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This is Scientific American's 60-Second Science. I'm Steve Mirsky at the Lindau Nobel Laureate Meeting in Lindau Germany.This will just take a little more time than our usual minute.

Harold Kroto won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1996 for the discovery of buckminsterfullerene, the soccer ball shaped form of carbon better known as buckyballs. On June 28, he spoke¹ to students about science as a philosophical² construct:

"I'm going to talk about what science is because it's a totally misunderstood sort of subject. There are aspects of science which are important, and of course we know the body of knowledge that you learn at school, alright. The applications of that knowledge, technology, the only thing that journalists ever ask, in general, 99 percent of the time.

"Perhaps most important is that it's the way that we discover new knowledge. But for me the most important, by far, is that it's the only philosophical construct we have to determine truth with any degree of reliablity. Think about that. Because then it becomes a much bigger subject. In fact, for me, perhaps the most important subject there is. And the ethical³ purpose of eduction⁴ must involve teaching children how they can decide what they're being told is actually true. And that's not the case in general. The teaching of a skeptical⁵, evidence-based assessment⁶ of all claims--all claims--without exception is fundamentally an intellectual integrity issue. Without evidence, anything goes.Think about it.

"Common sense says the sun goes around the Earth. Who agrees with me? Look at it! Starts over here, ends over there. It's uncommon⁷ sense that was needed to recognize that the Earth was turning on its axis⁸. The uncommon sense of Copernicus, Galileo and Giordano Bruno, who burned to death. We have to learn to be very careful and to question everything. Let me just check--how many of you know the evidence for Galileo to say that the Earth was going around the sun? Put your hand up. You've accepted it. Almost nobody's put their hand up. It's incredible. Look at yourself, you've accepted this. You've accepted a lot of things without evidence. Find out what the evidence is for that, and find out what the evidence is for everything that you accept."

Thanks for the minute. For Scientific American's 60-Second Science, from the Lindau Nobel Laureate Meeting I'm Steve Mirsky.