Science in Society

Science is not appreciated by the general public because it ventures to capture the processes in the first microsecond after the Big Bang or to identify the fundamental parts of all matter. Rather, public esteem—and public funding—is for the greater part grounded in the expectation that science-based technology development is a driving force of the economy and helps boost its competiveness. Consequently, it is not scientific understanding as such that is highly evaluated in the first place but the transdisciplinary character of science: research takes up problems posed and demands articulated from outside of science. The research agenda of science as a transdisciplinary endeavour is formed by extra-scientific influences.