On November 7th, Wang Yunqi, who is a professor from Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences, University of California at Berkeley, was invited to Redbud Forum on Global Change Science. He emphasized the significance of scientific methodology and discussed the development of Earth Science research and teaching in China in his report entitled “Earth Science Teaching in China---From the Perspective of Scientific Methodology”. More than 30 faculties and students from our center attended this lecture.

Prof. Wang explained the importance of scientific methodology in research by taking the example of the discovery of Celestial body's laws of motion and the law of universal gravitation. He believes that scientific methodology is an essential process to prove the progress a scientist has made, and he also adds that a scientific success is not a description of phenomenon, but an explanation. Moreover, taking the recognition of plate drift theory as an example, he explained that only the science which is able to withstand rebuttal and question is qualified to be the “good” science. At last, combining with the reality in China, Prof. Wang expressed his own opinions about the Earth science research and teaching in China. In his opinion, there are lots of favorable conditions in China’s Earth science research, but unfortunately, owing to the privatization of data and commercialization of education, China’s Earth science research does not take the lead in the world. Too much attention is paid to research funding rather than the science. He believes that great attention should be paid to the post-graduate education, and the post-graduate education should be committed to developing young scientists who love science, who enable to think and research independently, and who are in pursuit of truth and perfection.

Dedicated to theoretical and experimental research on Geology, geophysics, experimental geophysics, seismology and hydrology, Prof. Wang Qiyun has made a large number of outstanding research achievements. He has published more than 100 papers in international journals, including Nature, Geology and JGR. There are 8 his papers published in Nature since 1968. (The picture is Prof. Wang in lecture)