BBC: Restoring trust in science

Once in a while along comes a scientist who captures the public imagination and communicates their passion for science in an exciting and understandable way. 

In this programme, we'll be meeting one of American's best-known popular scientist. Astronomer Neil deGrasse Tyson. He's a man with a gift for communicating and inspiring people with his television shows and books on cosmology- the study of the origin and nature of the universe. 

In his day job, he runs the Hayden Planetarium in New York's American Museum of Natural History, but Neil's real mission is to encourage scientific thinking among the American public. 

We'll be hearing from the famous astronomer, and learning some new vocabulary, soon. But first I have a question fo ryou, Sam. Science is ever-changing with new discoveries updating our understanding all the time. For centuries, the Earth was thought to be the center of the Universe- but who was the first astronomer to have the correct ideat that, in fact, the Earth and the planets revolve around the Sun?  revolve- 회전하다 

a) Nicolaus Copernicus   b) Issac Newton   or c) Galileo Galilei

Hmm, I'll say it was c) Galileo. 

OK. Sam. I'll reveal the correct answer later in the programme. Recent events like the Covid pandemic and climate crisis have put scientists under pressure from critics motivated by political views. Neil deGrasse Tyson thinks facts are not dependent on politics, but should be established with the scientific method, a process of finding the truth through testing and experimentation. 

Here's Neil explaining more about the scientific method to BBC World Service programme, HardTalk. 

If you have a brilliant idea and you test it and it unearths so much of what has been known before, we're gonna double-check that- the rest of us- we'll say. 'But did he do it? Did he cross his t's and dot his i's? Did he... Let me check how that was conceived and done'- And if no-one can duplicate your results, it's not a result. 

Before scientists can confirm the truth of an experiment, their findings must be doubled- checked- making certain something is correct by carefully examining it again. This process is called 'peer review'- other scientists double-cheking the experiment to make sure everything was done correctly. One way they do this is to duplicate, or repeat, the experiment to see if they get the same result. 

In other words, Neil wants scientists to have crossed the t's and dotted the i's, a phrase which means paying attention to the small detail of whatever you are doing. 

A scientific approach requeires an open mind and critical thinking, but Neil believes the most important thing is to know the difference between fact and opinion. People have opinions about all kinds of things but that doesn't make what they belive a fact. 

Yet fact and opinion are becoming harder to seperate. As protests by anti-vaccine groups and climate change deniers have shown, many Americans, evn presidents, seem suspicious of scientific fact. It's a worrying trend and Neil thinks is a result of the US education system, as he told BBC World Service Programme, HardTalk. 

It has to do with how science is taught in school. It's currently taught as a body of information, a satchel of facts that are imparted upon you and then you regurgitate that for an exam. That's an aspect of science, but it's not the most important part of science. The most important part of science is knowing how to queston things and knowing when an answer has emerged that represnts an objective truth about this world. satchel-가방, impart-나누어 주다