Simon Cowell spent the weekend bemoaning Britain’s lack of talent.
Simon Cowell spent the weekend bemoaning Britain’s lack of talent. He obviously doesn’t listen to Radio 4. As Cowell should know, there are other kinds of talent, more useful in these gloomy economic times and more durable, which have no requirement to cake on tubloads of fake tan and sing along to Celine (or Whitney). What about our engineers and R&D cohorts, for example? We also have more than our fair share of extraordinary scientists, thinkers and communicators of big ideas. Just listen to Neil MacGregor for 15 minutes once a day for a week and you’ll acquire not just the facts of history behind some of the objects he’s gathered from the British Museum, but also that vital sense of context, setting, connections and relationships-between. His series A History of the World in 100 Objects continues to demand admiration for the way he wears his knowledge so lightly, placing our island history within a global story that is at once accessible, entertaining, illuminating and, above all, inspiring.
Early evening is not the best time for such concentrated listening, and I must confess that I have been known (more than once) to turn off the radio at 7.45 as soon as I’ve heard those haunting chords announcing the next mini-lecture. At that time of day it’s just too difficult to take in the full measure of what MacGregor and his cleverly selected band of experts are saying, while at the same time attempting to put together something halfway edible from the few mouldy mushrooms and squashed tomatoes at the bottom of the veg box. What we need in that pre-dinner slump is the latest instalment of a P.D. James classic with just enough meat for the imagination to work on, but not too much.
One day last week, though, I was gripped at once by MacGregor’s announcement that in this instalment we were going to be looking at ‘one of the first images of Christ in a villa in Dorset’. Why Dorset, and not Constantinople? When and how? I needed to know, forgetting the requirement of dinner and sitting down instead to listen, to truly take in what he was saying. The Hinton St Mary mosaic, as it is known, is ‘an astonishing survival’, says MacGregor, conveying immediately his excitement at what this image represents: the moment in Roman Britain when the pagan and Christian worlds came together in tiny tesserae of black, yellow and red Dorset stone set in cement. I suspect that I’ve walked past it at the BM several times without realising its significance.
This year’s Reith Lectures, which began last week on Radio 4, are also a demonstration of that rare talent for syncretic thinking. Martin Rees, the Astronomer Royal and President of the Royal Society, has entitled his series Scientific Horizons, treating us to a marvellously clear exposition of the interplay between science and society. What should the role of the scientist be in the century ahead of us, the first perhaps when one species has the potential to alter the biosphere, for ever? Rees uses no careless words, he has no careless thoughts, but instead he has been guiding us through his chosen topic with the measured pace of a trained scientist who understands that true knowledge can only be acquired through the slow and painstaking accretion of detail.
We should, he argues, be looking to science to help us through the problems and dangers we might face in the coming century. But scientists are finding it much harder to communicate in this era of instant knowledge, when it’s almost true that the flutter of a butterfly’s wing can be felt on the other side of the globe. We demand instant answers, but science trades in ‘organised doubt’.
Our minds, he tells us, were evolved to cope with life on the African savannah, yet we can now comprehend both the microworld of atoms and the vastness of the cosmos. We have the vision to create edifices such as Ely Cathedral, but we too often let ourselves down by focusing on the short-term and parochial. ‘Noisy controversy does not imply evenly balanced arguments,’ says Rees.
This mismatch between scientific advance and the ability of scientists to communicate their ideas is a dilemma for both the scientific community and those outside it. Scientists need to take more responsibility for the fruits of their ideas, says Rees, and governments need to take more heed of science, especially in a time of such rapid environmental change. Here, though, there is an inherent problem: how many active scientists are there in our new government?
Cameron and Clegg should take time out to listen to Rees. As should we all, to ensure that we acquire at least a ‘feel’ for science, an appreciation of its ability to open up to us the dark vaults of heaven.
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