Sarah Ingham is author of The Military Covenant: its impact on civil-military relations in Britain.
Can you explain mass, acceleration and the Second Law of Thermodynamics? If you can’t, so what?
In the late 1950s Sputnik era, the Soviet Union dominated the space race and Britain was the global leader in atomic power. But instead of embracing the brave new world being opened up by scientific discovery, some were decidedly sniffy. Their problem was scientists, especially mathematicians, with their indifference to art galleries and the latest novels.
In 1959 CP Snow – novelist, senior civil servant and scientist – gave the Rede lecture in Cambridge. The Two Cultures identified the gulf between science and the arts: “The degree of incomprehension on both sides is a kind of joke which has gone sour.”
Britain, he argued, was on the brink of a scientific revolution, seen in the fledgling electronics industry, atomic energy and automation. However arty intellectuals, including writers, were proud of their failure to understand basic science: indeed, most scientists might as well speak in Tibetan to these self-impoverished Luddites.
Snow praised two former prime ministers: Lord Salisbury, with his laboratory at Hatfield, and Arthur Balfour, who had “a more than amateur interest in natural science.” The lecture was given shortly before the 1959 general election when Margaret Thatcher first became MP for Finchley; the future prime minister was one of the few British politicians with science degree.
More than six decades on, The Two Cultures remains relevant. Of his era’s scientific revolution, Snow stated: “The majority of the cleverest people in the Western world have about as much insight into it as their neolithic ancestors.” This is probably true of today’s fourth industrial revolution, which includes AI, robotics and the advanced engineering of 3D printing.
In the past five years, policymakers have been urging Britain to follow “The Science”, as if science is immutable. Whether Net Zero or lockdown, it has been invoked to justify ruinously expensive and/or socially divisive policies by politicians whose scientific knowledge is a long way from Isaac Newton’s.
It must be wondered how many of those MPs who voted for the revised Net Zero target in June 2019 were climate scientists. They should tell us by how much they want the current percentage of 0.04 per cent of carbon dioxide in the Earth’s atmosphere to be reduced – and what will happen if the target is not met. Are they are still catching planes?
The vanity of legacy-seeking politicians leaping on the green bandwagon would be risible even if Net Zero were cost-free, but it’s not. Few, however, seem to agree on exactly how much it will cost, including the Office for Budget Responsibility. Trillions (£1,000,000,000,000+) is bandied about, with the sort of disdain for the hard-earned money of ordinary taxpayers displayed by pre-revolutionary French aristocrats.
The June 2019 amendment to the Climate Change Act was based on a report by the Climate Change Committee. If few MPs had read it, they really should not be blamed.
Last month’s “Rapid evaluation of the extent to which NAP3 addressed suggested adaptation actions in CCRA3 (ADAS)” explains why the Committee is unlikely to win any prizes for science communication; filling reports full of esoteric science-speak and obscure acronyms of course makes it easier to browbeat gullible policymakers who don’t know their amps from their watts.
To paraphrase Churchill, scientists were on top rather than on tap during the pandemic. This lamentable state of affairs was perhaps inevitable. Sir Patrick Vallance, the UK’s former Chief Scientific Adviser, told the Covid Inquiry that Boris Johnson was “bamboozled” by graphs and found relative and absolute risk “almost impossible to understand”. He had given up science at 15, as the Inquiry was reminded, but apparently was not the only European leader who failed to understand exponential growth.
Snow’s Two Cultures chasm was fostered by the country’s education system which, he argued, specialised too early. Like many teenagers, Johnson was perhaps happy to escape the torture of trigonometry, but this is not much help to the country. The Campaign for Science and Engineering suggests that Britain’s shortage of STEM skills (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) costs the economy £1.5 billion a year.
The lockdown policy highlighted that science illiteracy comes at huge cost – perhaps £400bn+, not to mention the current cancer crisis. Paralysed by their ignorance the Government, civil servants, and the Opposition remained at the mercy of scientists who were, for example, all over the shop over mask-wearing.
Meanwhile, Denmark reopened its junior schools after five weeks, while German dental surgeries remained open for emergency work. So much for ‘The‘ science.
The Cass Review has brought some rational thinking to the often-hysterical transgender debate of recent years. Many, including Gillian Keegan, the Education Secretary, are now swiftly backtracking from their previous assertions that “trans women are women”, i.e. biological men are women. All those who championed this cellular-level impossibility, including Sir Keir Starmer, would fail Key Stage 3 Biology.
STEM-related cluelessness also makes policymakers more likely to be captured by vested interest groups. Earlier this week, a briefing from transgender lobbyists Stonewall led to Dawn Butler MP apologising for “inadvertently” misleading the Commons over Hilary Cass’s research methodology.
The Stonewall-Butler debacle raises a few questions, not least how many other MPs simply parrot similar briefings to parliamentary colleagues whose knowledge is too scant to call out errors.
For Snow, understanding the Second Law of Thermodynamics was the scientific equivalent of reading Shakespeare: not being able to explain mass and acceleration was being unable to read. With trillions of our pounds set to be spent on science-based projects such as Net Zero over the coming decades, perhaps we all need to be more STEM-savvy.
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Author: Dr Sarah Ingham
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