On 29/11/2012 10:23, kay wrote:
Martin Brown;973949 Wrote:

Jocelyn Bell-Burnell gave a Royal Society talk bemoaning the increase in

nutty doomsday cults - she was being asked this question a lot! and
assessing the relative risks of the various real EOTWAWKI scenarios.

Mainly it is making the point about the difficulty in communicating real

science to the public without getting shock horror scare stories.


Seems to be a decreasing understanding generally of what science is
-witness, for example, the frequent reference to Darwin's book as "the
Bible" of evolutionists,

That's a quirk of the US Rilegious Right influencing global thinking
towards superstitious anti-science and Bishop Ushers estimate of the age
of the world (which at the time was reasonable given his data).

Lord Kelvin pretty much crucified Darwin's theory of evolution when it
was first published by demonstrating conclusively that no known fuel
could possibly power the sun for as long as geology and evolution
required. This was a powerful counter argument at the time.

Modern airbrushing of scientific history rewrites this to say that he
suggested nuclear power sources. He did no such thing. He was trying to
prove evolution impossible because there was insufficient time for it.
Kelvin was brilliant in many other ways but he called this one wrong.

the portrayal in the media of scientific
theorems as belief systems, and the apparently perceived need by the
media to counter any scientific theory with a piece by an opposing
nutter, as if scientific theories were political points of view.

That is because news programs these days are all edited by luvvies who
were never very good at maths or science and see "balance" as meaning
having two opposing views for every topic no matter how wild and crazy
one side is. Sometimes I think they do it deliberately.

The biggest problem is that the drunken inbred halfwit from one of the
flyover states who claims to have been abducted and molested by
Venusians always has a very much more interesting story to tell than the
scientist who says the guy had had a skinful in a bar and then fell
asleep at the wheel on the way home late at night.

I suspect it's an inevitable consequence of the popular portrayal over
the last 30 years of scientists as nerds with no social life. Why would
anybody want to develop any understanding of science?

The way it was put to me by a classicist at university was
"why be a scientist when you can be a scientists boss?"

The answer is because science is more fun. Scientists do science because
they never lose that curiosity of "I wonder what happens if ..."

Anyway we are not doing too bad at the moment. Hard sciences like maths
and physics have never been more popular since the NASA moonshot era
with the likes of Brian May, Brian Cox and Jim Al-Khalili making it sexy
once again to do physics and chemistry. As an astronomer I think it is a
bit naughty of him to poach on our territory but if he gets the message
across and encourages public interest in science I don't care!

The lack of good careers for science and engineering graduates in the UK
is one reason why we have fallen behind Germany and Japan. The bean
counters rule everything here and the result is very uninspiring.

Regards,
Martin Brown