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Musings on Science and Education - What is so Scary about Science? [1]
['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']
Date: 2025-06-09
This started out as a short letter to my Congressman, but quickly became something else. There’s little new here besides my take on the subject, as a long time research scientist and educator. You can derive your own implications.
What is So Scary about Science?
Federal support for scientific research since the end of the Second World War, both in basic fundamental science and in its applications, has driven three quarters of a century of innovation, making our economy the strongest in the world. This has attracted the best and the brightest to our shores, further driving innovation. Consequently, we enjoy longer lifetimes and a better standard of living than did our forbears. It is estimated that every federal dollar invested in scientific research, through agencies such as the NSF, NASA, NOAA, and the DOE, returns between 3 and 8 dollars to the economy. These alone would make the funding of science a good investment. But today in the United States of America science is under attack.
Why is science under attack? It is not to save money - that is a red herring.
Scientific research takes up only a minuscule fraction of the federal discretionary budget. Federal support for NASA and the NSF amounts to less than half of one percent of the non-defense federal discretionary budget. Money spent on science circulates; it ends up in people's pockets - from students and educators to engineers and scientists, and all the technicians and support staff that enable their work. And scientific inquiry into the nature of the cosmos inspires us. The decimation of scientific infrastructure and its inevitable brain drain will cede our lead in science research, in innovation, and stunt our economic growth, for generations.
Attacks on science are but one facet of a wholesale attack on education.
If you already know everything, there is no need for further inquiry.
But education is subversive because it encourages one to ask questions. Science scares some, not because it is difficult, but because it reveals truths about the universe around us that they may find unsettling. Dogma is easier to deal with than is free inquiry. And rational inquiry leads to science.
Science is merely a rational way of investigating the world around us.
The process of science is hardly mysterious: it is the outcome of people asking questions. Every 7 year-old is a budding scientist, trying to figure out the world around them. The process of science has been employed to great success (and profit) for millennia, since Thales of Miletus in about 600 BC postulated that there was an underlying order to the universe, subject to rational inquiry, accessible by observation.
Science is a human endeavor; we sometimes make mistakes. But science is self-correcting, because any experiment or observation can (and should) be repeated, perhaps to differing outcomes.
Science has a way of humbling us: eventually the objective truth is discovered, and incorrect hypotheses are falsified. Science is not dogmatic. Science is not to be believed; it is to be put to the test. Science is not ideological, and cannot be shaped to match one's predilections - at least over the long term.
Why then attack educational institutions? Why decimate funding for science?
Why cede the very things that have led our country to its position of scientific leadership and economic dominance in the world? History shows us what can go wrong when science is abandoned. In adopting the political ideology of Lysenkoism, Stalin's Soviet Union devastated their biological science infrastructure, jailed thousands of scientists, and saw tens of millions die in the resulting famines. Are we fated to repeat a similar experiment?
Science - and rational inquiry - generate factual truths. As John Adams pointed out over two centuries ago, ``facts are stubborn things." There are no alternative facts, only differing opinions. But to carry any weight opinions must be supported by facts. If we are unable to freely inquire into the facts, then we are likely to find out soon whether ignorance is indeed bliss.
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