Science, the public, the history of science, historians, and philosophers of science

"Science, the public and the history of science"

What made historians and philosophers of science get all of a flutter on Twitter yesterday?

by

Rebekah Higgitt   

December 21st, 2012

guardian.co.uk

Some Twitter-types may have noticed that the New Statesman editorial by Brian Cox and Robin Ince on science [see below], evidence and policy provoked some discussion and debate between the authors and various people loosely within the fields of History and Philosophy of Science and Science and Technology Studies.

One interesting post on the piece has been written by Jack Stilgoe here in the Guardian. Let me say straight up that, like Stilgoe, there was plenty I agree with in the piece. Particularly the meat of their article, in paragraphs 4 to 7, including the clear acknowledgement that science is work-in-progress and that it cannot be the only thing that policy-makers take into account.

Likewise, most of those engaged in the Twitter discussion would have been in complete agreement that science is an excellent way of producing evidence vital for informed policy and that the scientific evidence on climate change is clear.

So why the fuss? It was an opinion piece that discussed the nature of science and the role of science in society. These are areas that people in HPS and STS have devoted their careers to researching. The view of science that was presented here does not chime with the current consensus within these disciplines, and that naturally provoked a reaction – just as scientists are provoked to react by those who reject or ignore their research.

Both sides of this discussion have more in common than not, and the criticism was made in good faith and with a genuine belief that science, science communication and the use of scientific evidence in government policy, would benefit. We aim to aid, not to jeopardise understanding of scientific evidence, by following the evidence uncovered by our disciplines (and, yes, there are other kinds of evidence than scientific).

Broadly, my objections fall into two categories:

1. The piece suggests that science is separated from the "moral, geopolitical and economic components", even if they rightly acknowledge that it must be part of policy-making

2. Some large and a-historical claims are made regarding changing attitudes to science and technology

On the first, I agree with what Stilgoe has written: "Climate science cannot be separated from climate politics", for scientists are people and they are funded by people. Choices about scientific research and its interpretation are also influenced by geographic, economic, moral and other frameworks. Failing to acknowledge this places an impossible burden on science and its practitioners and inhibits good discussion around different kinds of evidence and opinion.

While there are lots of good phrases about this in the piece, it remains the case that we have scientific evidence on one side of the equation and everything else on the other. It is right to say that scientific evidence "should not be seen or presented … as a body of inviolate knowledge against which policy should be judged", and yet it and "the scientific method" are given a unique place in this discussion. It is the only thing placed as an "adjudicator above opinion", and they explicitly see a border between science and politics, even if it is portrayed as an unclear one.

The second issue arises in the article's framing, especially the big opening: "The story of the past hundred years is one of unparalleled human advances, medically, technologically and intellectually. The foundation for these changes is the scientific method". This was bound to get the historical and philosophical radar twitching, even if it seems peripheral to the focus of the piece.

"[U]nparalleled human advances" is questionable, for almost any other 100-year period can give a similar sense. In the West in recent centuries, science and technology have certainly played a huge part in those changes, but claiming that the kind of technological innovations Ince and Cox are referring to are due to "the scientific method" is something most scholarship in the history and philosophy of science rejects. Firstly, there are many scientific methods and many, when studied in detail, are not particularly methodological. Secondly, new technology tends to lead to new scientific research, rather than vice versa.

This is fairly trivial in the context, however galling to those who carry out research that demonstrates these points. However, more problematic is the fact that the piece goes on to claim that our cushy life and unquestioning consumption of incomprehensible technology is leading us to be less impressed by and accepting of such novelties. Apparently we are devolving:

    The technology and advances in knowledge that cosset us have removed, to a large extent, the need to use our ingenuity and to think rationally. Believing complete drivel was once selected against; now it gets you an expert slot on daytime TV.

In fact, historical research suggests that levels of "believing complete drivel", like those of greeting innovations with "excitement and awe" or boredom or suspicion have not changed a great deal. There is no evidence that "humbug and charlatanism are able to creep into our lives with greater ease", and I have yet to find anyone arguing that "we are no longer obliged to continue the scientific exploration of nature" or that "scientific progress is no longer desirable or necessary".

It is untrue and unhelpful to claim that those who question or ignore certain scientific findings are opposed to science in general. Such statements set up unnecessary dualisms and a "you're either with us or against us" feeling. Frankly, if people only accept part of the package, better that than none. We need to avoid situations where people, who for whatever cultural, religious or personal reasons are unconvinced by scientific arguments in one area, find themselves forced into taking sides in a science/anti-science dichotomy.

How are we to proceed? We should simply accept that "It is not logical to challenge the findings of science unless there are specific, evidence-based reasons for doing so". But the trouble is that people do challenge, and being told that they can't isn't likely to stop them. There is no call here to improve communication with those who have doubts about the message. In the end, we are left simply with "Believe us".

Finally, I do think that scientists are better at science than me, and that successful science communicators are better at communicating science (to a large audience, if not to all audiences). I also think that when scientists, rightly, get involved with discussing the nature of science (philosophy) and its role in society (history, social sciences) they might accept that there are other realms of scholarship that have thought about these things long and hard, and have important things to add to the conversation.

"Brian Cox and Robin Ince: Politicians must not elevate mere opinion over science"

Climate science is just one area that has become controversial for primarily non-scientific reasons. Controversies like this risk undermining confidence in the very idea of science.

by

Brian Cox and Robin Ince

December 18th, 2012

guardian.co.uk

The story of the past hundred years is one of unparalleled human advances, medically, technologically and intellectually. The foundation for these changes is the scientific method. In every room in your house, there are innovations that in 1912 would have been considered on the cusp of magic. The problem with a hundred years of unabated progress, however, is that its continual nature has made us blasé. We expect immediate hot water, 200 channels of television 24 hours a day, and the ability to speak directly to anyone anywhere in the world any time via an orbiting network of spacecraft. Any less is tantamount to penury. Where once the arrival of a television in a street or the availability of international flight would have been greeted with excitement and awe, and the desire to understand how those innovations came into being, it is now expected that every three months you’ll be queuing outside the Apple store for a new wafer-thin slab of brushed metal, blithely unaware that watching a movie in the palm of your hand has been made possible only through improbable and hard-won leaps in the understanding of the quantum behaviour of electrons in silicon.

With each new generation, the memory of appallingly high child mortality rates, tuberculosis and vast slums grows fainter and fainter. As the past becomes hazy, we start to believe that there can be no other sort of world. We become nonchalant about vaccines, to the point of seeing them as a lifestyle choice akin to a decision to eat only organically farmed fruit, because we attend fewer and fewer funerals of those who died too young. The technology and advances in knowledge that cosset us have removed, to a large extent, the need to use our ingenuity and to think rationally. Believing complete drivel was once selected against; now it gets you an expert slot on daytime TV.

Against this rather depressing introductory backdrop, however, there are faint glimmers of hope, because science, rational think-ing and evidence-based policy-making are enjoying a revival. Part of the evidence for this statement can be found on the pages of a certain type of newspaper, where the idea that there may be an adjudicator above opinion is treated as an affront to the ideology of the columnist. The adjudicator in question is nature, the universe beyond the Notting Hill basement kitchen, and the wonderful thing about nature is that opinions can be tested against it. The key to science is in this simple statement from the Nobel Prize-winning scientist Richard Feynman, who once remarked: “It does not make any difference how beautiful your guess is. It does not make any difference how smart you are, who made the guess, or what his name is – if it disagrees with experiment it is wrong.”

The assertion is surely uncontroversial, but implementing it can be prohibitively difficult, primarily because it demands that everything be subordinate to evidence. Accepting this is fraught with cultural difficulty, because authority in general rests with grandees, gods, or more usually some inseparable combination of the two. Even in a secular democracy, a fundamental tenet of the system is that politicians are elected to reflect and act upon the opinions of the people, or are at least given temporary authority by the people to act upon their own. Science is a framework with only one absolute: all opinions, theories and “laws” are open to revision in the face of evidence. It should not be seen or presented, therefore, as a body of inviolate knowledge against which policy should be judged; the effect of this would be to replace one priesthood with another. Rather, science is a process, a series of structures that allow us, in as unbiased a way as possible, to test our assertions against Nature.

Let us take the politically controversial issue of climate change as an example. Climate scientists make measurements of observable properties of our planet, such as sea surface temperatures and the area of Arctic sea ice. Over many years, these measurements have formed a large data set. The only grounds for arguing with the data would be specific technical issues with the measurements themselves. One could assert that the satellites measuring sea temperatures were not calibrated correctly, or that there was a methodological error in the measurement of the area of the sea ice. Such criticisms are relatively rare. A more common criticism is of the interpretation of the data using computer models.

All models are, by nature, an approximation to reality. But they are the best we can do, given our current understanding and the power of our computers. The important words here are “the best we can do”. There is no other way of predicting the probability of weather in the future. The only legitimate criticisms would be of specific issues with specific models, or of specific inferences drawn from them. It would certainly be wrong to assert that the ensemble of climate models from various research groups around the world encompassed all possible uncertainties about the future, but it is not logical to attack climate science as a whole, because to do so is to attack scientific method.

The loud criticism of climate science is motivated in the main not by technical objections, but by the difficult political choices with which it confronts us. This is important, because there must be a place where science stops and politics begins, and this border is an extremely complex and uncomfortable one. Science can’t tell us what to do about our changing climate. It can only inform us that it is changing (this is a statement based on data) and tell us the most probable reasons for this given the current state of our understanding. For a given policy response, it can also tell us how likely that response is to be effective, to the best of our understanding. The choice of policy response itself is not a purely scientific question, however, because it necessarily has moral, geopolitical and economic components.

Climate science is one of a series of areas that, for primarily non-scientific reasons, has become controversial; and these controversies risk undermining confidence in the very idea of science. Others are the use of genetically modified crops, vaccination policy and even (God help us) the teaching of evolution in schools. These socio-political-religious controversies risk damaging public confidence in science, partly because of the tactics employed by their advocates, which, if unchecked, will have grave consequences because we live in a society dominated by science. People who rail against science risk becoming disenfranchised, because many of the most important decisions we face as a society have a scientific component. And the larger and more vocal the disenfranchised minority, the less likely we are to make decisions based on the best available evidence and understanding.

Science is the framework within which we reach conclusions about the natural world. These conclusions are always preliminary, always open to revision, but they are the best we can do. It is not logical to challenge the findings of science unless there are specific, evidence-based reasons for doing so. Elected politicians are free to disregard its findings and recommendations. Indeed, there may be good reasons for doing so. But they must understand in detail what they are disregarding, and be prepared to explain with precision why they chose to do so. It is not acceptable to see science as one among many acceptable “views”. Science is the only way we have of exploring nature, and nature exists outside of human structures.

We live in exciting times; our access to knowledge has never been greater, but this also means that humbug and charlatanism are able to creep into our lives with greater ease. We cannot afford to sit back and enjoy the achievements of previous generations, and decide that we are no longer obliged to continue the scientific exploration of nature. Fortunately for us, Michael Faraday was not dazzled by the convenience of gaslight. We must not use our comparative comfort and luxury to elevate opinion above science or, even worse, to argue that scientific progress is no longer desirable or necessary. It would be a gross mistake to assume, for the first time in human history, that there are no great discoveries left to make.

[Robin Ince is a writer and comedian. Brian Cox is a broadcaster and professor of physics at the University of Manchester.]

Crusty ole Sir Patrick Moore

"Brian Cox? He's no astronomer! Patrick Moore turns his telescope on the young pretender - and concedes he's really rather good (for an ex-rock star)"

by

Jane Fryer

January 24th, 2012

Daily Mail

Sir Patrick Moore is 88 years old and he looks it. His huge body is battered by age — lurid purple bruises decorate his enormous forearms, his baby-soft hands are clawed with arthritis, and an old wartime spinal injury has left him dependent on a rotating team of carers who share his fairytale 15th-century cottage in Selsey, West Sussex.

They help him from bed to chair and back again, glue his famous monocle (yes, really) to his eyelid to stop it tumbling out, launder his lurid Hawaiian shirts and fix him a daily G&T at 12.30pm, on the dot.

His enormous brain, however, is as sharp as ever and flits from his beloved cats Jeannie and Ptolemy ('they rule the house), to his loathing of all Germans ('if I saw the entire German nation sinking into the sea, I'd help push it down') and the national obsession with Professor Brian Cox — the pop star-turned-physicist who idolised Moore as a child, presented the 700th episode of Sky At Night with him last year, and is adored by the British public.

Now, thanks to the BBC2 Stargazing Live show, Professor Cox has increased telescope sales by more than 500 per cent and is poised to take on Sir Patrick's mantle.

'These young ones come and they go, but he's a nice chap, you know,' barks Sir Patrick in his fabulously posh voice. 'Came on my show once. Can't say I've seen his, though. I've been so busy I keep forgetting. Sheer stupidity on my part. I think he and I could learn from each other.

'Though, of course, he's not an astronomer — he's a particle physicist!' he hurrumphs. 'And he was in a rock band! But I suppose the more people that come into astronomy the better. I'm all for it. And it's a good thing, because I'm ancient.'

So ancient, that he's planned his own death. In meticulous detail.

'I've got it all mapped out. I don't want a funeral. So they can take all my good bits and use them for medical science.'

What about the less 'good bits'?

'They can chuck it all away! I couldn't care less. But I've left some money in my will for a very good party. There will be a candle and a tape with a message from me, and they'll light the candle and play the tape, and at exactly the right moment I'll blow the candle out.'

And the message?

'I've already recorded it! I say: “I'll blow that candle out if it kills me”, ha ha ha!'

Goodness.

Sir Patrick may be cruelly incapacitated by a failing body, but it's hard to imagine his candle spluttering out any time soon. For one thing, he's too busy.

He's still filming The Sky At Night — the longest-running programme with the same presenter in the history of television ('I think we're on about instalment 760 . . . I can't see anyone beating it now, can you?') — recorded here in his cluttered study.

The first programme went out live on April 26, 1957, and he has missed just one since — in 2004, when he accidentally ate a rancid goose egg and nearly died of salmonella.

He has also just finished his Data Book of Astronomy — an enormous compendium of pretty much everything you'd ever want to know about the cosmos, which took him ten years ('so much has happened — the probing of the planets, huge advances in astronomy') and is now sitting glossily on his desk, topped by Jeannie the cat.

But for all his impressive industry, his world has shrunk dramatically in the past few years.

But for all his impressive industry, his world has shrunk dramatically in the past few years.
Sir Patrick and his trademark monocle, pictured in his home in Selsey, Sussex

'I went to sleep one night about ten years ago and woke up like this,' he says, looking down in disgust at his crippled body. 'Look at my hands. I can't play the piano or the xylophone any more. It killed everything.' Including regular games of tennis, cricket (his unorthodox bowling style involving lots of leaps, bounds and whirling of arms), travelling and even walking.

'My active life came to an abrupt full stop. It was a tremendous shock and it was permanent. Unlike all those new telescope users out there, I can't even operate my telescope any more — I can't handle the controls. I try to make the best of it, but I could have done without the last ten years.' So he'd rather not have woken up that morning?

'It might have been better, yes,' he says. 'I'm not scared of dying. I believe in some form of afterlife: I just hope my uncle George isn't there — silly, bald-headed old coot. But you've got to make the best of things and that's what I've always tried to do.'

Patrick Alfred Cauldwell-Moore was born in Pinner, Middlesex, in 1923, only child of Charles, a soldier ('who survived the Great War with a Military Cross and a lungful of gas') and Gertrude, a trained opera singer.

He had a weak heart and so was tutored at home. In his spare time, he would lie on the sofa reading about the moon and the stars, and saved his pocket money until, aged 11, he had enough (£7 10s) to buy his first telescope and became the youngest member of the British Astronomical Association. Fifty years later to the day he was elected its president.

On the outbreak of World War II, he lied about his age (he was 16) and his dodgy heart and joined the RAF ('I knew if I joined the Army or Navy I'd last ten minutes with my heart').

Today he's rather tight-lipped about his war years, admitting only to spending five years as a navigator in RAF Bomber Command, losing all his teeth in an accident, sustaining the spinal injury that has finally caught up with him and, rather mysteriously, 'learning enough Norwegian to get by'.

With the war, though, came great personal tragedy.

'My girl, Lorna, was killed,' he says. 'We were both 20 and engaged. She was a nurse and she was in the wrong place when a German bomb fell. There was no question of anyone else — I still think about her all the time. Second best was no good for me. So I didn't marry and had no family.'

He lived with his beloved mother, Gertrude, until her death aged 94 in 1981 ('the worst day of my life after Lorna died'), became an amateur astronomer and travelled the world chasing eclipses, mapping the moon, reporting from meteorite craters for The Sky At Night and playing the xylophone on Morecambe And Wise.

Despite being 88, he continues to work and has left money in his will for an almighty party when he dies. He has also created a video, at the end of which he blows out a candle

'I never thought the programme would go on so long, but there are various reasons for it — it's cheap, it goes on late at night so it doesn't bother anybody, and it's not controversial. Though we had plenty of disasters.'

Like the time he swallowed a bluebottle live on air — 'it buzzed all the way down' — and his ten-minute interview in pidgin French with a Russian who spoke no English — 'we just about got away with it, ha ha!'

His high point was when he saw the dark side of the Moon for the first time after it was photographed from a space probe.

Nearly 760 Sky At Nights later, his letterbox is still overflowing with enthusiastic fan mail (they haven't all defected to Cox yet), which he answers in full — despite barely being able to type on his specially adapted computer keyboard — though he does now lean on a few stock replies for the bog-standard queries. 'You know . . . how do I take up astronomy? What's that bright thing in the sky? Is there life out there?'

And is there?

'I'm sure there is. I refuse to believe we're the only living things. But I can't prove it. The clue is maybe Mars — not little green men, or not any near here, anyway — but if we can find trace of any life on Mars, that will be our pointer.'

He is also a magnet for rather more eccentric correspondence — from the man convinced the Earth was shaped like a teacup, the women who wanted to send a carrier pigeon to the moon . . . He wrote back suggesting a parrot-pigeon hybrid, so it could say hello when it got there.

Celebrating a continuous 25-year run of the Sky at Night in 1957 with a piece of cake. To this day he still gets hundreds of letters of fan mail

'There are plenty of nuts — the “flat-earthers” and “hollow-globers”,' he says. And he replies to every letter he receives, no matter how nutty.

Sir Patrick is surprisingly cheerful for a man whose physical life is restricted to his downstairs bedroom, wood-panelled study and a view through the mullioned windows at his cats playing on their very own scale model of Saturn in their luxury cat run. (He's paranoid about keeping them safe — there's a typewritten sign by the front door: 'Patrick's cats are fiendishly clever masters of escape. Please observe the airlock procedures'.)

'I used to wake up and think: “What have I got time for today?” Now, I get up, drink my usual four coffees, have a look at the obituaries in The Times, and if I'm not in them, I'll get on with the day's work.'

He is not a man afraid to speak his mind, whether it's regarding his own disabilities, or sharing some of his rather more, er, trenchant views.

There was an uproar two years ago when he said the BBC had been ruined by women executives drowning us in soap operas, cooking and quiz shows, and advocated two separate television stations — one for each gender. 'There should be a mix of men and women — that's what I actually said,' he insists (not very convincingly) today.

When I ask him about his comparing of EastEnders to diarrhoea, he smirks naughtily and says: 'I've never been a fan of soap operas.'

And don't, whatever you do, get him onto the Germans.

'Eughhh! A Kraut is a Kraut is a Kraut. And the only good Kraut is a dead Kraut.'

'Of course I'm a lot older than (Brian Cox),' he relents. 'In a fortnight's time I'll be 89! But I'm okay, just. Though I can't play cricket any more.'

Like many men of his generation, he is fervently anti-European (though he loves the Norwegians and the Greeks — 'the only people who fought gallantly all through the war'), is a keen member of UKIP ('if I were 20 years younger I'd be fighting for a seat next time') and frets about immigration.

'They need to be controlled. I'm not sure how, but let in the people you want and not the riff-raff,' he says. Perhaps it's time to change the subject, and ask if he wishes he'd made it to the moon himself. 'I had no chance,' he says, 'wrong age, wrong nationality and wrong medical grade.'

Yet he must take comfort in how many budding astronomers he has inspired and how much he has crammed into his 88 years.

He has mapped the moon (when the Russians and Americans went to the moon, they used his guides), played duets with Einstein ('exactly what I expected — charming, old-worldly, courteous and never wore socks'), excelled as a musician and composer ('one thing that is no credit to me is perfect pitch and perfect timing') and written more than 70 books on astronomy.

And he is surely one of the very few people to have met the first man to fly, Orville Wright, the first man in space, Yuri Gagarin, and the first man on the moon, Neil Armstrong.

He's done an extraordinary amount in his 88 years. So would he feel happy to be passing on the stargazing baton to Professor Cox? 'I'm not dead yet!' Oh dear.

And, er, Professor Cox? 'Well, he's not the only one taking on the mantle. But he is very good . . .'

That's high praise indeed from the great man.

And with that I leave him planning his next project — 'I think it's high time I started concentrating on my composing' — fussing over his beloved cats and rubbing his vast hands at the thought of all those budding astronomers with their shiny new telescopes — ('a wonderful thing').

Sir Patrick is an exceptional man and one whom, for all his outrageously un-PC views, it's impossible not to like enormously.

After all, there aren't many octogenarians who can wear a glued-on monocle and a lurid green Hawaiian shirt and still exude gravitas. Professor Brian Cox has some very large shoes to fill.


More on Moore

An interview with Brian Cox and Jeff Forshaw on physics

An interview with Brian Cox and Jeff Forshaw on physics

Brian Cox and Jeff Forshaw

“Science tells you that your opinion is worthless. That’s difficult”

by

Helen Lewis-Hasteley

December 8th, 2011

NewStatesman

The NS Interview: Brian Cox and Jeff Forshaw, physicists

You've co-authored a book called The Quantum Universe. Why should we value quantum physics research?

Brian Cox: Exploring the way that nature works is a good idea - given that we are part of it and living in it and manipulating it. Every big particle accelerator that's been built has discovered something other than the thing it was supposed to discover. That's the point of exploration: you don't know what you're going to find.

Jeff Forshaw: Solar panels, that's quantum physics. The laser is a direct exploitation of quantum physics: we wouldn't have discovered it if we didn't know quantum mechanics.

Is Britain punching above its weight in terms of scientific research?

BC: Way above. We are second only to the US by any measure. Some 14.7 per cent of the highest scientific papers in the world come from the UK and we have 3 per cent of the research-spend and 1 per cent of the population. We are the most efficient scientific nation in the world.

What do you make of neutrinos apparently being measured moving faster than the speed of light - which would overturn Einstein?

BC: Science should be really honest - the experimenters don't believe the result, I don't think, because it does require a big revision of our understanding of physics. But they check it, they can't find anything wrong, so the correct thing to do is publish. You shouldn't sit on results just because they're surprising.

JF: There are loads of apparent discoveries in physics - we've found the Higgs Boson a dozen times already! There's nothing wrong with that. The false alarms get weeded out.

BC: You can think of areas where that's problematic: medical research, for example, where the behaviour of people depends on the research - I'm thinking of disasters like the MMR scare. But in general science should be really naive; there shouldn't be PR spin or politics.

JF: If people are interested in science, part of the journey they'll get to enjoy is seeing false alarms and how evidence mounts until we can make a very strong statement.

How much of a responsibility do you feel to be an advocate for science generally?

BC: A lot. I think the peer-review process is the best way we have of giving our best view on how nature works. There are no absolute truths in science. Take a so-called controversy such as climate change: the correct thing to say is that we make measurements of the climate, we look at the data, we model it and here are a range of predictions. While it's easy to point out the flaws, in general it's unarguable that science works. . . because we're not in fucking caves!

What motivates climate sceptics and the rest?

BC: Carl Sagan pointed out that "Science challenges". And the natural human response from people who are educated, who have a title or position, is to assume their opinion is worth something. And science tells you that your opinion is worthless when confronted with the evidence. That's a difficult thing to learn. When you look back at the Greeks or Romans and think, "Why didn't they get science?", maybe it was that.

JF: As a theoretical physicist, most of my time is spent doing calculations that are wrong. It's a humbling exercise, a massive dose of humility.

How can we teach that process?

BC: Quantum mechanics is interesting, because it's a theory that is absolutely shocking in its implications and yet not technically difficult. I think it should be taught in schools for that reason. Measurements of the world suggested something very odd - that particles can be in multiple places at once - so we developed a theory and it works. It's that process of saying: "Your preconceptions about reality are not right, because the evidence says so."

JF: Look through a window - how can you see through it? The answer is what a little kid might think: because there is virtually nothing there, it's an illusion of solidity. That's why the entire universe could fit into a pinhead, because it's empty.

One of the book's messages is not to trust your intuition. So how do you distinguish between a bonkers idea - and a bonkers idea that's right?

BC: Experiment! Make predictions.

JF: Put a number on it. People like me calculate what we expect to see, and people like Brian are involved in experiments.

Was there a plan for your career?

BC: No, other than I wanted to do physics.

JF: In the third year of my PhD I thought I wanted to become a schoolteacher.

Is there anything you'd like to forget?

JF: The haircut I had in 1984 - I had one of those Chris Waddle cuts, permed at the back.

Are we all doomed?

JF: The only thing that will save us is fundamental physics, because we have to escape to a distant part of the universe.

BC: On the human timescale, the adoption of the scientific method - making rational decisions based on evidence - that's the important thing. Look at public policy, health policy, economics: there's a reluctance to be humble.