The way we teach science at school and college level conveys a deeply flawed view of the nature of science, because we do not sufficiently acknowledge the profound mysteries that lie beneath all the facts and discoveries. We are so busy telling students about what we know, what has been discovered and what we can do, that we barely consider the relevance of what we don’t know. Some of the most important things any educated person should know about scientific endeavour are its limitations.

Science is the name we give to our attempts to understand the world and the rest of the universe using investigation and logic rather than fantasy and faith. Science rightly enjoys a legitimacy we deny to any other attempts to understand the world, such as religions, which are not prepared to be proven wrong. Science, conducted properly, will allow uncertainty, submit provisional conclusions to testing, and be ready to revise its description of reality whenever the experimental evidence suggests that is required.

This has proved a fabulously successful way of trying to understand and influence things. It has given us all manner of machines, technologies and medicines. Without doubt, science works, in that it can stop pain, kill infection, transmit images using electricity, let us fly between continents or travel to the Moon. But science also fails us, and always will fail us, because in place of true understanding it so often just offers more complicated mysteries.

An essential part of science is the endeavour to fully understand what we are, how we work, where we have come from and why we are here. Our teaching of science often ignores the fact that these central questions remain unanswered. A few examples: we are creatures composed of interacting particles of matter, yet nobody really knows what matter is, and when we analyse it in depth its seeming solidity vanishes into a world of mysterious quantum forces and fields that nobody truly understands. We are awed by convincing tales of all the matter of the universe emerging from a cataclysm we call the Big Bang, but at the point of the big bang our descriptions fail, become meaningless, and return us to a state of incomprehension in face of the “where did we come from” question. We present stories of the origins of life that are, in truth, sketchy and untested possibilities. Nobody knows how, or even where in the universe, life began. Our brains are known to sustain the thoughts that let us ponder these things, and we have uncovered wondrous mechanisms that let nerve cells communicate; yet we know essentially nothing about what it really means “to think”, or how consciousness can arise from mere matter. We live out our lives in the belief that we have freewill and the consequent responsibility, yet nowhere in our physics, chemistry or biology can we find any mechanism that would actually allow us to be truly “free”.

So an honest appraisial of science reveals many complicated and powerful wonders, but many deep and troubling mysteries as well. And though science itself, as a pure ideal, is our rational and unbiased way of investigating things, the works of scientists involve all the mistakes, lies, myths, intrigues and complications we expect from any human activity.

The world of scientific enquiry offers us a complicated ever-changing mixture of true knowledge (“science” in its proper sense), myth and mystery. Many youngsters are “turned off” by science because they see it as just a succession of facts - difficult and often boring. If we spent a little more time acknowledging and exploring the mysteries at the heart of science, in addition to the facts we have learned, we might inspire more interest in some young minds. We would certainly present a much more honest appraisal of the successes and failures of science.

Dr Andrew Scott has written many books on science and has taught chemistry in several FE colleges.