Inselhalle

Conference Room 3

Access for Laureates and Young Scientists only

Most scientists are concerned about the polarization, anti-intellectualism, and inability to reach across differences we see around us. As scientists, we know that humans have immense capability to solve world-scale problems – from pandemics to climate to hunger – when we work together constructively and analytically. The obvious question for our international science meeting is: what role can Young Scientists and Nobel Laureates play in addressing this overarching crisis?

One traditional role is science diplomacy – scientists talking to each other internationally, providing communication bridges when other bridges are missing, and building on shared respect for scientific leaders. The Lindau Meetings' Mainau Declarations exemplify this approach. But there is another role that hasn't been as fully explored and may be equally powerful.

Nearly every society recognizes the importance of science education to economic prosperity and security. This provides another avenue – if scientists internationally recognize that a very different kind of science education is needed: an education in scientific thinking, not just traditional physics, chemistry, and biology. The entire history of science can be seen as developing the ability to understand and act in a confusing world by actively engaging each other, using disagreements to identify mistakes. Our remarkable capabilities come from recognizing how hard it is to understand reality and how easy it is to fool ourselves – and from the effective "thinking tools", both individual and collective, we have developed in response. If we teach these methodologies, in classrooms and informally, we may help our world learn to address problems constructively together.

This may sound abstract, but it's not. In the last decade, a full curriculum of "scientific thinking" has been developed at both university and high-school levels. The university course is now taught at leading research universities (including Harvard, Berkeley, U. Chicago, and Columbia), and this summer a complete high-school curriculum is being made available on the Nobel Prize website, using material tested in schools across the U.K. and U.S. (and soon in the IB system internationally).

Let's discuss: Could we carry this idea back to our respective countries' educational systems? Might this contribute to (re-)building a constructive, problem-solving international policy community?