There are so many things which, in an ideal world, people should know about science. But there's one thing which underpins the whole of science, and that is the scientific method.

All research scientists - from PhD students, to Galileo Galilei, to Albert Einstein - work by proposing a hypothesis to explain some natural phenomenon, and then setting up controlled experiments to disprove that hypothesis. The essential word here is 'disprove'. If an experiment shows that a hypothesis is wrong, then a new hypothesis must be proposed and tested. This means that nothing in science can ever be 100 per cent proven. Conversely, even established scientific 'facts' can be shown to be wrong, and the boundaries of knowledge extended.

That is the essence of science. Science is not a rigid corpus of knowledge, but a dynamic and changing system, which questions received wisdom and generates new knowledge. And on that basis, human progress is built.

See Martin Livermore's website.