This year has seen mainstream films celebrating the achievements of, first, the mathematician Alan Turing and, now, Professor Stephen Hawking. And when, in November, the Rosetta Mission's Philae Lander made its final approach to Comet 67P the world watched with bated breath. Science has become the stuff of huge television audiences, red carpet premieres and screaming fans. The baffled layman, dimly recalling school lessons that featured mouldy lab coats and asbestos Bunsen burner mats, could be forgiven for asking how the subject has suddenly become so cool. But it has.
Last week I was having a curry with some old university friends with whom I studied physics more than 20 years ago. It was a makeshift reunion. After graduation we had all headed off in different directions - management consultancy, CERN, the financial sector. For my part I headed back into higher education to study medicine.
None of us had a particular destination in mind when we embarked on our physics degrees. None of us could even begin to guess upon where we might end up. If you'd asked us back then why we'd chosen the subject we'd have still had the interview answers on the tips of our tongues. We'd all read Hawking's bestselling A Brief History of Time, we were excited about stuff like cosmology and particle colliders and high energy astrophysics. But the unspoken truth between us was that, in one way or another, we all thought science - and particularly physics - was cool.
The difference back then was that, by and large, we were alone in that belief. So we didn't ask everyone to agree with us, noting that there was plenty of evidence that very few of our peers did. Being an astrophysics student wasn't something that you readily owned up to in the student union bar. (It rarely got you an invite to the after party.) But from day to day we were studying the stuff that turned us on: amongst them ancient objects - as old as the universe itself, mysterious stars that blazed across the heavens from the very edge of space and Hawking's unfathomable singularities. There was no question; to us this stuff was indeed very cool.
I recaptured some of that sense of wonder in the final days of the Rosetta mission a few weeks ago. Rosetta, a space mission dreamt up while I was still an undergraduate student at University College, London in the 1990s, saw a probe rendezvous with a comet that was hurtling through space, in search of answers to questions about the origins of our planet and solar system.
As the first photographs of the comet swam out of at the blackness, revealing a gloriously alien landscape, beamed to us from hundreds of millions of miles away, I caught some of the same excitement that had led me to choose a career in science in the first place. Only this time, as I followed the excited chatter on twitter, I got the sense that it wasn't just me and a couple of geeky mates, but a huge slab of society all caught up in the wonder of the thing. This was science and this was cool - and for once almost nobody wanted, or dared, to disagree.
Things are changing in science. You're likely to hear more from us scientists. We've got better at engaging people from outside the parish. There's a growing recognition that the patriarchy of the past, when we did scientific and medical research to people - or even on their behalf - rather than with them, is outmoded. Charities such as The Wellcome Trust have begun to invest substantial funds to facilitate public engagement in the field. The science community is fast understanding that doing science without talking with people about it is like being the curator of a museum of rare and beautiful artefacts whose doors are never opened to the public.
These initiatives in the field of public engagement - coupled with the advantages brought by social media and its related tools - have in part been responsible for science's increased visibility in recent years. And for me that can only be a good thing.
Politicians too seem to acknowledge that the future of the UK's economy is likely to be knowledge based, and that science and technology will play central roles in the industries of the future. The assembled curry house alumni that I met with last week all went on to use the skills they'd gained while studying physics to contribute to society and the economy in ways we could never have imagined when we were filling in our university application forms. And so science has become a discipline worth investing in, and one worth pursuing as a course of study and a career.
For me, science has always been cool, because it's the ladder I climbed up to get to where I got to, because I have it to thank for every adventure I've ever had and because I'm not sure what else I could do that I could possibly enjoy more. Communicating even a fraction of that passion and delight in science should easily be enough to convince you of the same. Because the things out there to discover are truly things of wonder. That shared appreciation is beginning to happen now. And, of course, that's the coolest thing of all.
Kevin Fong is Honorary Chair of Public Engagement for Science & Medicine, UCL
Entities 0 Name: Stephen Hawking Count: 1 1 Name: Rosetta Mission Count: 1 2 Name: Philae Lander Count: 1 3 Name: Alan Turing Count: 1 4 Name: Kevin Fong Count: 1 5 Name: University College Count: 1 6 Name: CERN Count: 1 7 Name: Rosetta Count: 1 8 Name: London Count: 1 9 Name: UK Count: 1 10 Name: Public Engagement for Science & Medicine Count: 1 11 Name: The Wellcome Trust Count: 1 Related 0 Url: http://ift.tt/1vWOu9I Title: What Would You Teach High School Students About Science? Description: You have 80 minutes visiting a high school science class. What do you do? Tomorrow, I visit high school students to talk about careers in science. The classes are grade 11 Chemistry, grade 11 Earth Science, and grade 10 Science Honours*. What should I tell them?
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