What is the one thing everyone should learn about science?

Seth Lloyd Professor of mechanical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology

You do not have to be a scientist to do science; you can be a child, a computer, or an intelligent rat. As long as you can verify a result, it is part of science.

Freeman Dyson Emeritus professor of physics at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton

Science is about uncertainty. We do not yet know the answers to most of the important questions — nature is smarter than we are. But if we are patient, and not in too much of a hurry, then science gives us a good way to find the answers.

Richard Dawkins Charles Simonyi professor of the public understanding of science at the University of Oxford, and a science writer and broadcaster

I wish everyone understood Darwinian natural selection, and its enormous explanatory power, as the only known explanation of "design". The world is divided into things that look designed, like birds and airliners; and things that do not look designed, like rocks and mountains. Things that look designed are divided into those that really are designed, like submarines and tin openers; and those that are not really designed, like sharks and hedgehogs. Darwinian natural selection, although it involves no true design at all, can produce an uncanny simulacrum of true design. An engineer would be hard put to decide whether a bird or a plane was the more aerodynamically elegant.

Lewis Wolpert Emeritus professor of biology as applied to medicine at University College London

I would teach the world that science is the best way to understand the world, and that for any set of observations, there is only one correct explanation. Also, science is value-free, as it explains the world as it is. Ethical issues arise only when science is applied to technology — from medicine to industry.

Kathy Sykes Collier professor of public engagement in science and engineering at the University of Bristol

I would teach the world that science is not about truth, but is about trying to get closer to the truth. This is important because, too often, people look to scientists as having the "truth". What we have is wrapped in uncertainties, caveats and simplifications.

John Gribbin Astrophysicist and science writer

I cannot improve upon the comment of the American physicist Richard Feynman: "The most important information … is the atomic hypothesis … that all things are made of atoms — little particles that move around in perpetual motion, attracting each other when they are a little distance apart, but repelling upon being squeezed into one another."

Bernard Lovell Astronomer and founder of Jodrell Bank Observatory

I would teach the world that fundamental scientific research is neutral, but the dividing line between good and evil in the eventual use of the results of research is often thin and tenuous.

In the first half of the 20th century, research into the structure of matter led to a detailed knowledge of atomic structure, and to a knowledge that in certain transmutations, there was a loss of mass. The second world war led to the enormous concentration of tech­nological effort, to convert this knowledge into devastating weapons of mass destruction, instead of providing atomic power for the benefit of humanity. That contrast between the good and the evil, in the eventual use of research, confronts us today.

Simon Baron-Cohen Professor of developmental psychopathology at the University of Cambridge, and director of the Autism Research Centre

I would teach the world that scientists fall in love — with experiments. An experiment can be beautifully stunning. Experiments are not just about proof — some of them have an intrinsic elegance, that you just want to go back to and look at again and again. Take men with two X chromosomes. This puzzle of nature just called out for the experiment, conducted in 1990, to search the two X chromosomes in such individuals — to find a bit of the Y chromosome, that might have broken off and become integrated into one of the X chromosomes. It just had to be there. And sure enough, it was. What we now know to be the SRY gene — the sex-related Y gene — had got into the X chromosome. And this is the gene that turns on the process to grow testes, and become male.

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