WHY POPULARISE SCIENCE ?
17th DECEMBER 2002
I apologise for the slight delay in the uploading of Number 78 - recent brief hospitalisation is the reason...
No 79 is due to appear on January 15th 2003
Science is all the rage and has been for about two centuries in 'the West'. There is an accompanying modish anti-science trend among some would-be intellectuals who appear to think that science has gone 'far enough' - to satisfy their convenience anyway.
The kudos of science extends from pseudo scientific claims about cosmetic and 'health' products advertising to solemn pontification on the science/religion thing in which it is claimed, of science, that it validates true religion and, of religion that it underlies true science.
The upshot is something of a boom in science popularisation. The science festivals fashion reflects the extent of this boom.
Planners of such festivals could well ask themselves the question that heads this Thought; the answer they give might influence their choice of content.
Consider some of the great popularisers, present and recent past - Peter Atkins, Paul Davies, Richard Dawkins, Stephen Jay Gould, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jones, Lewis Wolpert and others. What are they aiming to do - to elicit the reaction 'Gee whiz!' or to raise the question 'I wonder about this ....... ?'.
To put it another way, are they telling us what can be done and what we claim to know or are they telling us the grounds on which such claims are made. The one would be at worst a tabloid sensationalist exercise and at best the imparting of mere information as to the current state of science or technology. The other would offer real insight into the way we track down truth, the way we solve problems. In short we have to ask which is the more important - is it 'what do we know?' or is it 'how do we know it?' The citizens of a mature democracy need more help with the second question; they can look up, for themselves, answers to the first.
At the Science Festival level we might usefully consider the epistemology of science just as much as its content and its prospects.
Such matters as to relations between models and data, the distinction between 'truth' and 'sufficient truth' (between the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth). We need to be invited to think of the dangers of post facto rationalisation without independent evidence (such as the repairing of cosmology by the ad hoc evocation of dark matter simply to 'balance the gravitational books'). We have to beware of confoundinig association with causation (can we say that war is caused by prayers for peace simply because the one very often follows the other?). We also need a clearer than usual view of when a priori assertions are useful and when they are harmful to the cause of truth-seeking
In face of what science is and does we are mostly spectators. In face of how science sets about finding out there has to be philosophical discourse. A bit more wondering and a bit less proclaiming might do society a world of good.
E.S.
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