We all know someone from the science field that boasts a little too much about science, don’t we? But do you know why? What is it about science that is more appealing than the other career options? How is it that people choose science to direct their choices when they have a sea of possibilities right in front of them? Did you know that 4.7 million people with science degrees worked in the United States in 2015, across all discipline and employment sectors? This number hasn’t stopped increasing since.
Science – The First In STEM
Time and time again, we’ve looked at how science proves to be essential while practicing STEM and its relevance in classrooms. However, today, we are going to get into the aspects of science that will tell us how it fits in almost everything we do.
Science, even after being seen as a topic for debate, its presence can be felt everywhere. The mobile phones we use, fans in our house, laptops, the internet – they are all products of science. We underestimate how convenient science makes our everyday lives. Science is not something you believe in; it just is, whether you believe, or not.
One of the most important aspects of science is that it has the solution to some problems that are still faced by some parts of the world, the problems which have the potential to become major bottlenecks to the overall growth and development of the country. Some of these problems could be health aspects, the standard of education, the availability of healthy food, and safe drinking water and infrastructure.
A good part of us and our lives is functioning because of science. We consume technology like food and we forget to credit science for making our lives comfortable. The subject science is more than just textbooks and lab experiments. The NCBI (National Center for Biotechnology Information) states in their article about the application of science that
It is time to seriously consider how science and research can contribute to education at all levels of society.
Take gravity, for example. It’s a very basic term that is explained quite frequently in physics. The reason that we are able to walk, eat and sleep so comfortably is because of science. Our existence depends on science and its understanding. When we say understanding, we don’t mean that you need to be a full-time scientist to have a grasp on what science stands as in our lives. Trivial knowledge about the field can take you a long way. For example, an understanding of solar radiation can prevent painful sunburn, an awareness of inertia is part of safe driving, and having a grip on number theory and statistics saves money on lottery tickets.
Why Science?
Beyond these basic applications, internalizing the scientific method as a regularly used mental tool also helps us keep calm whenever we read or hear anything that science cannot prove. The human mind automatically looks for things and phenomena that can be explained with adequate reasoning and practice. Hence, keeping an open mind to novel concepts encourages us to think, explore and discover, instead of just believing things as soon as we’re told about them. Believing things without any solid proof would be an insult to science. And why would we anyway want to believe in things that have no practical explanation at all? You might think that this doesn’t happen a lot. But it happens more often than that. We believe in second-hand information being passed to us and hardly ever think about the what, the why, and the how of it. This is where science comes in. And it’s important that we incorporate it into our lives.
Science also has the base to comfort its adherents and promote decent behavior among debaters. It was the modern understanding of genetics, for example, that revealed how closely related all humans really are. Science has lifted up the human spirit by teaching its students the hidden truths and inspiring feats of technical genius.
In a Nutshell
Science is indispensable. We can choose to not believe in science but it wouldn’t stop existing. It’s not something we can form an opinion on. It’s the reason we can form opinions. Any understanding of the subject science starts with the layman. Hence, it’s imperative that we understand why and how science fits in our lives.
