Why should a meeting of a dozen men in a dingy room in London on November 28, 1660, be a landmark event that has resonance for modern times? Because that group was about to establish the first truly scientific society, based on the principles of testing ideas by experiment.

“Establish” is a key word. From the outset they sought royal patronage, to make them part of the Establishment and ensure that they were taken seriously. They had a vision not just of seeking out knowledge for its own sake, but of science serving humankind, anticipating the technological revolution that would make our world so different from theirs.

But what was a revolutionary new idea in the 17th century has passed to a state where most people seem to have forgotten what science is all about, and how the technology we depend on got there in the first place.

What made the Royal Society special was its scepticism. Its motto, Nullius in verba, loosely translates as “take nobody’s word for granted”. There had been other groups of gentlemen throughout Europe who gathered to discuss new ideas. Significantly, though, they did no more than discuss these ideas. If somebody (as in the case of Isaac Newton) claimed to have invented a better telescope, say, they tested it for themselves.

The Nobel prizewinner Richard Feynman once said: “If it disagrees with experiment, then it is wrong.” People are happy to enjoy the technological rewards of science, from computers to cars and cheap air travel. But there is widespread ignorance about how science made such things practicable. In spite of the Superman movies, it is no good simply “believing” a man can fly. You have to do experiments to find out how wings can be made to generate lift, to test ideas about aerodynamics. And you only use the techniques and theories that pass those tests.

Some people don’t “believe” that adding gases such as carbon dioxide to the atmosphere makes the world warmer — George W Bush seems to be one of them. But the evidence for this has been clear since the 19th century. I gave up writing about the greenhouse effect 25 years ago because the scientific case was so overwhelming that there was nothing new to say, unless you were a politician.

The clearest example of a failure to understand what science is all about comes from the “intelligent design” debate. Some believe that natural selection alone cannot explain the complexity of life on Earth and that a designer must have been at work (mind you, it must have been a pretty unintelligent designer to come up with the human method of giving birth). There is no evidence for this, but they are entitled to their belief. By all means teach them in the context of religious studies, but not as science.

For it is essential that young people understand the difference between science and belief if they are to be able to make decisions about things that really matter in the world they will inherit — things such as global warming, the desirability of nuclear power, and the real or imagined dangers of genetically modified crops.

A good way to start clearing up some of this confusion would be in the pages of this and other newspapers. One of my pet hates is to see the painstaking work of experts attempting to piece together evidence from crime scenes referred to as “forensics”. The term is shorthand for forensic science. It was scientists who worked in the dark and dust of the London Underground to try to find out what happened on July 7. Give them the credit they deserve and the public might begin to appreciate what science is all about.

Not that all scientists seem to appreciate this. Lawrence Summers, the president of Harvard University, has been castigated not for saying he believed that women are inferior to men, but for suggesting that it might be worth investigating the possibility that women are intrinsically less suited to mathematical sciences than men. His comments provoked outrage, and his job was threatened — not because he was a bad scientist, but because his opponents believed women and men are equal in mathematical ability, without carrying out experiments to test the idea.

Of course, the all-male group that founded the Royal Society would have believed that men were mentally superior to women; the irony is, had their president been bold enough to suggest that this was not the case, I’m sure they would have devised experiments to test the hypothesis, not stormed from the room waving placards demanding his resignation. Harvard’s opponents of Professor Summers, no less than George W Bush, would do well to remember Feynman’s words: if it disagrees with experiment, then it is wrong.

John Gribbin’s The Fellowship, a history of the revolution in science in the 17th century, is published by Allen Lane on August 25