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Thu 07 Jul 2010Should the 'literacy package' include science too?
THREE HUNDRED and fifty years ago, a group of distinguished men gathered in London to hear a young Christopher Wren give a lecture on astronomy.
In the discussion that followed, they decided to form a society that would study and disseminate results from the new “experimental philosophy”, an emerging discipline that studied the natural world using inventions such as the telescope and the microscope. Two years later, the Royal Society was born, adopting the motto nullis in verba(“take nobody’s word for it”) to signify the determination of its members to establish facts objectively from experiment.
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