By ALOM SHAHA - THE GUARDIAN
Added: Wed, 28 Sep 2011 18:06:30 UTC

Most physicists believe, as Einstein proposed, that nothing can travel faster than the speed of light in a vacuum. You might say that some, like Jim Al-Khalili who promised to eat his shorts if this was proved untrue, hold this belief religiously. But the recent fuss over the possible existence of faster-than-light neutrinos illustrates precisely how different science and religion are when it comes to questions of "belief" or "knowledge".

As a science teacher, I have met a number of students who have questioned whether scientists simply "believe" in science in the same way religious people "believe" in God. It's easy to see why they might think this. Children encounter ideas about how the world works from both religion and science and they are often presented with these ideas as "truths" from figures of authority – priests, imams and science teachers – who in turn claim to be informed by even greater sources of authority such as the bible, Qur'an or science textbooks.

But there is a key difference between the way we teach science and religious teachings. Students of science can, at least in principle, test the claims made by science in a way they cannot do for religion. For example, most high school physics courses require students to know that all objects accelerate towards the ground at the same rate, regardless of their mass (providing we ignore air resistance). This is counterintuitive: most people assume that "heavier" objects fall faster. As a teacher, I get my students to find evidence for this claim by designing and carrying out their own experiments. They do not have to take my word for it, or the word of any other authority figure.

We cannot do this easily for all the claims science makes. For example, it's quite difficult to prove that atoms and electrons exist. In fact, many prominent scientists refused to believe atoms existed well into the late 19th century and it took Einstein to come up with a proof that was widely accepted. However, even if my students cannot prove for themselves that atoms and electrons exist, even if they cannot grasp the mathematics of Einstein's proof, I can point them to the fact that the physical world behaves as if our theories about these entities were true. For example, modern telecommunications would not work if what science tells us about electrons were not true in some sense. We cannot say the same for that other invisible thing so many people are asked to believe in, God.

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TAGGED: CRITICAL THINKING, SCIENCE