Science Education in American Undergraduate Institutions

Abstract

After Michael Faraday discovered how to generate electricity in 1831, our human society has experienced drastic changes. In the twentieth century, science and technology have played more important roles than those in the past century, when they were little related to common people's life. Nowadays, scientific terms such as the theory of general relativity, superconductors, and supernova appear quite often in everyday's newspaper. Moreover, used-to-be scientific terms such as atoms, molecules, transistors, lasers, genes, global warming, and nuclear powers, are not considered as purely scientific terminologies any longer. In fact, it would be difficult to imagine our modern life without such technological innovations. America became one of the most important world leaders after the Second World War, and it has played a strong leadership for free democratic countries. Behind such a leadership, the science in the United States has played important roles. Big science projects, such as the Manhattan project, the Apollo project, and the Space Shuttle project, have attracted lots of attentions from an over the world and provided means to bring some scientific discoveries into real world apparatus. So, science is called the "Endless Frontier."