On a dark and rainy day with science cuts looming, I thought I’d cheer myself (and hopefully some of yourselves) up with a little bit of Tom Lehrer. Here are the chemical elements set to the tune of I am the very model of a modern Major-General – the ultimate patter song – from the Pirates of Penzance by Gilbert & Sullivan. Enjoy.
ps. Anyone with some time to spare might wish to work on a set of alternative lyrics, in which the first line ends with “Chief Executive”..
Just a quick post to plug the Science is Vital campaign.
As you know, the government seems to be contemplating deep cuts to the UK science budget; see also this blog, passim. Cuts on the scale being discussed will devastate ongoing research, wreck the careers of hundreds of scientists and lead to an acceleration of the “brain drain” that has already started. Cutting science is short-sighted and counterproductive. The future is at stake.
If you agree, please visit the Science is Vital website and take part in the campaign. There is a petition, which currently has over 2000 signatures and a march is planned in London for Saturday 9th October. Please do your bit.
p.s. The Science Campaign blog is regularly updated with news of the fight to protect UK science.
I woke up this morning to the news that, according to Stephen Hawking, God did not create the Universe but it was instead an “inevitable consequence of the Law of Physics”. By sheer coincidence this daft pronouncement has come out at the same time as the publication of Professor Hawking’s new book, an extract of which appears in todays Times.
It’s interesting that such a fatuous statement managed to become a lead item on the radio news and a headline in all the national newspapers despite being so obviously devoid of any meaning whatsoever. How can the Universe be “a consequence” of the theories that we invented to describe it? To me that’s just like saying that the Lake District is a consequence of an Ordnance Survey map. And where did the Laws of Physics come from, if not from God?
Stephen Hawking is undoubtedly a very brilliant theoretical physicist. However, something I’ve noticed about theoretical physicists over the years is that if you get them talking on subjects outside physics they are generally likely to say things just as daft as some drunk bloke down the pub. I’m afraid this is a case in point.
Part of me just wants to laugh this story off, but another part is alarmed at what must appear to many to be an example of an arrogant scientist presuming to pass judgement on subjects that are really none of his business. When scientists complain about the lack of enthusiasm shown by sections of the public towards their subject, perhaps they should take seriously the alienating effect that such statements can have. This kind of thing isn’t what I’d call public engagement. Quite the opposite, in fact.
In case anyone is interested, I am not religious but I do think that there are many things that science does not – and probably will never – explain, such as why there is something rather than nothing. I also believe that science and religious belief are not in principle incompatible – although whether there is a conflict in practice does depend of course on the form of religious belief and how it is observed. God and physics are in my view pretty much orthogonal. To put it another way, if I were religious, there’s nothing in theoretical physics that would change make me want to change my mind. However, I’ll leave it to those many physicists who are learned in matters of theology to take up the (metaphorical) cudgels with Professor Hawking.
No doubt this bit of publicity will increase the sales of the new book, so I’ve decided to point out that I have written a book myself on precisely this question, which is available from all good airports bookshops. I’m sure you’ll understand that there isn’t a hint of opportunism in the way I’m drawing this to your attention. If you think this is a cynical attempt to cash in then all I can say is
I also noticed that today’s Grauniad is offering a poll on the existence or non-existence of God. I noticed some time ago that there’s a poll facility on WordPress, so this gives me an excuse to try repeating it here. Anything dumb the Guardian can do, I can do dumber. However, owing to funding cuts I’ve decided to do a single poll encompassing several topical news stories at the same time.
The time is getting closer when the Condem government’s hatchet men announce the detailed plans for spending cuts over the next few years. Those of us scientists working in British universities face an anxious few weeks waiting to see how hard the axe is going to fall. Funds for both teaching and research seem likely to be slashed and there’s fear of widespread laboratory closures across the sector, particularly in “pure” science that doesn’t satisfy the current desire for a rapid return on investment.
The mood is pretty accurately summarised by an article in the Guardian, in which John Womersley (who is the Director of Science Programmes at the Science and Technology Facilities Council) pointed out the very real possibility that the UK might be forced to mothball expensive national facilities such the recently built Diamond Light Source and/or withdraw from international collaborations such as CERN (which would also entail pulling out of the Large Hadron Collider). Astronomers also fear that cuts to STFC might force us to withdraw from the European Southern Observatory, which would basically destroy our international competitiveness in a field which for so long we have been world-leading. Withdrawal from CERN would similarly ensure the end of particle physics in Britain.
As well as the loss of facilities and involvement in ongoing international research programmes, big cuts in science funding – especially at STFC – will also lead to a “lost generation” of young scientists having little or no opportunity to carry out their research here in Britain. In fact the process of throwing away the UK’s future as a scientific nation has already begun and is likely to accelerate even without further cuts this year.
The STFC budgets for training young scientists at both postgraduate and postdoctoral levels were slashed even before the General Election because STFC was formed in 2007 with insufficient funds to meet its commitments. The total funding for research grants in astronomy – which is how many postdoctoral researchers are trained has been squeezed by an unsustainable level of 40% already. Many young scientists, whose contracts have been terminated with virtually no notice, have not unreasonably decided that the UK can offer them nothing but a kick in the teeth and gone abroad, taking their expertise (which was developed thanks to funding provided by the UK taxpayer) to one of our competitors in the global economy.
Some say the previous funding crisis was due to downright incompetence on behalf of the STFC Executive, some say it was part of a deliberate policy at the RCUK level to steer funding away from pure science towards technology-related areas. Either way the result is clear. Opportunities for young British scientists to do scientific research have been severely curtailed. Another round of cuts to STFC of the 25% being talked about by the new government will certainly lead to wholesale closures of labs and observatories, the withdrawal from international commitments such as CERN and ESO, and the loss of irreplaceable expertise to other countries.
On top of this, it seems not only STFC but also other research councils (such as EPSRC) are talking about clawing back funds they have already granted, by reneging on contracts they have already signed with Universities to fund research by scientists carried out there. If this does happen, there will be a catastrophic breakdown of trust between University-based scientists and the government government that will probably never be healed.
This government risks destroying the foundations of scientific excellence that have taken over 300 years to build, and all for what level of saving? The annual subscription the UK pays to CERN is about £70 million, a couple of pounds per British taxpayer per year, and a figure that most bankers would regard as small change. It would be madness to throw away so much long-term benefit to save so little in terms of short-term cost.
In the Guardian article, John Womersley is quoted as saying
Our competitor nations such as Germany and the US are investing in science and engineering right now because they recognise that they stimulate economic growth and can help to rebalance the economy. It is pretty obvious that if the UK does the exact opposite, those companies will look elsewhere. That would deepen the deficit – in a recession you need to invest in science and engineering to reap the benefits, not cut back.
Of course we don’t know how the Comprehensive Spending Review will turn out and there may be still time to influence the deliberations going on in Whitehall. I hope the government can be persuaded to see sense.
I’m trying very hard to be optimistic but, given what happened to STFC in 2007, I have to say I’m very worried indeed for the future of British science especially those areas covered by STFC’s remit. The reason for this is that STFC’s expenditure is dominated by the large facilities needed to do Big Science, many of which are international collaborations.
In order to be active in particle physics, for example, we have to be in CERN and that is both expensive and out of STFC’s control. The cost of paying the scientists to do the science is a relatively small add-on to that fixed cost, and that’s the only bit that can be cut easily. If we cut the science spend there’s no point in being in CERN, but we can’t do the science without being in CERN. The decision to be made therefore rapidly resolves itself into whether we do particle physics or not, a choice which once made would be irreversible (and catastrophic). It’s the same logic for ESO and ground-based astronomy. There’s a real possibility in a few years time that the UK will have killed off at least one of these immensely important areas of science (and possibly others too).
A decade ago such decisions would have been unthinkable, but now apparently they’re most definitely on the cards. I don’t know where it all went wrong, but given the (relatively) meagre sums involved and the fact that it started before the Credit Crunch anyway, it’s difficult to escape the conclusion that it’s a deliberate stitch-up by senior mandarins. All I can say is that the future looks so grim I’m glad I’m no longer young.
For tonight’s post I thought I’d compose a commentary on a couple of connected controversies suggested by an interestingly provocative piece by Nigel Hawkes in the Independent this weekend entitled Peer Review journals aren’t worth the paper they’re written on. Here is an excerpt:
The truth is that peer review is largely hokum. What happens if a peer-reviewed journal rejects a paper? It gets sent to another peer-reviewed journal a bit further down the pecking order, which is happy to publish it. Peer review seldom detects fraud, or even mistakes. It is biased against women and against less famous institutions. Its benefits are statistically insignificant and its risks – academic log-rolling, suppression of unfashionable ideas, and the irresistible opportunity to put a spoke in a rival’s wheel – are seldom examined.
In contrast to many of my academic colleagues I largely agree with Nigel Hawkes, but I urge you to read the piece yourself to see whether you are convinced by his argument.
I’m not actually convinced that peer review is as biased as Hawkes asserts. I rather think that the strongest argument against the scientific journal establishment is the ruthless racketeering of the academic publishers that profit from it. Still, I do think he has a point. Scientists who garner esteem and influence in the public domain through their work should be required to defend it our in the open to both scientists and non-scientists alike. I’m not saying that’s easy to do in the face of ill-informed or even illiterate criticism, but it is in my view a necessary price to pay, especially when the research is funded by the taxpayer.
It’s not that I think many scientists are involved in sinister activities, manipulating their data and fiddling their results behind closed doors, but that as long as there is an aura of secrecy it will always fuel the conspiracy theories on which the enemies of reason thrive. We often hear the accusation that scientists behave as if they are priests. I don’t think they do, but there are certainly aspects of scientific practice that make it appear that way, and the closed world of academic publishing is one of the things that desperately needs to be opened up.
For a start, I think we scientists should forget academic journals and peer review, and publish our results directly in open access repositories. In the old days journals were necessary to communicate scientific work. Peer review guaranteed a certain level of quality. But nowadays it is unnecessary. Good work will achieve visibility through the attention others give it. Likewise open scrutiny will be a far more effective way of identifying errors than the existing referee process. Some steps will have to be taken to prevent abuse of the access to databases and even then I suspect a great deal of crank papers will make it through. But in the long run, I strongly believe this is the only way that science can develop in the age of digital democracy.
But scrapping the journals is only part of the story. I’d also argue that all scientists undertaking publically funded research should be required to put their raw data in the public domain too. I would allow a short proprietary period after the experiments, observations or whatever form of data collection is involved. I can also see that ethical issues may require certain data to be witheld, such as the names of subjects in medical trials. Issues will also arise when research is funded commercially rather than by the taxpaper. However, I still maintain that full disclosure of all raw data should be the rule rather than the exception. After all, if it’s research that’s funded by the public, it is really the public that owns the data anyway.
In astronomy this is pretty much the way things operate nowadays, in fact. Maybe stargazers have a more romantic way of thinking about scientific progress than their more earthly counterparts, but it is quite normal – even obligatory for certain publically funded projects – for surveys to release all their data. I used to think that it was enough just to publish the final results, but I’ve become so distrustful of the abuse of statistics throughout the field that I think it is necessary for independent scientists to check every step of the analysis of every major result. In the past it was simply too difficult to publish large catalogues in a form that anyone could use, but nowadays that is simply no longer the case. Astronomers have embraced this reality, and it is liberated them.
To give a good example of the benefits of this approach, take the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) which released full data sets after one, three, five and seven years of operation. Scores of groups around the world have done their best to find glitches in the data and errors in the analysis without turning up anything particularly significant. The standing of the WMAP team is all the higher for having done this, although I don’t know whether they would have chosen to had they not been required to do so under the terms of their funding!
In the world of astronomy research it’s not at all unusual to find data for the object or set of objects you’re interested in from a public database, or by politely asking another team if they wouldn’t mind sharing their results. And if you happen to come across a puzzling result you suspect might be erroneous and want to check the calculations, you just ask the author for the numbers and, generally speaking, they send the numbers to you. A disagreement may ensue about who is right and who is wrong, but that’s the way science is supposed to work. Everything must be open to question. It’s often a chaotic process, but it’s a process all the same, and it is one that has servedus incredibly well.
I was quite surprised recently to learn that this isn’t the way other scientific disciplines operate at all. When I challenged the statistical analysis in a paper on neuroscience recently, my request to have a look at the data myself was greeted with a frosty refusal. The authors seemed to take it as a personal affront that anyone might have the nerve to question their study. I had no alternative but to go public with my doubts, and my concerns have never been satisfactorily answered. How many other examples are there wherein application of the scientific method has come to a grinding halt because of compulsive secrecy? Nobody likes to have their failings exposed in public, and I’m sure no scientists likes see an error pointed out, but surely it’s better to be seen to have made an error than to maintain a front that perpetuates the suspicion of malpractice?
Another, more topical, example concerns the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit which was involved in the Climategate scandal and which has apparently now decided that it wants to share its data. Fine, but I find it absolutely amazing that such centres have been able to get away with being so secretive in the past. Their behaviour was guaranteed to lead to suspicions that they had something to hide. The public debate about climate change may be noisy and generally ill-informed but it’s a debate we must have out in the open.
I’m not going to get all sanctimonious about `pure’ science nor am I going to question the motives of individuals working in disciplines I know very little about. I would, however, say that from the outside it certainly appears that there is often a lot more going on in the world of academic research than the simple quest for knowledge.
Of course there are risks in opening up the operation of science in the way I’m suggesting. Cranks will probably proliferate, but we’ll no doubt get used to them- I’m a cosmologist and I’m pretty much used to them already! Some good work may find it a bit harder to be recognized. Lack of peer review may mean more erroneous results see the light of day. Empire-builders won’t like it much either, as a truly open system of publication will be a great leveller of reputations. But in the final analysis, the risk of sticking to our arcane practices is far higher. Public distrust will grow and centuries of progress may be swept aside on a wave of irrationality. If the price for avoiding that is to change our attitude to who owns our data, then it’s a price well worth paying.
As I predicted last week, the A-level results announced on Thursday showed another increase in pass rates and in the number of top grades awarded, although I had forgotten that this year saw the introduction of the new A* grade. Overall, about 27% of students got an A or an A*, although the number getting an A* varied enormously from one course to another. In Further Maths, for example, 30% of the candidates who took the examination achieved an A* grade.
Although I have grave misgivings about the rigour of the assessment used in A-level science subjects, I do nevertheless heartily congratulate all those who have done well. In no way were my criticisms of the examinations system intended to be criticisms of the students who take them and they thoroughly deserve to celebrate their success.
Another interesting fact worth mentioning is that the number of pupils taking A-level physics rose again this year, by just over 5%, to a total of just over 30,000. After many years of decline in the popularity of physics as an A-level choice, it has now grown steadily over the past three years. Of course not everyone who does physics at A-level goes on to do it at university, but this is nevertheless a good sign for the future health of the subject.
There was a whopping 11.5% growth in the number of students taking Further Mathematics too, and this seems to be part of a general trend for more students to be doing science and technology subjects.
The newspapers have also been full of tales of a frantic rush during the clearing process and the likelihood that many well-qualified aspiring students might miss out on university places altogether. Part of the reason for this is that the government recently put the brake on the expansion of university places, but it’s not all down to government cuts. It’s also at least partly because of the steady increase in the performance of students at A-level. More students are making their offers than before, so the options available for those who did slightly less well than they had hoped very much more limited.
In fact if you analyse the figures from UCAS you will see that as of Thursday 19th August 2010, 383,230 students had been secured a place at university. That’s actually about 10,000 more than at the corresponding stage last year. There were about 50,000 more students eligible to go into clearing this year (183,000 versus 135,000 in 2009), but at least part of this is due to people trying again who didn’t succeed last year. Clearly they won’t all find a place, so there’ll be a number of very disappointed school-leavers around, but they also can try again next year. So although it’s been a tough week for quite a few prospective students, it’s not really the catastrophe that some of the tabloids have been screaming about.
I’m not directly involved in the undergraduate admissions process for the School of Physics & Astronomy at Cardiff University, where I work, but try to keep up with what’s going on. It’s an extremely strange system and I think it’s fair to say that if we could design an admissions process from scratch we wouldn’t end up with the one we have now. Each year our School is given a target number of students to recruit; this year around 85. On the basis of the applications we receive we make a number of offers (e.g. AAB for three A-levels, including Mathematics and Physics, for the MPhys programme). However, we have to operate a bit like an airline and make more offers than there are places. This is because (a) not all the people we make offers to will take up their offer and (b) not everyone who takes up an offer will make the grades.
In fact students usually apply to 5 universities and are allowed to accept one firm offer (CF) and one insurance choice (CI), in case they missed the grades for their firm choice. If they miss the grades for their CI they go into clearing. This year, as well as a healthy bunch of CFs, we had a huge number of CI acceptances, meaning we were the backup choice for many students whose ideal choice lay elsewhere. We usually don’t end up recruiting all that many students as CIs – most students do make the grades they need for their CF, but if they miss by a whisker the university they put first often takes them anyway. However, this year many of our CIs held CFs with universities we knew were going to be pretty full, and in England at any rate, institutions are going to be fined if they exceed their quotas. It therefore looked possible that we might go over quota because of an unexpected influx of CIs caused by other universities applying their criteria more rigorously than they had in the past. We are, of course, obliged to honour all offers made as part of this process. Here in Wales we don’t actually get fined for overshooting the quota, but it would have been tough fitting excess numbers into the labs and organizing tutorials for them all.
Fortunately, our admissions team (led by Helen Hunt Carole Tucker) is very experienced at reading the lie of the land. As it turned out, the feared influx of CIs didn’t materialise, and we even had a dip into the clearing system to recruit one or two good quality applicants who had fallen through the cracks elsewhere. We seem to have turned out all right again this year, so it’s business as usual in October. In case you’re wondering, Cardiff University is now officially full up for 2010.
There’s a lot of guesswork involved in this system which seems to me to make it unnecessarily fraught for us, and obviously also for the students too! It would make more sense for students to apply after they’ve got their results not before, but this would require wholesale changes to the academic year. It’s been suggested before, but never got anywhere. One thing we do very well in the Higher Education sector is inertia!
I thought I’d end with another “news” item from the Guardian that claims that the Russell Group of universities – to which Cardiff belongs – operates a blacklist of A-level subjects that it considers inappropriate:
The country’s top universities have been called on to come clean about an unofficial list or lists of “banned” A-level subjects that may have prevented tens of thousands of state school pupils getting on to degree courses.
Teachers suspect the Russell Group of universities – which includes Oxford and Cambridge – of rejecting outright pupils who take A-level subjects that appear on the unpublished lists.
The lists are said to contain subjects such as law, art and design, business studies, drama and theatre studies – non-traditional A-level subjects predominantly offered by comprehensives, rather than private schools.
Of course when we’re selecting students for Physics programmes we request Physics and Mathematics A-level rather than Art and Design, simply because the latter do not provide an adequate preparation for what is quite a demanding course. Other Schools no doubt make offers on a similar basis. It’s got nothing to do with a bias against state schools, simply an attempt to select students who can cope with the course they have applied to do.
Moreover, speaking as a physicist I’d like to turn this whole thing around. Why is it that so many state schools do teach these subjects instead of “traditional” subjects, including sciences such as physics? Why is that so many comprehensive schools are allowed to operate as state-funded schools without offering adequate provision for science education? To my mind that’s a real, and far more insidious, form of blacklisting than what is alleged by the Guardian.
After yesterday’s satisfying and enjoyable graduation festivities, it’s back to reality today with a clutch of scary news items about future cuts.
Vince Cable, the coalition Minister responsible for Universities, has revealed plans for Higher Education that include introducing a graduate tax and encouraging the growth of private universities, the latter to be introduced at the expense of some current institutions which are to be allowed to go bankrupt. You can find some discussion of his speech in the Times Higher as well as in the Guardian piece I linked to earlier.
The graduate tax isn’t a new idea, but it does seem rather strange to be suggesting it right now. The proposal won’t lead to any significant income for universities in the short term so presumably either the government or the institutions themselves will have to borrow until the cash starts to flow in. But I thought we were supposed to be cutting public borrowing?
In fact, it seems to me that the announcements made by Cable are little more than a ragbag of ill-considered uncosted measures likely to do little but cause alarm across the Higher Education sector. Perhaps he would have been wiser to have kept the Ministerial trap shut until he’d actually worked out whether any of the half-baked ideas he announced were worth thinking through properly, as some of them just might be.
Apart from anything else, Vince Cable’s dramatic U-turn on Higher Education funding shows that the LibDem contingent have now been completely subsumed by the dominant right-wing, pro-market political stance of the Conservatives. In other words, we now know there’s no reason ever to vote LibDem again; they’re Tories in all but name.
I hope this year’s new graduates realised how lucky they’ve been to get their education before universities turn into Discount Education Warehouses, although I cling to the hope that the Welsh and Scottish assemblies might take a stand against if some of the worst aspects of the ConDem policy look like becoming reality in England, where the Tories live.
Meanwhile, the Royal Society has submitted its, er, submission to the ongoing debate about research funding. The headline in an accompanying article from the Times – which you won’t be able to read unless you give money to the Evil Empire of Murdoch – suggests that it could be “game over” for British science if the suggested cuts go ahead. Paul Crowther has done his usual fabulously quick job of hacking his way through the documentary jungle to get to the juiciest quotes, including this one:
Short-term budget cuts will put our long-term prosperity at risk.. The UK should maintain its breadth of research .. a flat cash settlement will be painful but manegeable; a 10% cash cut will be damaging .. while a 20% cut will be irreversibly catastrophic for the future of UK science and economic growth.
I’m sorry if I’m introducing a note of pessimism here, but I think we’ll be very lucky indeed if the cuts are as small as 20%.
And finally, not unexpectedly, the news this week includes an announcement that university staff are to have their pensions reduced and/or deferred and will have to pay more for the privilege. Employee’s contributions to the USS scheme will increase from 6% to 7.5%. For new members the pension will not be based on their final salary, but on average earnings. This isn’t a surprise as it’s been clear for some time that USS was actuarially unsound, but it’s one more sign of the forthcoming squeeze on academics, those of them that don’t get made redundant anyway…
Looking around for a bit of good news, I could only manage this. If you’re worried about the future of UK universities and scientific research then consider how lucky you are that you’re not Italian. Owing to budget cuts imposed by the Berlusconi regime, several Italian institutions will no longer be able to pay scientists’ wages. Responding to this situation the Italian premier replied with all his usual tact and intelligence:
Why do we need to pay scientists when we make the best shoes in the world?
Fans of the late Douglas Adams will be reminded of the following passage from The Restaurant at the End of the Universe:
Many years ago this was a thriving, happy planet – people, cities, shops, a normal world. Except that on the high streets of these cities there were slightly more shoe shops than one might have thought necessary. And slowly, insidiously, the number of the shoe shops were increasing. It’s a well-known economic phenomenon but tragic to see it in operation, for the more shoe shops there were, the more shoes they had to make and the worse and more unwearable they became. And the worse they were to wear, the more people had to buy to keep themselves shod, and the more the shops proliferated, until the whole economy of the place passed what I believe is termed the Shoe Event Horizon, and it became no longer economically possible to build anything other than shoe shops. Result – collapse, ruin and famine.
I see that Big Brother isn’t the only dystopian vision to have become reality, but perhaps Douglas Adams should have called his book The Restaurant at the End of the University?
I suppose it was inevitable that there would be infighting as academics jostle for an increase intheir share of what is likely to be a diminishing level of research funding to be announced at the end of the ongoing Comprehensive Spending Review. The first professional society to try to barge its way to the front of the queue appears to be the Royal Academy of Engineering, which has written to the Department of Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS) in terms that make it clear that they think egineering should prosper at the expense of research in fundamental physics.
To quote the RAEng:
we believe that research should be concentrated on activities from which a contribution to the economy, within the short to medium term, is foreseeable. I recognise that this calls for significant changes in practice but I see no alternative in the next decade. This may mean disinvesting in some areas in order properly to invest in others.
And where should the axe fall?
BIS should also consider the productivity of investment by discipline and then sub-discipline. Once the cost of facilities is taken into account it is evident that ‘Physics and Maths’ receive several times more expenditure per research active academic compared to those in ‘Engineering and Technology’. This ratio becomes significantly more extreme if the comparison is made between particle physics researchers and those in engineering and technology. Much of particle physics work is carried out at CERN and other overseas facilities and therefore makes a lower contribution to the intellectual infrastructure of the UK compared to other disciplines. Additionally, although particle physics research is important it makes only a modest contribution to the most important challenges facing society today, as compared with engineering and technology where almost all the research is directly or indirectly relevant to wealth creation.
Obviously whoever wrote this hasn’t heard of the World Wide Web, invented at CERN – precisely the place singled out for vitriol.
I couldn’t agree less with what the RAEng say in their submission to BIS, but instead of going on a rant here I’ll direct you to John Butterworth’s riposte, which says most of what I would want to say, but I would like to add one comment along the lines I’ve blogged about before.
The reason I think that the RAEng is precisely wrong is that I think the Treasury (on behalf of the taxpayer) should only be investing in research that wouldn’t otherwise be carried out. In other words, the state should fund academic esearch precisely because of its “blue sky” nature, not in spite of it.
Conversely, engineering and technology R&D should be funded primarily by the commercial sector precisely because it can yield short-term economic benefits. The decline of the UK’s engineering base has been caused by the failure of British companies to invest sufficiently in research, expecting instead that the Treasury should fund it and all they have to do is cash in later.
I’m not calling for the engineering and technology budgets to be cut – I don’t have such a blinkered view as the RAEng – but I would argue that a much greater share should be funded by private companies. This also goes for energy research. As Martin Rees pointed out in a recent Reith Lecture, the UK’s energy companies spend a pathetically small proportion of their huge profits on R&D. The politicians should be “persuading” industry to get invest more in the future development of their products rather than expecting the taxpayer to fund it. I agree that the UK economy needs “rebalancing” but part of the balance is private companies need to develop a much stronger sense of the importance of R&D investment.
And, while I’m tut-tutting about the short-sighted self-interest displayed by the RAEng, let me add that, following the logic I’ve stated above, I see a far stronger case for the state to support research in history and the arts than, e.g. engineering and computer science. I’d even argue that large commercial companies should think about sponsoring pure science in much the same way as they do with the performing art exhibitions and the Opera. We need as a society to learn to celebrate curiosity-driven research not only as a means to economic return (which it emphatically is) but also as something worth doing for its own sake.
Finally, and most depressingly of all, let me point out that the Chief Executive Officer of the Royal Academy of Engineering, Philip Greenish, sits on the Council of the Science and Technology Facilities Council, an organisation whose aims include
To promote and support, by any means, high-quality basic, strategic and applied research and related post-graduate training in astronomy, particle physics, space science and nuclear physics.
Clearly, he should either disown the statements produced by the RAEng or resign from STFC Council. Unless he was put there deliberately as part of the ongoing stitch-up of British physics. If that’s the case we all have the dole queue to look forward to.
With the reaction to Simon Jenkins’ rant about science being just a kind of religion gradually abating, I suddenly remembered that I ended a book I wrote in 1998 with a discussion of the image of science as a kind of priesthood. The book was about the famous eclipse expedition of 1919 that provided some degree of experimental confirmation of Einstein’s general theory of relativity and which I blogged about at some length last year, on its 90th anniversary.
I decided to post the last few paragraphs here to show that I do think there is a valuable point that Simon Jenkins could have made out of the scientist-as-priest idea. It’s to do with the responsibility scientists have to be honest about the limitations of their research and the uncertainties that surround any new discovery. Science has done great things for humanity, but it is fallible. Too many scientists are too certain about things that are far from proven. This can be damaging to science itself, as well as to the public perception of it. Bandwagons proliferate, stifling original ideas and leading to the construction of self-serving cartels. This is a fertile environment for conspiracy theories to flourish.
To my mind the thing that really separates science from religion is that science is an investigative process, not a collection of truths. Each answer simply opens up more questions. The public tends to see science as a collection of “facts” rather than a process of investigation. The scientific method has taught us a great deal about the way our Universe works, not through the exercise of blind faith but through the painstaking interplay of theory, experiment and observation.
This is what I wrote in 1998:
Science does not deal with ‘rights’ and ‘wrongs’. It deals instead with descriptions of reality that are either ‘useful’ or ‘not useful’. Newton’s theory of gravity was not shown to be ‘wrong’ by the eclipse expedition. It was merely shown that there were some phenomena it could not describe, and for which a more sophisticated theory was required. But Newton’s theory still yields perfectly reliable predictions in many situations, including, for example, the timing of total solar eclipses. When a theory is shown to be useful in a wide range of situations, it becomes part of our standard model of the world. But this doesn’t make it true, because we will never know whether future experiments may supersede it. It may well be the case that physical situations will be found where general relativity is supplanted by another theory of gravity. Indeed, physicists already know that Einstein’s theory breaks down when matter is so dense that quantum effects become important. Einstein himself realised that this would probably happen to his theory.
Putting together the material for this book, I was struck by the many parallels between the events of 1919 and coverage of similar topics in the newspapers of 1999. One of the hot topics for the media in January 1999, for example, has been the discovery by an international team of astronomers that distant exploding stars called supernovae are much fainter than had been predicted. To cut a long story short, this means that these objects are thought to be much further away than expected. The inference then is that not only is the Universe expanding, but it is doing so at a faster and faster rate as time passes. In other words, the Universe is accelerating. The only way that modern theories can account for this acceleration is to suggest that there is an additional source of energy pervading the very vacuum of space. These observations therefore hold profound implications for fundamental physics.
As always seems to be the case, the press present these observations as bald facts. As an astrophysicist, I know very well that they are far from unchallenged by the astronomical community. Lively debates about these results occur regularly at scientific meetings, and their status is far from established. In fact, only a year or two ago, precisely the same team was arguing for exactly the opposite conclusion based on their earlier data. But the media don’t seem to like representing science the way it actually is, as an arena in which ideas are vigorously debated and each result is presented with caveats and careful analysis of possible error. They prefer instead to portray scientists as priests, laying down the law without equivocation. The more esoteric the theory, the further it is beyond the grasp of the non-specialist, the more exalted is the priest. It is not that the public want to know – they want not to know but to believe.
Things seem to have been the same in 1919. Although the results from Sobral and Principe had then not received independent confirmation from other experiments, just as the new supernova experiments have not, they were still presented to the public at large as being definitive proof of something very profound. That the eclipse measurements later received confirmation is not the point. This kind of reporting can elevate scientists, at least temporarily, to the priesthood, but does nothing to bridge the ever-widening gap between what scientists do and what the public think they do.
As we enter a new Millennium, science continues to expand into areas still further beyond the comprehension of the general public. Particle physicists want to understand the structure of matter on tinier and tinier scales of length and time. Astronomers want to know how stars, galaxies and life itself came into being. But not only is the theoretical ambition of science getting bigger. Experimental tests of modern particle theories require methods capable of probing objects a tiny fraction of the size of the nucleus of an atom. With devices such as the Hubble Space Telescope, astronomers can gather light that comes from sources so distant that it has taken most of the age of the Universe to reach us from them. But extending these experimental methods still further will require yet more money to be spent. At the same time that science reaches further and further beyond the general public, the more it relies on their taxes.
Many modern scientists themselves play a dangerous game with the truth, pushing their results one-sidedly into the media as part of the cut-throat battle for a share of scarce research funding. There may be short-term rewards, in grants and TV appearances, but in the long run the impact on the relationship between science and society can only be bad. The public responded to Einstein with unqualified admiration, but Big Science later gave the world nuclear weapons. The distorted image of scientist-as-priest is likely to lead only to alienation and further loss of public respect. Science is not a religion, and should not pretend to be one.
PS. You will note that I was voicing doubts about the interpretation of the early results from supernovae in 1998 that suggested the universe might be accelerating and that dark energy might be the reason for its behaviour. Although more evidence supporting this interpretation has since emerged from WMAP and other sources, I remain skeptical that we cosmologists are on the right track about this. Don’t get me wrong – I think the standard cosmological model is the best working hypothesis we have _ I just think we’re probably missing some important pieces of the puzzle. I don’t apologise for that. I think skeptical is what a scientist should be.
I’ve wanted to post this little clip for some time, just because it’s so marvellous.
I wonder what you felt as you watched it? What went through your mind? Amusement? Fascination? I’ll tell you how it was for me when I first saw it. I marvelled.
Seeing the extraordinary behaviour of this incredible creature filled me with a sense of wonder. But I also began to wonder in another sense too. How did the Lyre Bird evolve its bizarre strategy? How does it learn to be such an accurate mimic? How does it produce such a fascinating variety of sounds? How can there be an evolutionary advantage in luring a potential mate to the sound of foresters and a chainsaw?
The Lyre Bird deploys its resources in such an elaborate and expensive way that you might be inclined to mock it, if all it does is draw females to “look at its plumes”. I can think of quite a few blokes who adopt not-too-dissimilar strategies, if truth be told. But if you could ask a Lyre Bird it would probably answer that it does this because that’s what it does. The song defines the bird. That’s its nature.
I was moved to post the clip in response to a characteristically snide and ill-informed piece by Simon Jenkins in yesterday’s Guardian. Jenkins indulges in an anti-science rant every now and again. Sometimes he has a point, in fact. But yesterday’s article was just puerile. Perhaps he had a bad experience of science at school and never got over it.
I suppose I can understand why some people are cynical about scientists stepping into the public eye to proselytise about science. After all, it’s also quite easy to come up with examples of scientists who have made mistakes. Sadly, there are also cases of outright dishonesty. Science is no good because scientists are fallible. But scientists are people, no better and no worse than the rest. To err is human and all that. We shouldn’t expect scientists to be superhuman any more than we should believe the occasional megalomaniac who says they are.
To many people fundamental physics is a just a load of incomprehensible gibberish, the Large Hadron Collider a monstrous waste of money, and astronomy of no greater value to the world than astrology. Any scientist trying to communicate science to the public must be trying to hoodwink them, to rob them of the schools and hospitals that their taxes should be building and sacrifice their hard-earned income on the altar of yet another phoney religion.
And now the BBC is participating in this con-trick by actually broadcasting popular programmes about science that have generated huge and appreciative audiences. Simon Jenkins obviously feels threatened by it. He’s probably not alone.
I don’t have anything like the public profile of the target of Jenkins’ vitriol, Lord Rees, but I try to do my share of science communication. I give public lectures from time to time and write popular articles, whenever I’m asked. I also answer science questions by email from the general public, and some of the pieces I post on here receive a reasonably wide distribution too.
Why do I (and most of my colleagues) do all this sort of stuff? Is it because we’re after your money? Actually, no it isn’t. Not directly, anyway.
I do all this stuff because, after 25 years as a scientist, I still have a sense of wonder about the universe. I want to share that as much as I can with others. Moreover, I’ve been lucky enough to find a career that allows me to get paid for indulging my scientific curiosity and I’m fully aware that it’s Joe Public that pays for me to do it. I’m happy they do so, and happier still that people will turn up on a rainy night to hear me talk about cosmology or astrophysics. I do this because I love doing science, and want other people to love it too.
Scientists are wont to play the utilitarian card when asked about why the public should fund fundamental research. Lord Rees did this in his Reith Lectures, in fact. Physics has given us countless spin-offs – TV sets, digital computers, the internet, you name it – that have created wealth for UK plc out of all proportion to the modest investment it has received. If you think the British government spends too much on science, then perhaps you could try to find the excessive sum on this picture.
Yes, the LHC is expensive but the cost was shared by a large number of countries and was spread over a long time. The financial burden to the UK now amounts to the cost of a cup of coffee per year for each taxpayer in the country. I’d compare this wonderful exercise in friendly international cooperation with the billions we’re about to waste on the Trident nuclear weapons programme which is being built on the assumption that international relations must involve mutual hatred.
This is the sort of argument that gets politicians interested, but scientists must be wary of it. If particle physics is good because it has spin-offs that can be applied in, e.g. medicine, then why not just give the money to medical research?
I’m not often put in situations where I have to answer questions like why we should spend money on astronomy or particle physics but, when I am, I always feel uncomfortable wheeling out the economic impact argument. Not because I don’t believe it’s true, but because I don’t think it’s the real reason for doing science. I know the following argument won’t cut any ice in the Treasury, but it’s what I really think as a scientist (and a human being).
What makes humans different from other animals? What defines us? I don’t know what the full answer to that is, or even if it has a single answer, but I’d say one of the things that we do is ask questions and try to answer them. Science isn’t the only way we do this. There are many complementary modes of enquiry of which the scientific method is just one. Generally speaking, though, we’re curious creatures.
I think the state should support science but I also think it should support the fine arts, literature, humanities and the rest, for their own sake. Because they’re things we do. They make us human. Without them we’re just like any other animal that consumes and reproduces.
So the real reason why the government should support science is the song of the Lyre Bird. No, I don’t mean as an elaborate mating ritual. I don’t think physics will help you pull the birds. What I mean is that even in this materialistic, money-obsessed world we still haven’t lost the need to wonder, for the joy it brings and for the way it stimulates our minds; science doesn’t inhibit wonder, as Jenkins argues, it sparks it.
Now, anyone want to see my plumes?
In the Dark 