It has been a beautifully clear and sunny day – perfect weather for a barbecue. We dined and chatted with our guests as the afternoon turned to dusk and then the stars began to wink in the night sky. After everyone had gone and the clearing up was mostly complete, Saturn had ascended above the houses across the street.
Writing about science. It’s important. And not just because you could win some dosh from the Wellcome Trust. I tried to explain why (and a little bit about how) in a guest post on Grrlscientist’s blog today.
I have been working my way around the solar system with my telescope. The moon was easy to spot. And Jupiter and Saturn were not so very difficult to find, though they proved to be beyond my photographic capabilities. Over the weeks and months, Mercury, Venus, Mars, and finally Uranus have succumbed to my searches. Of all the official objects in the solar system only Neptune has so far eluded my telescoped eye.
It just doesn’t add up: why do so many people, including scientists, get stuck on the maths problem? The subject is on my mind because it was raised at a departmental meeting last week where I tried to argue that A level mathematics (the qualification obtained at age 18 in the UK) should be an entry requirement for our degree programmes in biochemistry and biology.
It cannot have escaped your attention this past weekend that the Earth was treated to a supermoon. The correct terminology for this felicitous event is a perigee syzygy, but the reasons for the interesting nomenclature need not detain us. The point is that Saturday night was clear in London and gave those of us who live there a magnificent view: Which, just like a lunar orbit, brings me to a place I’ve been before.
We came. We chanted. We lobbied. We petitioned. And in the end, thanks to the Science is Vital Campaign and the persuasive efforts of CaSE and the learned societies and captains of high-tech industry, the UK science budget was protected from deep cuts in the Governments Comprehensive Spending Review last autumn.
In many ways Travis Bickle, the disturbed taxi driver in Scorsese’s famous film, is a model of public engagement. For one thing, he really thinks about his audience. He rehearses in front of a mirror so that he will be fully prepared for his encounters with the people he wants to reach. Legs apart, arms folded, his stance is confident — his body language is really very good. Then, with the merest tilt of the head: “You talkin’ to me?
I have Jim Franks of Newton TV to thank for the opportunity to sit around a table with some of the current scientists at the world-famous MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology to talk about the legacy of its founder, Max Perutz. The discussion was part of a video that you can see at The Guardian web-site and is intercut with previously unseen interview footage of Pertuz himself looking back on his scientific life.
On Wednesday last I was fortunate to find myself an outlier among the great and the good at the Wellcome Trust Image Awards for 2011, where hefty glass slabs were being handed out by Adam Rutherford as prizes to imaginative individuals who had conjured a captivating image from their scientific work.
The Science Museum in London is a national shrine to human ingenuity. Its existence is a testament to the value that our society places on inquiry and innovation, its worth paradoxically underscored by the fact that, even in these impecuious times, entry is still free. The museum sits grandly on Exhibition Road, just around the corner from my laboratory at Imperial College.