“A good many times I have been present at gatherings of people who, by the standards of the traditional culture, are thought highly educated and who have with considerable gusto been expressing their incredulity at the illiteracy of scientists. Once or twice I have been provoked and have asked the company how many of them could describe the Second Law of Thermodynamics. The response was cold: it was also negative. Yet I was asking something which is the scientific equivalent of: ‘Have you read a work of Shakespeare?’”

The Media’s Frivolous Ignorance
If Snow were still alive, he would, this week, have realised his worst fears about the chasm between the sciences and the humanities, focusing on something which perhaps even he did not foresee, that truly “great edifice of modern physics”, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC).

The media coverage of this wonderful frontier of scientific experiment has exposed not only the arrogance and sheer triviality of a media largely dominated by arts graduates, many of whom are totally, and often proudly, ignorant of even the most basic science, but also the irrational and millenarian fear of ‘science’ itself that now so infects modern society. In our media, sadly including Radio 4 (the ‘Today’ programme) and BBC Radio Five Live, there have been precious few exceptions to the general embarrassed giggling, to the “aren’t we clever to be so stupid about science” utterances, and to the sheer rubbish spread about the LHC creating a black hole and ending the world in a flash when it is started up next Wednesday.

One notable exception to all this has been Mark Henderson - an history graduate, I believe - who has covered the topic brilliantly in The Times, where has also bravely, and, I might add, consistently, found it necessary to slam his fellow journalists over their demeaning coverage of science [see: ‘Mysteries of the Universe will be solved, starting next Wednesday’, The Times, September 4; ‘The Large Hadron Collider: how the press demeans science’, The Times, September 5]. Mark writes:

“The LHC is one of the most exciting experiments of this or any age, yet the thing most people now know and remember about it is a frivolous half-truth. That is a pretty depressing indication of the value we place on science.”

Indeed, it is hard to credit that we are the country of Bacon, Newton, Dalton, Faraday, Darwin, Eddington, Rutherford, Crick, Higgs, Hawkins, and many others, some of the seminal scientists of all time.

Dystopian Arts Graduates
A few years back, I analysed our fundamental problems with science in an article in The Times [‘Alas, poor science, I knew thee well’, The Times, May 6, 2003]. Essentially, I pointed out that media arts graduates were aggressively defensive about their scientific ignorance, but also that they were natural dystopians, full of gloom and doom:

“Alas, poor science, I knew thee well. DVDs, antibiotics, dentistry, vaccination - how you have threatened us with constant disaster. How marvellous our lives would be if you had never been invented.

But ‘the end of the world’ is the new Islington dinner-party chic, ... the latest blockbuster by Margaret Atwood (Beware, Oh Handmaid, The Oryx and the Crake!). And remember the Guardian Editor’s dire TV drama, Fields of Gold, which even the delectable Anna Friel couldn’t redeem. We are surrounded by dystopians and millenarians. If a UFO doesn’t get us, there is surely a GMO in a field near by. And we are all deeply concerned about cruelty to Schrödinger’s cat - although we won’t know if it is suffering until we look in the box.” [Not to mention, of course, the current darling of the literati - ‘global warming’.]

I suspect also that one of the biggest problems is the failure of science in many of our schools, where it is often taught by non-specialists, and where it is increasingly forced into politically-correct curricula lacking the basics and toned down for general consumption.

The Gutter And The Stars
How sad this is. The truth is that the Large Hadron Collider represents not only a triumph of the human exploration of the universe, but also one of the most exciting moments in humanity’s long intellectual journey. We are about to explore the state of the universe just one billionth or one trillionth of a second after its formation. We are opening a magical window on the physical conditions that existed at that extraordinary moment, thus enabling us to seek for answers to the most fundamental of questions. Can we find a unified theory linking the tiniest particle to the whole universe? Is there supersymmetry in the universe, in which all particles have an accompanying superparticle, just like a dæmon in Philip Pullman’s worlds? How many dimensions are there? How did mass emerge, and what gives particles - the Hadrons, the particles with mass - mass? Can we see experimentally for the first time the Higgs boson [picture: a simulated event in the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) detector, featuring the appearance of the Higgs boson], that elusive theoretical particle which is thought to give matter mass? What is the full ‘zoology’ of particles? What is dark matter? What is dark energy? What is the quark-gluon plasma that existed in the first millionth of a second after the Big Bang? Why is there any matter at all in the universe?

In 1610, Galileo Galilei wrote his wondrous Sidereus Nuncius (‘The Starry Messenger’), the first scientific treatise to be published based on observations made through a telescope. It took until 1992 for the Catholic Church to vindicate him. In 2000, Pope John Paul II issued a formal apology for all the errors of the Church over the last 2000 years, including the trial of Galileo. Yet, worryingly, on February 15th, 1990, in a speech delivered at La Sapienza University in Rome, Cardinal Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI, described the Galileo affair as forming what he called “a symptomatic case that illustrates the extent to which modernity’s doubts about itself have grown today in science and technology.”

There is thus far too little excitement and wonder, but far too much doubt, ignorance, and fear. Mark Henderson rightly condemns the ‘end of the world is nigh’-style media coverage:

“This isn’t a story that’s worthy of serious discussion, even as kooky fun. It might sound harmless, but it feeds stereotypes of crazy and reckless boffins who know everything about nothing and nothing about everything, and encourages the contemptible but widespread view that scientists are not to be trusted. It is of a piece with other media-led panics in which expert opinion has been ignored, from the MMR vaccine to GM crops. In short, it’s demeaning to science, and insulting to scientists.”

Sadly, in much of our media, C. P. Snow’s ‘Two Cultures’ remain deeply entrenched, opposed, and dangerously separate; we are witnessing the Large Media Collider, rather than the marvels of the Large Hadron Collider.

Nevertheless, to adapt somewhat Oscar Wilde’s famous aphorism: “We are all in the gutter, but, thank goodness, some of us are still looking at the stars.”

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