Give five reasons why do we teach and learn History of Science???

Question

please give reasons...8s a homework...please!

Answer 1

Well first of all, usually people don't teach history of science.  I teach high school science and the majority of my students do not know the following:

1.  More than 3 famous scientists

2.  More than 1 famous scientists correctly spelled name

3.  Any famous scientific experiments

4.  Any recent scientific experiments or theories

5.  Any regional information (where science experiments were conducted)

And any historical information they know, they don't know that it is historic.  

Reasons to teach history

1.  It's more interesting to go through a process of science with characters than to just learn results of experiments

2.  The history often replays itself, for instance the current debacles of evolution are very similar to historical interactions between science and religion

3.  A lot of scientists still play a prominent role in science, the periodic table has 20 some elements named after famous scientists and regions where elements were discovered

4.  The history of science follows from simple experiments to more complex ones, thus by following history, you can go from simple science to more complex as people become more educated

5.  Historical examples are often great teaching tools, for example when Millikan measure the mass/charge ratio of an electron, his results were wrong, and the next 5 experiments all got similar wrong answers that progressively approached the correct answer demonstrating the need for questioning of results as well as multiple successful experiments and repeatability of results.