For our Christmas double issue, Brian Cox and Robin Ince guest edit a 100-page special on science and evidence.
In the NS Leader, they address the state of modern science, the power of evidence (why do we need it, and how can we evaluate it?), and speak out on the pressing issue of climate change:
The story of the past hundred years is one of unparalleled human advances, medically, technologically and intellectually. The problem with a hundred years of unabated progress, however, is that its continual nature has made us blasé. With each new generation, the memory of appallingly high child mortality rates, tuberculosis and vast slums grows fainter and fainter…
Against this rather depressing introductory backdrop, however, there are faint glimmers of hope, because science, rational thinking and evidence-based policy-making are enjoying a revival.
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.
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.
Read Brian and Robin’s leader in full here.
HIGHLIGHTS IN THE MAGAZINE
David Attenborough: A life measured in heartbeats
Brian Cox and Robin Ince interview Sir David Attenborough in an NS exclusive. Robin Ince writes:
No other individual is held in such awe by as broad a group of people as Sir David Attenborough. I have seen people held in high regard reduced to gibbering fan-kids on finding themselves in the same room as him. After 60 years in broadcasting, a career that has included commissioning Kenneth Clark’s Civilisation and Jacob Bronowski’s The Ascent of Man, as well as astounding investigations into the varieties of life on this planet, he continues to work every day of the year with the occasional exception of Christmas Day.
On how public perception of science changed over the past 60 years, Attenborough says:
I suppose [in the 1940s] there was a mystique about science and also a certain suspicion of it. Since then, our society has become so technologically based that you really can’t be a fully operating citizen unless you understand basic science. How are you supposed to make judgements about the health of your children if you don’t believe in science? How are you supposed to make a judgement about a generation of fuel and power if you don’t believe in science? You can’t operate as a sensible voting member of a democratic society these days unless you understand fundamental scientific principles.
On whether or not he considers himself a scientist:
If you appear as frequently on television as I do, looking at bunny rabbits or whatever, it’s very tempting to think people notice what you say, because you’re the one person they see and hear on the subject of science, so they think you’re a scientist. You are not a scientist. I’m a television journalist and mustn’t become so intoxicated with my own intellect that I suddenly believe that I discovered these things or I have a privileged position to assess them.
On climate change:
In the early days of dealing with climate change, I wouldn’t go out on a limb one way or another, because I don’t have the qualifications there. But I do have the qualifications to measure the scientific community and see what the consensus is about climate change.
I remember the moment when I suddenly thought it was incontrovertible. There was a lecture given by a distinguished American expert in atmospheric science… he plotted time against population growth and industrialisation. It was incontrovertible, and once you think it’s really totally incontrovertible, then you have a responsibility to say so.
On whether or not the natural world still ‘flabbergasts’ him:
Things flabbergast me all the time. A friend of mine was up in the Andes filming the courtship display of a particular hummingbird, a high-altitude hummingbird. My pal had the wit to shoot it at 250 frames [a second] and you suddenly saw the complexity of the display.
It taught you so much, not only about how complex nature is, but about how impoverished your perceptions can be, governed as they are by your human condition.
Brian Cox: The coldest place in the universe
Brian Cox writes on the Large Hadron Collider – the proton smashing mega machine that has united 10,000 scientists from across the globe in the pursuit of knowledge, and was – in 2012 – the site of the discovery of the Higgs Boson-like subatomic particle. Cox writes:
The discovery of a Higgs-like particle by the Large Hadron Collider was the greatest scientific story of 2012. It is also a spectacular demonstration of what can be achieved when the intellectual power of theoretical physics is coupled with engineering and international collaboration.
The discovery of the Higgs is more than a profound vindication of advanced mathematics and its application in theoretical physics. It is also a surprising engineering and political achievement. No single nation is prepared to invest in a project as technically difficult and high-risk as the Large Hadron Collider.
In order to construct and operate this group of complex, interdependent machines, more than 10,000 physicists and engineers from 608 institutes in 113 countries collaborate with each other for the sole purpose of enhancing our knowledge of the universe.
I find all this to be deeply inspiring; it makes me optimistic for the future of the human race. First, we have been able to discover something profound about our universe. How astonishing it is that, to paraphrase Douglas Adams, a small group of apes on an insignificant rock among hundreds of billions in the Milky Way galaxy were able to predict the existence of a piece of nature that condensed into the vacuum of space less than a billionth of a second after the universe began 13.75 billion years ago.
And how wonderful that they did this together; that there is a place where people put their religious, political and cultural differences aside in the name of exploring and understanding the natural world.
PLUS
Ricky Gervais talks to Robin Ince about atheism
Alan Moore: The case against evidence
Mark Gatiss: On the art of the perfect ghost story
Maggie Aderin-Pocock: Voyager 1, 35 years later
Michael Brooks: On NASA, Mars Curiosity, and the Hubble Space Telescope
‘A View from a Hill’, a Christmas ghost story by Stewart Lee
‘The Greatest Scientific Discoveries of 2012’, a short comic by Robin Ince and Tom Humberstone
Mehdi Hasan: On God, faith, and Richard Dawkins
Ben Miller’s Notebook: Stargazing with Joan Collins
The NS Interview with physicist Jim Al-Khalili
Nina Caplan on Christmas drinks
Rachel Cooke on Christmas television
Antonia Quirke on Christmas radio
A double page Christmas Quiz
And much more…
Robin Ince is a writer and comedian. Brian Cox is a broadcaster and professor of physics at the University of Manchester. You can buy their guest edited issue of the New Statesman in shops until Thursday 3 January, or purchase a print or digital version here.
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