knowledge you need to understand public issues. It is a mix of facts, vocabulary, concepts, history, and philosophy. It is not the specialized stuff of the experts, but the more general, less precise knowledge used in political discourse.”
― Robert M. Hazen, Science Matters: Achieving Scientific Literacy