Sigh-ence
4th February, 2009Science is boring, irrelevant and elitist. It’s clouded in incomprehensible terminology, dogged by in-fighting, and fails to describe the world most people see around them (at least in part because much science these days is focused on the “invisible” or unseen world of quantum mechanics, cellular biology etc). The government’s in a lather about it, given that national science week’s coming up in March and, more to the point, because science and innovation are the economic pillars for national progress. Deja vu anyone?
Of course, science isn’t actually boring, irrelevant, elitist, or incomprehensible. Well, it doesn’t have to be anyway. The latest New Scientist has some interesting throughts on this. Firstly, Robert Winston (how can you not admire science when it’s characterised by that moustache?) reminds us that it’s now 50 years since CP Snow’s infamous “two cultures” lecture, which argued that there needs to be better connection between science and the arts. Winston goes on, “The remarkable creativity of science is an integral part of human culture and it needs to be thought of in this way.” It’s probably because I agree so much that I have read plenty of sci-fi: in great sci-fi literature (and film), art, science and human culture are always interconnected. The science, however fantastically imagined, is told as art; it informs the writing itself. In fact, a lot of American writing (whether sci-fi or not) of the 20th century is deeply informed by the concept of entropy (the 2nd law of thermodynamics), which demonstrates how complex systems either run themselves cold or sometimes produce unexpected new outcomes. Entropy is a great literary concept. See Pynchon’s Crying of Lot 49 (communication as entropy), Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon (networks, information and entropy), and Franzen’s The Corrections (the family and entropy) for decent evidence. So: art-science-human culture; yes yes yes!
What about school science though? Overleaf in the NS from Winston’s piece, the letters are interesting because there are several responses to Richard Hammond’s new TV science show for children. If Winston is our national scientific treasure (like Stephen Fry is our national cultural treasure) then Hammond is our national scientific buffoon, blowing things up with the kind of anarchic glee most of us dreamed about from the back row of the wet lab while planting sunflower seeds in cotton wool. Here’s the problem, as one NS letter states it: “You have made a good children’s entertainment programme–and set a standard too high for the school science teacher to compete with … Now Richard, you must do the honourable thing and deliver the entire science syllabus to schools from the studio.” Yes, this is the problem. Not only is school science completely like meh, but TV and computers and videogames do science much more excitingly. School can’t compete: it’s like the fat kid at sports day unhappily still jogging the final lap of the 1,500m while the winner’s getting snogged after a refreshing shower. But: this slick world of science-based entertainment (because guess what, it’s stuff about science delivered to you by scientifically precision-engineered machines, duh) still falls short of what science should really offer, which is about the societal implications of science, and the human values that underpin it.
Unless we think urgently about science in human, social and ethical terms then we’ll continue to hear the long entropic sigh of it running out of gas in the public imagination, and that of schoolchildren’s imaginations. I suppose some bright teacher is already doing this (good teachers are always doing more than they get credit for), but how about a scheme to get children writing about science in ways that interest them, either through their own little projects or, even more excitingly (in my opinion as a literature junkie), through writing short pieces of fiction. The child in me is already busy composing a piece about the effects of a world without atmospheric diffusion, and a boy with toxic farts. (Actually, I wrote that in Dr Russell’s science class when I was 12 and got an A grade; I don’t remember much else that year.)
Futurelab is always looking for ideas. Find out how you can 
Bob Harrison
Ben Williamson
Dan Sutch
Richard Sandford
Leon Cych
Martin Owen
Sarah Grier
Tim Reader
February 6th, 2009 at 9:35 am
Kia ora Ben
For as much as I admire your enthusiasm – and I don’t knock it – I have to say that the era of bangs, smells, scorching flashes and toxic green smoke is well past its use by date. ‘Stinks’ was what we used to call Science lessons at school.
I have a book that I treasured as a teenager from those days – “After-Dinner Science” by Kenneth Sweezey. He published a series of these – all very fine in their day, and as a boy I was inspired by Sweezey’s texts.
But as I moved through high school, uni and finally teacher training and into teaching Science, I realised that the era of Science that inspired me as a boy had done nothing for the women who were my age. Women just simply were not going into Science.
Since then, times have changed – almost gone the other way – as curricula moved globally to embrace the fairer sex. Now girls lift all the Science prizes and boys struggle to make the scholarships – FACT!
The A-bomb days, of atom-splitting, linear accelerator phenomena, quantum leaping quarks and their uncertainty, principled an exciting time in Science. That was well before Youtube and the Internet streaked their I-Poddic ways Twittering and breaking the Seesmic barrier into Second Life.
Science in school today, like every other curricular slice, is everchanging. It is e-dupunking and e-volving faster than the World markets are collapsing, and it will continue with every Tweet and Twitter that even the birds will utter.
You have to be up early enough to hear them though.
Catchya later
from Middle-earth