Big bang better than theory

“I’m going to save the world,” said the man with a glassy gleam to his eyes, “through the application of science.”

Or some similar sort of dialogue.

I’m sure you know the sort of thing. It happens in the moment during the ridiculous movie when lengthy exposition about something fundamentally impossible is only going to get in the way. So the writer, who really didn’t want to waste those sitting around hours, dropped in the shorthand version. It’s probably less prevalent these days if only because Wikipedia enables you to at least sound convincingly full of shit, but in those terribly glorious B movies the only scientific qualifications you needed was to be vaguely reclusive, have a creepily calm demeanour and to smoke a pipe.

In reality there is no such thing as science. Not really, it’s a complex collaboration of astrophysics, microbiology, hydro-chemistry and a hundred other sub-specialities. Sure, they all get to combine into one as science, but it’s a bit an uneasy alliance. Kind of like saying “fiction”.

Maybe the confusion is my fault, after all I do find it hideously complicated. Unfortunately, I had a habit of not paying attention at school when a subject was challenging, rather than struggle to gain ground I would just tune out. Science was one of the worst (after geography, maths, IT, design and graphics, French, German, and so on). Raised on the sort of movies described above, I was expecting science to be fantastical, but instead it all seemed somewhat mundane. Biology was little more than trying to remember by rote the correct anatomical correlation of our reproductive system or how photosynthesis worked, physics an extension maths with seemingly even less practical application and chemistry understanding how oil formed. Perhaps we did experiments, but I think we were mainly just taught theory. Things that went bang, smoking formulas bubbling over the top of test-tubes, leaping into the quantum physics divider to visit the fifth dimension? We didn’t actually get to try doing stuff ourselves.

State education, eh?

I’d completely expected science to be akin to magic. In the world in my head, science could be used to build space ships that could reach the universe’s perimeter. It existed in the same theoretical zone as serums that transformed skinny weaklings into buff athletes, radiation poisoned animals attached school boys with positive after-effects, bomb detonations didn’t always kill or lightning strikes that hit a specific combination of chemicals and splashing them over someone would create heroes. Okay, so I took my early years science education from comics, but I was expecting something which would illuminate a brighter, more exciting universe than suburban eighties Birmingham. Was that so bad? Instead I got systems of classification and basic electronics, neither of which were going to help me build a time machine.

I don’t think this was helped by my disruptive class. From the boy who routinely called out “I’ve got gametes up my nose” for no apparent reason to the couple who spent the entirety of every lesson trying for a practical biology demonstration it was somewhat difficult to concentrate. We were virtually riotous, scaring off one supply teacher by pelting her with insults so as the head of department arrived with a cricket bat to quell the noise. On one of the few times I recall actually were allowed to do any real experiments it almost always ended in disaster.

Disaster or fire.

I remember quite distinctly sticking the ends of paper aeroplanes in the Bunsen burner’s flame, blowing it out and imaging the smoke trail belonged to a real plane, a fighter jet maybe, crashing due to a missile strike on its tailfin or an engine malfunction. Incredibly I was thirteen, not six, at this point. When one of the even less tuned in kids did the same, he found suddenly holding burning paper to be disconcerting and so decided to get rid of it as soon as possible.

By dropping it in the waste paper bin.

Poomf.

Instant fire. Well done. Smoke and flames billowing, the no doubt exasperated teacher strode across the room to extinguish the fire.

By standing on it.

Whilst this did have the desired effect of putting the fire out, unfortunately, it didn’t do so before his trousers were burning.

In a panic about getting sufficient GCSEs to get into the local sixth form college I crammed Double Science because it was worth two and somehow ended up with BB despite not having seen a mark higher than a D on any work for years. When I went to university I found myself living with and then friends with an extended batch of scientists, mainly zoologists. I had no comprehension of the work they did. They would try to explain, but it would come across as gibberish. And yet there was a touch of envy on my part. I remember at least one conversation about the value of their studying over mine. History was worthless; an analytical appraisal of things which no longer mattered. Whilst the application of biological investigations had the potential for a profound impact upon society. Depending, of course, on what they found out. To an extent, they were right, but there wasn’t much I could do about it. I couldn’t, at least not without the help of a scientist with dubious mental health and a fortress in an inclement mountain climate, rewire my brain.

So, science is clearly important and by definition, therefore, so must be scientists.

David Baddiel wrote very elegantly a couple of years ago about how scientists are the last heroes. Or to be slightly more accurate, that they are the last profession to be universally ordained as “great men.” (And for the purposes of this argument, I’m going to keep Baddiel’s definition of men, but we all know it can include women too, right?) James Joyce, he points out, was called a great man, a great writer by Erza Pound and TS Elliot, both of whom would have some claim on the title themselves, and so it became commonly agreed that indeed he must be. Yet if Ulysses were published in 2011 it would be pulled apart and bickered over – mostly via the internet – and any argument for its greatness would fail to reach a consensus. People would start sniping about his Irish background, his drinking, his failings as a teacher in northern Italy and how reliant on his wife he was. All irrelevant to the sentences on the page, but try telling the baying masses that.

But scientists are different. They’re more revered, because we don’t understand what they do. If someone cures cancer they will automatically – and correctly – be acclaimed as great. No debate amongst the masses. Perhaps this has always been the case, but whilst Shakespeare, for example, was ordained in genius fairly early on there seemed to be more reluctance to voice passionate support for medical scientists who advocated leeches for every ailment. Alexander Fleming, in contrasting example, and the discovery of penicillin must have been a revelation; a cure that didn’t have to be removed with a match. Anyway, perhaps today we recognise that scientists, whatever their field, have done, or are capable of doing, something which is so far from the everyman’s ability that it becomes almost inconceivable. In contrast, most people equipped with laptops think they can write a novel. Most people are wrong, but that’s kind of beside the point.

Margaret Atwood (no slouch herself, but rarely acclaimed as great without dispute) recently defined science fiction as being split into two types. Essentially, the fantastical and the exaggerated, or the Jules Verne versus HG Wells death-match. Verne, the man whose fiction was based at the edges of the scientific knowledge at the time and Wells who had Martians invade Woking.

Essentially, I believe – no doubt incorrectly – that you can divide real science into two equally matching sub-sections. (And, okay, numerous other bits as well, give me a break here). Jules Verne twenty-first century science is the science that keeps us progressing at a steady rate; it’s research into new medicines, computer engineering, formulas for hair dye and toilet cleaners and pesticides. Like the Mitchell and Webb Laboratoire Garnier sketch where the powerful and rich Monsieur Garnier gathers a team of crack scientists not to cure cancer but to formulate hair dye. Don’t get me wrong, it’s still inventive stuff which arguably improves people’s lives on a daily basis, but it’s still capitalism science. Science which supports the economy and, like the science I was subjected to at school, more than a little boring. HG Wells twenty-first century science is the hadron collider, it’s the inside of Stephen Hawking’s brain, expeditions to Mars and the international space station; it’s the sort of work where staff arrive thinking, “fuck, yeah, I’m a scientist, baby.”

Perhaps we plebs trundling through our daily, dreary lives can’t properly understand the distinction. And maybe that’s fiction’s fault. A few years ago I was crammed into the cattle shed commuter train at some ungodly hour and failing to concentrate on my book. It wasn’t helped by the young woman yattering excitedly down her phone. “Oh, I don’t mind the commute in, it gives me plenty of time to read,” she plainly lied as she’d spent the entirety of that particular journey yacking down the phone.

“Yeah, yeah. I read. I so read. Yeah, actual books. You know, like, science fiction.” She then named a couple of authors I’d never heard of, but it seemed to be of alien armada guerrilla marine testosterone never-ending serial bullshit sort beloved by their fans and bemoaned by everyone else. “Yeah, and when he gets his badass caught behind enemy lines then he breaks out the hyper-tension gatling gun and a neo-spike pill to keep the Bortch hordes at bay. Science faction, baby. Science faction, this shit is totally being reeled back to us from a better world.”

(Or something like that, anyway.)

The point is the use of the invented word, faction. Even if you accept that for those who love this sort of science fiction can be delightful, meaningless entertainment, it is not, it is never, trying to pass itself off as real life. I think, as a child, that was what confused me. It was written down and so I wanted it to be true. More than anything in the world, I wanted an exciting future full of space ships and epic journeys to beyond and back, of noble heroic captains and their rag-tag crews from the far corners of the galaxy and easily defined alien villains bristling with additional arms and spikey things. The drab greyness of reality where the bad guys are dressed in designer suits and shirts from Pink and either fucking up the economy, contesting your patents or disagreeing with your research funding has a sheen of boredom. It takes empathy to appreciate the underlying human drama.

Case in point: The suspension of operations by NASA and the apparent gradual winding down of space exploration operations by everyone (except China, India and Iran) is a shame. There’s a nice bit fairly early on in The West Wing when the Mars exploration probe ‘Galileo’ goes missing as it attempts to touch down on the red surface. Martin Sheen’s President Bartlett is disappointed because he sees space exploration as the natural extension of humanity’s strive for a better tomorrow. He even infuses ‘Galileo’ with more than a nominal nod to an Italian philosopher so as it becomes something greater, something more noble.

Yet it clearly makes complete economic sense, the average trip into space to pootle around and watch the sun come up over the Earth’s rim, costs – no doubt – the same as Belgium, the end of something as aspirational as the voyage to another planet, another solar system, is something to mourn. As Kevin Fong, a director of the somewhat implausibly named Centre for Altitude, Space and Extreme Environment Medicine (who I’ve met in real life and is a thoroughly nice guy, so apologies for his inclusion here) says it taught us to dream. The shuttle, despite apparently flying like an open safe still gave of an air of grace and beauty. It was the ideal vessel to touch the rim of knowledge, but for the time being it’s gone; we are earth-bound once more. Science is being beaten back by economics.

I know little about science, and actually I don’t care. I’m happy with that. I understand that ninety-nine percent of science isn’t as photogenic, not quite as phallic as a rocket launching out the desert and into space (and hopefully not as bad for the environment as something packed with sufficient fuel to give it the equivalent explosive capability of a small nuclear warhead). Whilst childish idiots like me want to be wowed, most science is done by people sitting at computers late into the Saturday night, ploughing through reams of data looking for the pattern, or lack thereof, which will give them an answer to the question: why?

And that’s true heroism. The risk of wasting a life time looking for better when there might be nothing. Real people’s mundane life cycle becomes heroism, greatness. Perhaps we should push our empathy further and find stories to write about this reality so as kids like me are happy to be bored for a couple of hours a week. Bored yet maybe just a smidge of something useful will be retained.

You know, for the future.