Just Read: The Ten Most Beautiful Experiments

If I were a high school science teacher, I might assign The Ten Most Beautiful Experiments as class reading. It's a nice little book you can breeze through in a sitting or two and learn more about some of the most important scientific findings than you ever did in high school. For the vast majority of us that aren't going to become scientists, this is just the kind of style of science teaching we ought to emphasize: easy to understand accounts of how some of history's most important experiments were conducted and what their significance is in our everyday life, showing along the way the essential characteristics of the scientific method.

Most basic science education spends way too much time hammering in facts: memorizing periodic tables, the difference between cellular meiosis and mitosis, the equations of Newtonian mechanics. This is probably because teachers are lazy and that kind of stuff is easy to teach and to test. But the takeaway is pathetic: about half of Americans don't even believe in the theory of evolution, and the vast majority of them routinely fall for basic cognitive errors like confirmation bias that a basic understanding of the scientific method would be able to prevent.

The actual data, jargon, and mathematical methods of science should be left to those who wish to pursue the study further, everybody else is just going to forget it anyway. Introductory science in k-12 education can and should be taught more like literature is, with emphasis on critical understanding of the meaning behind the most important scientific concepts and on practicing scientific analysis the same way we practice writing skills. George Johnson does just that in this book; cheers to him.