Sunday, May 30, 2010 | 2:03 a.m.
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I am glad the Clark County School District is requiring our students demonstrate some minimum level of proficiency in science (“Road to graduation runs through science test for Class of 2010,” Thursday).
Whether it is cell phones/electronics, medicines/medical devices, vehicles, the Internet, construction methods, plastics, recycling, agriculture, harvesting and processing of natural resources, energy use, etc., we live in a world dominated by science. Achievements that come from scientific inquiry about nature largely drive our economy, national security and well-being.
Americans and their leaders should be well-versed in science so they fully understand and are therefore able to debate the positive and negative implications of our efforts to control nature (such as in the Gulf of Mexico oil spill catastrophe), and so that we can remain highly competitive in the global market with a large pool of educated workers/problem solvers — many of whom will use and depend on science for their jobs.
The writer is a physics professor at UNLV.
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