How science became cool

Brian Cox, Physicist

Over the last few years, I have definitely noticed a shift in the public's attitude towards science: from viewing it as a useful sideline in society – a valuable pursuit for the boffinous few, that ultimately looks after itself – to a cause worth fighting for, which has the power to change society for the better.

No sensible person or politician has ever argued that science is not useful, but many take its contribution for granted. Did you know, for example, that Britain's entire science budget was £3.3bn last year, out of a total government spend of £621bn? And that physics-based industry alone contributes 6.4% of our GDP – comparable to the much vaunted and rather more costly financial services sector – yet no party is committed to protecting it after the next election?

A growing appreciation of the low-cost, high-value and good old-fashioned solidity of science and engineering relative to finance has, I believe, contributed to the new public mood, but as with all paradigmatic cultural shifts, there is more to it. Simon Singh's libel tussle with the British Chiropractic Association has brought together an unusual alliance of comedians and scientists in support of a broad, rationalist agenda. The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) has been a rollercoaster ride of success and engineering difficulty, but the sheer ambition and scale of the project has fired the imagination of many. The dramatic pictures of the Martian surface from the Opportunity and Spirit rovers, and the unparallelled beauty of Saturn and its moons as seen by the ongoing Cassini mission, grace a million computer screensavers.

This confluence of factors has seeded a fragile but strengthening movement. There is a desire to look to the tangible world of science and engineering to replace the perceived smoke and mirrors of the financial sector. There is a recognition that the real world, revealed to us by machines such as the LHC and Cassini, is more rich, beautiful and satisfying than the vacuous meanderings of pseudoscience – and a realisation that we must fight for science and rationality in our society if we want to preserve them, because they are both fragile and immensely valuable. If my unscientific feeling is right, then these gentle shifts may herald a new golden age of science in the UK, simply because we, as a society, want it to happen.

Brian Cox is professor of particle physics at the University of Manchester, and works at Cern's Large Hadron Collider

Martin Rees, Astronomer

Science shouldn't be just for scientists, and there are encouraging signs that it is becoming more pervasive in culture and the media. Spectacular images from space, and the razzmatazz of the LHC, have broadened public awareness of the fundamental mysteries of the cosmos and the microworld. The Darwin anniversary year raised the cultural profile of science. And technology, in symbiosis with science, advances at an unprecedented rate. Computer power grows according to Moore's law, as does the sophistication of handheld devices.

But there is a quite different technology that's advancing even faster: genome sequencing. This is now a million times cheaper than 10 years ago. Its spinoffs – post-genomic science – could be as astonishing as those from the microchip have been in the last two decades.

What will surely enhance everyone's focus on science is the imperative to provide energy and food for a world population destined to rise to nine billion by mid-century. This challenge will be aggravated by climate change – so climate science needs better data, and modelling that can reliably predict regional impacts. And sustainable agriculture, in a world of water shortages and climate change, requires new technologies – genetic modification among them. We also need to preserve biodiversity and prevent a "sixth extinction".

Where in the world will the leading-edge science be done? The internet has levelled the playing field, allowing far more people to participate. And the world's intellectual capital will be increasingly concentrated in east Asia. In these countries, science is prominent on politicans' radar screens – as it is in some western countries.

The US, France, Germany and Canada have all responded to the financial crisis by boosting rather than cutting their science funding. The UK has not. In the last decade, government policies strengthened our science base. But it will be in jeopardy if other countries become more attractive to mobile talent. Leadership, once lost, would be hard to recover in a "scientific century", when other nations are forging ahead.

Martin Rees is the astronomer royal, and president of the Royal Society

Alok Jha, Science writer

On the morning of 30 March, as the LHC finally geared up to collide protons with an energy that had not been witnessed in the universe since moments after the big bang, Twitter was ablaze with excitement.

"First time in the history!!!!!!!!!!!! World record!!!!!!!!" tweeted the physicists in the Cern control room, as the particle beams reached full power. "Pardon me, LHC up and running now. I expect a Higgs Boson by teatime," said realbillbailey. Elektr0nika was also impatient for Cern to locate the fundamental particle that confers mass on to everything else: "Come on, Higgs-Boson. If Ricky Martin can come out, you can do it, too."

Hundreds of messages an hour relayed, commented on and celebrated the biggest science experiment in the world, built to examine the most abstract and fundamental science imaginable. That morning, particle physics was the coolest thing on the planet.

The Cern laboratory, near Geneva, is no stranger to the internet. Back in 1989, this is where Tim Berners-Lee wrote the computer code that gave birth to the world wide web – but even he would have struggled to predict how this would alter the way science is done and, importantly, talked about. Blogs, Twitter, Facebook, Digg and countless other social networks have given anyone interested in science (a group far wider than just the scientific community) a faster and easier way to share the best ideas, and find like-minded people to geek on about some favourite subject.

Scientists have always spoken to each other, of course, but these networks mean they can speak direct to everyone else, too. For years they had to watch, probably in deep frustration, as ill-informed journalists would make mincemeat of their carefully crafted research. With their own blogs and social networking tools to spread and discuss their ideas, they could tell their side of the story, unfettered by space restrictions or misunderstandings.

Within an hour of Cern's announcement that it had reached full power, a new profile had appeared on Twitter. HiggsMatter's first message: "Hello world!"

Alok Jha is a science and environment correspondent at the Guardian

Kevin Fong, Astrophysicist

Things change. When I was at college at the start of the 1990s, being an astrophysicist was something one didn't readily own up to. The government took a dim view, too. Science for the sake of knowledge was seen as an anachronism: good enough for Newton and Einstein, but useless to the needs of the modern British economy. And while this mindset persists today among some in the Westminster bubble, the tide of public opinion has turned.

Maybe people needed something they could rely upon for a change; something more dependable than their banks and politicians. Maybe it's the long awaited backlash against Simon Cowell culture: careers in science being the perfect antithesis to his snake-oil formula of instant fame and vast wealth without effort. It might simply be that many of yesteryear's übernerds have become today's multibillionaire tech gurus. Or that the fabric of the digital age, which underweaves everything from our trading desks to home entertainment, was a throwaway gift, stumbled upon by some folk while they were about the business of colliding subatomic particles at Cern.

This is science's time. The community is stronger than ever and more vocal, all in pursuit of a single goal – to make the world understand what Einstein always knew; that curiosity has its own reason for existing.

Kevin Fong is honorary senior lecturer in physiology at University College London

Dara O Briain, Comedian

I think most of the credit for science getting cool has to go to Gillian McKeith. The rise of the "poo lady", as Ben Goldacre calls her, was probably the point at which a lot of nerds, such as myself, cried out: "Enough! This bullshit has got to stop!"

Hand-in-hand with the exciting advances in proper science, there has been an explosion in the public's hunger for some proper rational thinking, and an end to the unfettered rubbish being unquestioningly allowed into our culture. There was a large and previously quiet majority out there, growing increasingly tired of the parade of psychics, nutritionists, astrologers and homeopaths sitting on couches on daytime telly spouting off.

This constituency has now found its voice, whether on blogs or in events such as Robin Ince's Nine Carols and Lessons for Godless People – originally started as a celebration of an atheist Christmas but which, because of demand, became a week-long, sell-out festival of rationalism and science instead.

"Nerdstock", as I like to call it, is probably the only gig I can open by shouting "what's e to the i pi?" and get the correct answer from the crowd. It's also a chance for comedians like Ricky Gervais and Tim Minchin to share a bill with Richard Dawkins and Brian Cox, and for audiences to enjoy them equally.

Even in my normal theatre shows, though, crowds are unfazed by more technical information. I followed up my initial McKeith routine with a longer piece in my 2008 tour on evidence-based medicine versus quackery. This year's show manages to draw in Neutrinos, the hormone Oxytocin and the efficacy of chiropracty on infants; all without coming close to scaring the crowds away.

There are a whole new generation of real scientific communicators to explain this stuff properly; Jim Al-Khalili on quantum physics; Marcus du Sautoy on mathematics, Alice Roberts on anthropology. My experience simply illustrates that audiences are more than happy to handle the "difficult" stuff. Thanks, Gillian.

Dara O Briain is a comedian and Guardian columnist

Tim Radford, Science writer

Every moment in science has seemed bigger than the last for more than 40 years. When the Beatles sang Love Me Do in 1963, there was an argument for a big-bang moment of creation, but also for an eternal, steady-state universe. And there was no satisfactory explanation as to why the continents seemed to have migrated around the planet, crashing into each other like dodgem cars for the last few billion years. Yet by the time the Beatles tuned in with Eleanor Rigby in 1966, both problems had been settled.

Now, in little more than half a lifetime, physicists have a confident, although not necessarily correct, history of the universe for the last 13.7bn years – with some amazing mysteries in the first trillionth of a second, when the universe was about the size of a beachball. (It was to tackle these that thousands of physicists lobbied for the LHC.)

Also in the mid-1960s, geologists, geophysicists and planetary scientists began assembling a complete theory of the Earth, which accounted for sea shells in the Alps, fossilised trees in Antarctica, and earthquakes in Japan. In the same decades, medical scientists extinguished smallpox, all but obliterated polio, and extended life expectancy even for the poorest nations. Geneticists sequenced DNA, confirmed it as a universal code of life, and used it to create new treatments, solve crimes, and even confirm at least one hitherto unknown recent human species.

What has happened in computing and communications in the last five decades has exceeded anyone's wildest dreams; and while space exploration hasn't quite caught up with the fantasies of Dan Dare or Star Trek, the rewards so far have been spectacular. So now is always more astonishing than then.

But right now? When a quarter of all Americans still cannot grasp the genius of Darwin, thus rejecting all the supporting evidence from physics, biology, physiology, genetics, geology, palaeontology and even astronomy? While very influential politicians and commentators feel free to reject two decades of consistent research into climate change from thousands of competing meteorologists, oceanographers, naturalists and glaciologists? How cool can science be, when so many feel so lukewarm?

Tim Radford was science editor of the Guardian until 2005

Sam Wollaston, TV critic

It's certainly appears to be science's big moment on the telly. Bang Goes the Theory on BBC1 is doing it for the kids, testing things by blowing them up, hands-on – so much more fun than Tomorrow's World ever was; like Top Gear with a white coat and safety specs. And just as science reacts to Top Gear, so Top Gear reacts to science (Newton's third law of motion), with Richard Hammond exploring his Invisible Worlds (also on BBC1), zooming in and zooming in some more so he can write his name on the platelet of a human hair.

For the more advanced, BBC4 has been taking things beyond GCSE level. Jim Al-Khalili, a physicist, confusingly (these pointyheads are very adaptable), did his fascinating Chemistry: A Volatile History. And Sadeq Saba made a lovely programme about Omar Khayyam. That's a brave commission in the era of Celebrity Love Island: a profile of a Persian astronomer and mathematician who lived nearly 1,000 years ago.

Then, pitched somewhere between Hammond and Al-Khalili, at AS level difficulty, is Brian Cox. Chris Evans described his Wonders of the Solar System series as "literally the best hour of TV I have ever seen", and the BBC has already commissioned a followup.

But TV's new love of science isn't just about dedicated science programmes. It's already well established in crime (CSI, Waking the Dead), is creeping into drama (Breaking Bad), even cooking (Heston Blumenthal). It's not just Brian Cox who's (maybe) cool, it's science itself.

Sam Wollaston is TV critic for the Guardian

Laura Spinney, Science writer

A country's visibility on the international science scene is measured by its publications in high-impact, peer-reviewed journals. Given that Britain has reaped more of those in the last decade than it strictly deserves, based on its share of global science funding, the view from abroad is that for a small island, it has a big output.

It has an important advantage, of course: English is the language of science. But it's a tenuous advantage: currently, it's Mandarin-speakers who struggle to translate novel concepts in molecular biology into English, but it could be the other way round.

The Labour government deserves a lot of the credit for the UK being on such a roll, having steadily increased science funding since it took power in 1997. But how long will it last? Not all British talent is homegrown. The national debt is bigger in relation to its GDP than that of the US or Japan – other scientific leaders – and any future government is likely to make cuts, whichever party forms it. That will make it harder for British universities to attract foreign stars.

It doesn't help that the UK is still perceived as a bad place to do animal research, because of its powerful animal rights lobby, or that British libel laws are less supportive of free speech than those of, say, the US.

On the whole, though, Britain has a lot to be proud of. For decades, scientists tried and failed to shed their fusty old egghead image, then along came CSI, and they became cool. What was it about forensic science that glinted and caught TV's eye? Probably DNA profiling. And who invented that? A Brit.

Laura Spinney is a science journalist and novelist

Ian Sample, Science writer

One morning this January, hundreds of people gathered outside branches of Boots, the chemists, to wolf down bottles of pills they had bought in the stores. None of the mob suffered an overdose, and that was the point the event sought to drive home. The pills were homeopathic and contained no active ingredients. Boots admits to having no evidence the pills work, but makes a tidy profit selling them to people who think they do.

The campaign began in Merseyside, but thanks to a network of self-professed sceptics and the reach of the internet, it quickly became national. And then international. The mass non-overdose in Liverpool was mirrored in Edinburgh, London, Bristol, Madrid, Perth, Sydney and elsewhere.

Did Boots change its ways? Of course not. Was the protest a waste of time? Not at all. Video clips of people cheerfully munching expensive placebos went viral. Who knows, perhaps one or two folk learned more about what they were getting from their high-street pharmacists. A few more may have cottoned on to the value of evidence. In everything.

And this is the reason to celebrate. We are in a golden age of scepticism, and that is a triumph for science and society. Sceptics, many of whom are scientists themselves, have become emboldened thanks to a handful of high-profile cheerleaders, and the world is a better place for it. They are watchful and influential. The government – so fond of proclaiming its dedication to evidence-based policy making – has been taken to task for wasting millions on flawed studies; ignoring scientific evidence on drugs, and allowing scientists and science journalists to be silenced by inappropriate libel cases.

The war is afoot on other fronts. Multinational companies have been embarrassed into dropping unsubstantiated claims from their advertising campaigns. The media, with its consistently dreadful record on scientific accuracy, is mauled for every transgression. All of this is good. People will always profit from peddling nonsense, but MPs, PRs, CEOs, quacks and journalists are now being challenged by a rising army of sceptics. And they won't have the wool pulled over their eyes.

Ian Sample is the Guardian's science correspondent

Alice Roberts, Anatomist

It is very difficult to decide whether science is enjoying a golden moment right now. It's probably something we'll only be able to gauge a few years from now, with the benefit of hindsight.

The pursuit of science helps satisfy our curiosity about the world around us, our place within it, and ourselves. But it also provides real, physical benefits, underpinning medicine, for example, and providing a foundation for our industry and economy. But we also need to accept that science and technology can create problems for us - certainly, there are valid concerns about how we as a society view, fund, and use it.

We all need to have a basic understanding of science, yet I think our education system still encourages us to think of ourselves as either "artists" or "scientists". If society is to be engaged with making decisions about science and technology, then we all need to be scientifically literate. And scientists need to engage with the public – in fact, this is an obligation, as most research is publicly funded.

We seem to have been getting very mixed messages from the government about the value of science to our society. On the one hand, it has launched a campaign to show us that science is important, yet it has also tried to manoeuvre scientists into rubber-stamping political decisions, and has got rid of them if they won't – as we saw with the very public dismissal of its chief drug adviser, David Nutt. And of course, there has been the recent announcement of cuts in higher education.

In the run-up to the election, it will be interesting to see what the various parties promise us when it comes to science funding and education. And I'll make up my mind about whether it's been a golden age for science in a few years' time.

Alice Roberts is an anatomist, author and broadcaster