An evening with Stephen Fry and Venki Ramakrishnan | The Royal Society

good evening i'm venki ramakrishnan the current president of the royal society and it's a great pleasure to welcome you to what i hope will be the first of conversations between scientists and people from the arts and humanities to discuss broader issues of science and society tonight our guest is stephen fry we all know him as a great actor he's appeared on many television programs uh on on the big screen uh i myself uh who grew up with pg woodhouse and oscar wilde and enjoyed his portrayal in jeeves and worcester and and in the movie wild he's also a widely read author who's written on a broad range of subjects ranging from humor to autobiography and most recently about greek mythology and some of you may know him as something of a polymath if you've seen him on qi but he's here today for none of those reasons it is because he's a non-scientist with a deep interest in science and rationality and has engaged in conversation and debate with many leading thinkers including stephen pinker and richard dawkins and that is one of the reasons that we really wanted him to appear on this program he's also consistently argued against superstition and pseudoscience now this brings me to the state of science today's science is among the most trusted of professions and today science is more in the news than ever yet there's also widespread misinformation fueled by the growth of internet and social media many question both the motives and the conclusions of science and promulgate all sorts of nonsense raging from the barely plausible to the outrightly bizarre so to be nice to talk about the nature of science how to combat misinformation and how to build and maintain the trust that science has in society so welcome stephen thank you thank you so much frankie it's a real honor to be here it truly is the royal society stands for something very enormous in our culture and um while i know i'll never be a fellow i don't have what it takes i don't have the chops but it is something to be uh under its aegis just for a for an hour thank you soon so let's begin with the nature of science i think many people when they think about following the science or the scientific method have a slight misconception scientists know that there isn't such a thing as these scientific method there's no magical recipe rather there's a variety there are a variety of methods with different kinds of evidence some of which may be stronger and and some not as strong and i was wondering how you as someone interested in science perceives science it's very hard to find a an all-encompassing definition you're absolutely right in terms of method i suppose one can talk about experimental science and and therefore look at the difference between rationalism and empiricism as the philosophers used to describe these two ways of approaching the truth one by what you might call pure reason um which is the equivalent of um if you like exp non-experimental physics or pure mathematics things that have no application in the real world but are abstracted and yet can be used to discover extraordinary truths um and i personally have always loved empiricism i've loved it's a very it's a very strong part of the of the british age of reason and enlightenment was that it was always palliated the reason was always palliated by experiment i like to think that uh you know you have this is extreme and you'll forgive me if you're french but as a kind of image you have a pascal figure who has a piece of paper and numbers and he has a theory of light which is purely rational and you have newton who takes a piece of cardboard and punches a hole in it and looks to see and and that is a very a very crude way of describing a difference in thinking but it's a it's one that's always struck me as as desperately important and the way they both come together because they can seem to be very opposing and it's often used in the psychological way to describe two utterly different character types a rationalist and an imp racist and rationalism can often be superstitious it can often be something that works purely on its own outside the world and empiricism tends to uh tends to call it out in that sense comedy is empirical and tragedy is rational if that that isn't an absurd way of looking at it you know the comic spirit is always to test things on the anvil of experience and characters like um hamlet you know just to talk about ideas and things without ever really having the the common grounded sense but i would say the two come together in my definition of science which is humility before the facts yes i think i think that i since we are this is a royal society event uh it's interesting to point out that one of the strengths of the royal society was that it came down on this idea that it doesn't matter how beautiful a theory is or how important the person who uh proposed a theory but you know it's motto is nullius and verba which is on nobody's word it's the evidence that matters and i think that restored a very healthy balance between rationality and empiricism and and allowed modern science to flourish so that you didn't have this imbalance as you know is that's another way you might look at it yes and and the the part of me that can't help but be uh interested in drama and novel and personality perhaps even over ideas or at least who can only grasp ideas when they're mediated by personality looks at a story like um ignas semelweis i was filming in hungary and i was able to go and find an ignacio vice museum in buda on the buda side of budapest and um he had long been a hero of mine because he he was a true tragic victim of empiricism in the face of cruel rationalism i'm sure you know the story it's a very important one in the history of medicine but uh we most of us know the story of jon snow who who you know locked the pump in soho and proved that the miasma theory was wrong and and that was a great step forward again of empirical behavior but semelweis was a was a youngish uh figure who uh was faced with this terrible problem of women in particular dying of sepsis really uh appalling numbers of them died in childbirth and they were being delivered by medical students but they were big bodies that the babies were being delivered by medical students who had come straight from the dissecting room without washing their hands but this is before germ theory to us it seems so automatically grotesque an idea but nobody had thought that might be in any way a connection and indeed some of ice didn't particularly he tried all kinds of closed off experiments not exactly you know blind double you know random double-blind trials but but as close to it as he could do he controlled things and one of them was to get a certain number of a cohort of these students to wash their hands and um and immediately the deaths went down you and i won't be surprised to hear but the awful thing was he suggested that there was something on their hands that was causing these deaths and because microscopy and pasteur and and germ theory hadn't yet uh arrived in the world this was considered insane and he was laughed at laughter scorned sacked ended his life in an insane asylum i mean it was a really dreadful story um and and he couldn't have been more right and and it it seems to us extraordinary that that because the there was no evidence that these little invisible things existed except the fantastic evidence of the drop in the death rate its reason defeated epidemiology in an awful way and and you know i i think of that as a not as an example of the arrogance of the existing science because they didn't accept it but just of the the the split nature of the human way of looking at things in a way we won't accept something that doesn't make sense to us even if there is hard evidence it seems yeah a very similar thing happened in the late 19th century when uh boltzmann you know the famous physicist great proponent of the atomic theory but he was surrounded by people who thought the atomic theory was just a fiction just a matter of it was something the chemist just used as a convenience had no basis in reality people like ernst mark and he was really hounded for quite some time before the community realized that he was right and rallied around him he committed suicide but he that was for other reasons he was mentally ill yes but but he was he did face a lot of trouble uh but it does goes to go to show you that rationality and empiricism they have to go hand in hand because empiricism without an underlying conceptual framework isn't going to get you very far uh for example you may know the death rates drop but unless you know the underlying basis yeah you you can't go forward exactly you stumble on the the distinction between a correlation and a causality exactly and but so so they're both important but what what's interesting from your example is that they're not always in sync sometimes one leaps ahead and the other has to catch up they're a very romantic stories when they are in sync like eddington going off to africa exactly i was just about to say about the bending of light yeah you know and and of course you could argue we're still testing uh some of the predictions of relativity for example gravitational waves a hundred years later so so sometimes they're well out of sync and sometimes as you pointed out in that beautiful example of the eddington expedition uh they can be uh quite uh closely in sync yes so i want to come to another issue about science which is uncertainty so scientists always live with uncertainty and doubt as you know is an intrinsic part of science i'm reminded of a well-known senator who once ran for president named edmund muskey who said that on his committees he only wanted one-armed scientists because they kept saying on the other hand and they could never give them give him a straight answer and naomi oresquez the author of merchants of doubt has pointed out how this very natural doubt that exists in science has been exploited by people like the tobacco lobby or the fossil fuel lobby to argue against conclusions that are widely accepted by the science community absolutely right and in a recent debate uh you stephen have argued against being too certain and for passionate and positive doubt those are your words and you also said just because science doesn't know everything doesn't mean it knows nothing yes that's right because that's one of the maddening things when when you're having an argument with someone who is uh doubting science and doubting a stack of evidence uh when it comes to almost anything they will say well science doesn't know everything as if that's to say that it allows them to to push open against science in every degree so well no it doesn't know everything but it knows a lot more than anything else knows um after all science that the the origin of the word science is is knowledge ski ray the latin for to know it is it is about establishing what you can know and like any good philosopher any good scientist realizes there are limits to what you can know but they're nothing like uh big enough limits to allow all kinds of nonsense to be said and um it is one of the great worries that the i was quoting i think in that debate uh bertrand russell who who said it is one of the sad things in the world that those those people you know who are who know a lot and think a lot are filled with doubt and those people who are foolish are certain and it's a kind it's been refined in some ways into the now very well known dunning-kruger effect for example that the very nature of mental and cognitive incompetence is that it can't encompass its own incompetence it doesn't know how stupid it is the problem with stupid people is they don't know they're stupid and smart people know the limitations of their smartness so that allows bloviated braggarts and die hards like like the american president to behave as if they know everything when they know less less than the you know the smallest and meanest uh educated person knows but uh they they are not in any way inhibited by an understanding of their lack of understanding if you see what i mean which is deeply worrying and then on top of that there is a cynical layer of quite you know quite able people who as in the case of this um i forget her name you you quoted her who who who i heard brings me on the radio talking about the the the the similarity the congruence of of the tobacco playbook and the the fossil fuel playbook the exactly the same way of muddying the waters of um hiring somebody in white coats in fact i think the tobacco industry called it the the operation white coat what was the name of their first move in the 50s as it became apparent that smoking was you know the evidence was mounting up and up and up and up um they called it operation white coat just get someone in a white coat whom you can pay um and tell them that it is uncertain that it's not quite clear yet the evidence isn't all in the jury is still out and you can say this again and again about anything and at the moment of course it's being said about climate change and the anthropogenic nature of climate change in particular um because people will look at the medieval warm period and say see there are cycles and once you have to stop and go into the detail once you have to go as the popular phrase is granular people are bored they don't want to know anymore they just like hearing the big rhetorical statements and in the in the 19 uh and 60s when c.p snow and fr levis had the famous two cultures debate humanities versus science um as if they were you know enemies and that there were two ways of looking at the world and one was correct and truthful and valuable and the other wasn't and to leave is the scientific method was cold calculating it controlled human beings it wasn't human shaped it was abstracted and it led to dark forces and dark outcomes whereas the literary and artistic way of trying to examine human impulse human feeling and looking at uh looking at that through the the lens of an artist was something that only gave joy you know both sides exaggerated naturally i think we've got beyond that two cultures approach but um nonetheless there is still out there in the world a feeling that you can simultaneously appropriate science and dismiss it so you use the word uncertainty and of course that's a kind of um double meaning in in post uh you know post new physics uh uh language because you think of heisenberg and and so you can say look even even quantum physics says the world is uncertain uh which is a total misreading of what that's supposed to mean yes indeed uncertainty is probably not the best translation but nonetheless that's the word that's stuck and so people say you know and look at chaos physics there are non-linear equations everything's turbulent and unknowable so science is really proving that science isn't of any use and yet the most you know ridiculous fraud selling crystals and so on will use words like frequency and uh energy uh which are words that have a very specific meaning in physics of course um and and we'll use them of uh of crystals when and if you wanted to go and say when you talk about this frequency this crystal's giving out they say yes i mean do you remember your quartz watch telling the time that was giving out a frequency yes does this mean that if i take a piece of rock and rub it you know and then they're so so yeah they're scientific jargon in context where they have absolutely no meaning this is uh something that scientists really uh i think despise uh but but the real problem getting back to uncertainty and doubt is how to convey to the public that doubt and uncertainty are always a part of science but it doesn't mean that we don't know anything yes you know it's it's theory it doesn't mean that something is unsettled you know the theory of people you know for example creationists will say well it's just a theory well no that's obvious yeah that's the other thing theory has meaning something hypothetical whereas we think of theory as a conceptual framework exactly and so uh i think that is so there there are a number of issues i'm not sure that i'm not sure how to make headway on this doubt problem and i think it is important we're facing it for example now with climate change but as i'll come to later we're also it's also coming across with covid you know various aspects of the pandemic and so on and one thing is that eventually the truth wins out no one now questions whether smoking causes cancer and despite years of sort of pushback and so the question is you know how do we sort of accelerate that process in other words how do we you know it's about an attack against the people who are you know obstructionists or really actually in some ways somewhat dishonest about uh their claims well um part of it is that if if if someone has an axe to grind or a political agenda to to to to put forward they are nearly always a booze trick of uh in order to uh to put their point forward and in and to humiliate and to uh discredit their opponents so for example in politics if someone won't change their mind they're stubborn uh but if you like them they uh they they show immense uh stability and um you know so you could if you disliked margaret thatcher in the old days you would say she would stop him and she just wouldn't change her mind she was she was like like a donkey just stuck there wouldn't change and others would say say what you like about maggie she sticks to her guns you know so that's just an obvious example of how you use language and similarly scientists if people want to discredit a science then scientists are either arrogant because they state something as a fact and that they're just arrogant white-coated technocrats or if a scientist is kind of as it were makes the rhetorical mistake of being humble then they can just simply get trampled over so really it's about recognizing who the enemy is of the truth at any particular time and obviously we have as serious enemies of the truth when it comes to medical science at the moment which is something we're all thinking about in terms of the anti-vaxx movement if you can call it a movement um and the idea that you know vaccination is a hoax that covid is a hoax um and that the the the epidemiological and virological ways of trying to explain it are hoaxes but there are sciences that are halfway sciences they're not pseudosciences but they're sciences that take a long time to be accepted as sciences in the same way that subjects get a long time sometimes to be accepted into universities like economics took a long time before anybody would call it a science or a study or a discipline um and one of the sciences nobody's talking about much at the moment but which i know from friends in court as it were does have a seats in on sage and other committees and therefore has the ear of of of government is not virology it's not epidemiology or medical science generally um biology or chemistry or anything like that it's a scientist it's a science that we don't really think much of at the moment it was discredited in the 60s and or late 70s perhaps and that's behavioral science of one kind or another now what do we mean by behavioral science is it a mix of psychology and is it that kind of conditioning science of bf skinner that you know involved mice in k you know but as long ago sherlock holmes in his second uh the second novel a sign of four he says rather brilliantly he says you know whats and it's one of the most extraordinary mysteries that scientists can predict to an extraordinary order of precision how a mass of people will behave how the average human will behave under certain circumstances but nobody can predict what an individual is going to do and that is one of the subjects that that behaviorology has to try and look at yeah it is a mystery it's a very interesting point i mean when you're in theater for example and you're in a reasonably successful show you know that on monday you'll sell between forty and fifty percent of the tickets on tuesday it'll be sixty percent on wednesday eighty percent and then thursday friday saturday you'll sell out well why is it that those individuals some of whom go on a monday why don't the 40 to go on a monday why don't four weeks of worth of them all go on one monday and it sell out hugely and yet the averages do work out of individual humans who are all captains of their soul with their own brains and decisions they act in predictable ways and yet individuals don't anyway the point is companies yes well facebook and other companies know very well exactly how you know we will behave on average and advertising agencies there's a lot of money at stake in this kind of science and as we know now um two behaviorology and psychology has been added in the past 20 years um game theory and all kinds of ways of modeling nudging and behavior and and so on which have been used in uh financial markets as well as in things like facebook as you say in order to to predict human behavior and to nudge it not just to predict it but to some extent to control it and and this leaks over into politics as we also now know thanks to um cambridge analytica and the russian behavior and other interferences in in the ways people vote and think about uh subjects like who's going to be american president or should we or shall we not stay in europe and and here a mixture of prediction and nudging and and human uh control has been used for enormous profit either political profit or massive financial profits yeah and that brings me sort of to the next topic i wanted to uh bring up which is misinformation in today's world you know when the tobacco company did its uh lobbying efforts there was no internet but today you know we have the internet we have the growth of social media and it's a double-edged sword i mean children growing up in india or africa can have access to the world's knowledge at their fingertips but it's also fueled the growth of misinformation you mentioned q anon q anon has uh acquired amazing followings even among you know republicans it's going to be a congress congress exactly yeah and you know many of these people and they they're all sorts of conspiracy theories uh you take something like covet 19 it's a remarkable testament to the power of science you know just weeks after the outbreak people discovered the cause of the virus you know and then they they not only discovered the virus but they were able to sequence it they were able to get a test for it they were able to identify modes of transmission and how to suppress it they're on their way to trying to obtain vaccines and drugs when you compare that to hiv 40 years ago that progress that we've had in less than a year uh took almost a decade yes and so um you know science has done tremendously in this pandemic but there are people i would say i would say as a gay man who lost lots of friends that that actually the the hiv epidemic um was instrumental in in improving virology and epidemiology in incredible ways to do that absolutely and we're we're reaping the benefit yeah we're reaping the benefit of that but nevertheless you hear all these crazy theories about covet 19 you know such as the whole virus is a hoax it was uh artificially developed by china or alternatively by bill gates or it was developed by the pharmaceutical industry because they want you to get sick so they can sell you things and by the way 5g makes you susceptible to this virus and so we must destroy 5g infrastructure this all strikes you know to an average scientist uh this strikes us is crazy and uh there's now a significant minority of people the anti-vaxxers you mentioned who say that you know if a vaccine comes along we don't trust it we're not going to uh take it and so i don't i wonder what you think you know first of all what is your reaction to this and what do you think we could even do about it well my reaction as i suppose most people's ought to be one hopes would be is is obviously horror and a sinking heart every time i i pick up my ipad in the morning which i keep stupidly by my bed and really shouldn't and i look at the muse uh by the time i'm on my feet and ready for a shower there's already hot lead leaking into my stomach because i think of the the just the horror of the world but i i would suggest this fenki that um science i do do you familiar with um um the idea of uh stephen j gould's uh nomi his uh non-overlapping magisteria as he put it he was a son of a rabbi and it it it hit him very hard to try to to be when science was aggressive towards towards religion and and claims that religion made and he suggested that there should be non-overlapping magisteria which is just a a grand world for realms of inquiry for for areas of thought in other words science should stick to what science was good at and human you know whether you call it the humanities or the liberal arts or whatever culture you come from those sort of things could and religion can look after things that science shouldn't look after but i think and a lot of scientists thought he was he was a bit nuts about that and it wasn't right and i agree that he wasn't right partly because science has decided that it's not its job to look at things in the human world i mean apart from the human body but it looks at things that are of nature essentially the greek word is and so every scientist is really a physicist they're looking at physics they're looking at the laws of nature either in terms of biology and botany and geology even the planet and uh and the cosmos uh and the the the laws of motion and uh everything else that seem to to cause the whole the whole thing to work in the way that it does but that human interaction and human behavior uh generally speaking is the subject for non-scientists well the problem is that a huge number of very clever non-scientists fill that space and are therefore able to to pull triggers on human beings that they've discovered uh the kind of triggers that daniel kahneman who won his nobel prize for identifying in uh in in his uh excellent book you know the the cognitive balance biases the sadie inspires all the biases to which we humans are prey to and of which we are mostly unconscious and of which are two kinds of mind that he he he you know thinking fast and thinking slow was the book that that kind of hit the the popular presses and made him a a dinner party chatter hero but that there's a lot of extraordinary work that he did that shows that science can look at how people believe and why they believe and why they can be pushed into believing things that are untrue and why they find it hard to accept things that they don't want to be true and all this is deeply important and is as subject to a rigorous scientific codification and explanation and a laying out as is the reason that leaves go red in october yeah this is the behavior of the growth of behavioral science that's right so i think that is part of it i think scientists can't hold back and say gosh look how stupid humans are they're not believing us they should say we've done some scientists you say we've done a lot of work on this we know why humans are being like this and they should and that should be open science and in a sense that is happening but maybe there's there's more to it uh you know that it should yeah i think you know your hero bertrand russell whom you mentioned uh used to used to talk about the infancy of reason and the idea is that you know we all have a thin veneer of rationality but deep down we're actually quite emotional beings and we we come to conclusions often based on emotion and then we try to justify it with reasoning or rationality after the fact absolutely make a choice or form an opinion and then try to sort of rationalize it later and the very popular science now of course is evolutionary psychology and that would say that we're right to be the way we are because we've evolved to need to respond very very fast to danger threat or the possibility of a big lunch and reason takes too long if if emotion can short-circuit the journey between exactly problem and solution then then take it yes so at least a question so you know when scientists argue about the evidence or data they often as you say uh come across as cold and logical yeah you know uh a bit like spark or in the worst case dr strangelove and so naomi oreskes uh you know the person who wrote merchants of doubt has come out with a new book called why trust science and she points out that maybe scientists really should in order to connect with people expose their humanity that scientists are not individually we try to be objective but as individuals we fail to be objective science is objective because of the entire process of science of keeping each other in check and providing sort of scrutiny by the community but as individuals we we're human beings we have egos we have different motivations you're also subject to the pressures of academia and industry and whoever responds and she felt that if we were more sort of forthcoming about ourselves and our humanity and our motivation we would come across as more authentic do you yes funnily enough i was going to come to exactly this point um it's it's as absurd for scientists to talk about the science and scientists as it would be for historians to talk about the history and historians as if they were a special class and historians are just people who have looked further into history than most and the history makes no sense at all i'm following the history well who's history what are your sources what you know and the science of courses must irritate scientists every time they hear a politician saying the science but you can see why politicians do and and because politicians are human as well and scientists yes are human they have two nipples and two legs or they might have more it's occasionally possible to have more than two nipples of course but you know what i mean that the point is we're all subject to the same pressures and thoughts and desires and guilts and and complexities and one of them one of the things that scientists just as people in the literary and the humanitarian and the understanding the humanities need to be more aware of science so scientists need to be more aware of the humanities and i think all scientists should for example read nietzsche's birth of tragedy where he sets out very beautifully how the greeks understood this you talk about mr spock in star trek and of course um he he said what what the greeks understood so so clearly about themselves as this rather new civilization that had done remarkable things was that they were split between two principles that their own mythology gave them names for the apollonian and the dionysian in other words apollo the god of reason and prophecy and truth-telling the golden apollo they saw that as part of being greek they had given them the world music and rhetoric and logic and mathematics all kinds of advances in those subjects but also dionysus was a god of frenzy and addiction and desire and letting go of your feeling and appetite and that they were just as much dionysian as they were apollonian and their tragedies their plays very often played out to the contradictions in themselves between this and if we think that the truth either the human truth or even the truth of the world can be expressed by a human being who is exempt from these contradictions these pulls in his own or her own personality then they're fooling themselves because scientists desire things too i i i you know i become rather obsessed by the story of france harbor which you probably know is one of the most extraordinary stories of a scientist and i think acts as a there's a story that covers all of science and um he he was a nobel prize winner because he you could argue was responsible for saving more lives and causing more people to be born than any human who ever existed he he was the man estimate as the world's population would be about half what is now without the harbor process because of his ability to you know to he the way he found it to to get nitrogen uh available for farmers and so on before they'd have to get guano from from south america and bones from bone yards in order to to try and get the nitrogen into the soil and increase the fertility of their crops and so and then as you say he he's responsible for that but um then in the first world war as a good german he was also responsible for for for chlorine gas for for the gas attacks he actually supervised them and went to the front and taught the men how to use the wind best in order and he watched as french soldiers were shooting themselves in the head just to commit suicide quite horrible to stop the foulness of this burning in their throat and his wife brilliant she yes she was a brilliant chemist herself and she she went out and shot herself because she was so ashamed and horrified by what her husband had done who then went on after the first world war to produce this amazing new uh i suppose it complemented the nitrogen a weed killer type poison um that they called cyclone uh which in german of course is zyklon and um it turned out that that of course was the poison that the ss used in the death camps to kill harbour's family that's right the irony is he was jewish exactly and he did not want to leave nazi germany he said i am a loyal german and you must you know accept that yeah you know then his legacy is still there because the monsanto company used the same chemical that was in cyclone for roundup and for the you know and it is i don't know if you've seen what's that documentary on netflix it's a very good one about about the soil and about the you know the history of the degradation of the soil in the united states from the dust bowl onwards and so um there's an example of the fact that you cannot possibly you know you you cannot possibly take science as a pure thing it's it's as everyone knows it's it's application and a pure scientist will say oh but that doesn't apply to me because i'm not a technologist or an engineer or a working for a factory making some product i'm purely i'm not wet science i'm blackboard or you know whiteboard or whatever it is now you know um but that that doesn't quite wash does it no and it it's actually the harbor uh anecdote you you mentioned it is actually a lesson that scientists also must learn uh not to have the sort of arrogance of science because science has become been so successful and it's such a a very logical way of looking at nature in the world uh we mustn't forget the sort of human aspect of why we do science and what it means i i think that's very important yes i mean if i wanted to start again with universities would you know one i think you know clearly ethics has has become more and more important to subject both in business uh and in science bioethics is is obviously a a very rewarding field a very important field as we move towards this tsunami of new technologies which we are facing which we haven't been able to speak about yet but that's one of the huge problems and and maybe we can learn from history that something scientists have never been very good at doing in in in the larger sense is prediction they can predict events discrete events that are part of their scientific realm and that is the prediction and repeatability of phenomena is part of what makes science work it's part of the proof of science of course but if galvano and um and volta and coulomb and and um faraday and thompson and maxwell if they had all predicted what the effect of their beautiful theories and their wonderful science and their marvelous mathematical modeling of this strange force this this electricity that was also seemed to be magnetism and yes was both and if they could see that as a result of that would come technologies that would so transform the world and in some cases so impoverished areas of it as well as enriching others i wonder what they would have said because how great their minds were and how logical the outcomes of electronics came you know as you move all the way up through to the bell labs and shockley and the transistor and these extraordinary developments um and then of course computing and right up now to the possibility of quantum computing and i think faraday though did have an inkling because i i forget whether it was the prime minister or the or or the queen queen victoria who asked him what good is this and he said something to the fact that well one day you may tax it of course ximena he may not have realized that the tax could be in the trillions you know but um very true but you know part of the problem is that some of the sort of things that people argue about like the anti-vaxxers well the the uh an anti-mmr paper was published in a mainstream journal okay before it was retracted oh andrew wakefield you mean exactly yes and and similarly there were there was a paper on gm crops which also turned out to be flawed uh they've been data on whether high tension wires cause cancer each of these cases there's been an initial finding that finding has turned out to be flawed subsequently lots of papers have discredited the finding and yet the original flawed paper seems to live on because it was done in this sort of established way you know published in a peer-reviewed journal and so on and so i think the public doesn't understand that there's a provisional nature of science you could have a finding and that finding could turn out to be wrong and subsequent findings uh you know is the mass of evidence uh which turn which people believe in and it's it's very very hard because there are often scientists there's often a small group of scientists who will still insist that the original finding was correct there are still scientists who argue that cold fusion is correct even though you know it's been widely discredited so i i sometimes wonder how to tackle that problem and how to sort of restore faith in the consensus trust in the consensus and part of the problem is people will argue oh well you know galileo was against the consensus and the case exactly you know or quantum mechanics and they don't realize that these are very very rare and that is why we remember them they're revolutionary that is not how science works most of the time there's also a misunderstanding that people think uh the next generation of science overturns the previous one that somehow uh einstein disproved newton um right you know and that niels bohr and and and others disproved uh einstein but but when it comes down to it mathematically there are differences of or almost unimaginably small amounts of decimal places in the in the results of of of these two forms of physics the the so-called mechanistic newtonian one still holds you can become a millionaire snooker player using only newtonian mechanics or design a car you know or even a rocket exactly you can't yes you can you can get back from on apollo 13 with the people a pencil and paper uh using a few newtonian equations as it were and you certainly can't play quantum billions as far as i know on the table but but um but nonetheless yes so there's there is this idea that scientists are going to change their minds anyway that in 50 years time there'll be another theory along which will disprove the previous one which is of course not what theories mean and not how what the history of science teaches us but it's very hard to to kick that out of people's minds and the other thing is of course and this is part what i said about the daniel kahneman business is that just as we can see the the the the bias in other minds they can see the bias in ours or or they think they can so whenever you defend something like an established scientific consensus people will always instantly want to read um a purpose behind you the or or or big farmer they'll say oh yes that's because big pharma wanted because um i mean i've tried to explain to someone um when when when they said to me of course yeah big pharma are gonna go rub their hands with joy when they find the vaccine i'll get well actually no you prob they'll probably make more money if there was no vaccine and over the years people continued to get ill the vaccine would actually very soon stop making them much money so you know it just doesn't even but once you start to argue like that it's very difficult and it's not only the arrogance of science but it's it seems almost the arrogance of knowledge of history and the ability to lay out an argument are under threat because populism is all about um dismissing elites and experts in all areas not just science uh in fact science is a pretty safe one compared to those pesky uh you know pesky people who've read books and uh and and who follow up details and and explain truths about things and point out what was said yesterday that you you're now contradicting and as we know it as each month has passed the populists and uh and their mouthpieces are able to double down more and more in sheer denial and just say i never said that and we're now in a position thanks to deep fakes which work both ways both they can make uh a politician appear to be snorting cocaine off over prostitutes nipples who was never near that prostitute and it looks totally convincing but also they can allow a politician who really did snort cocaine offer offer prostitutes nipples to say that's just a deep fake i was never there you know nothing is stable anymore everything that's that's a terrible problem yeah we we the kinds of evidence we relied on to establish facts uh are are becoming more and more difficult to sort of convince people that's right they're just part of the culture wars if you are that kind of person you believe that evidence if you're that kind of person you believe that so what do you see as a role of the press there have been a num couple of questions on whether journalists understand the science they're reporting another enough science correspondence and has is the level of debate and reporting been of a high enough standard and do you think what what in general do you feel is the role of the press and all this there are of course some really good uh uh scientific journalists and and and we're you know we're all the the culture as a debt to ben goldacre and simon charmer and people like that who've who've really uh uh increased to the general public's understanding of what you might call good science and bad science fake science and real science and how to read it and uh the you know the bbc uh has the uh program which which looks at numbers and how they really affect and analyzes and as it were fact checks the the claims and statistical counter claims that are made by politicians and so there is available a much much greater access to the truth but um again you have to want it and it's very easy for for us to say well we're the what used to be called the chattering classes and now called the you know the sneering metropolitanity or whatever you want to call this uh and and we're unbearable to to a lot of people because uh because we pull down these theories or we want to erect ones they don't like or or we're dishonest or i don't know you know it's very easy to assassinate the character and the the you know the process of so of someone who's your perceived enemy and and suppose the answer is is to try to try and engage everyone in in some element of the of being part of building a beautiful picture that's true um and a true picture you know it's a bit like the old x-ray crystallography it took a hell of a long time took those amazing scientists most of them women because men were too flighty to have the concentration skills to do it you know to to to find these different angles in these different different presentations of the truth before a whole picture of a protein or whatever could be established and it was an amazing of course now it can be done by machines in seconds but but the point is if if you all felt that you were holding a piece of the jigsaw and that that there was a way that different intelligences and different ways of looking at the world can contribute to uh uh as i say a kind of modeled um uh multi-faceted truth it would be very helpful because i suppose part of the problem with science and certainly is for me my father was a a physicist and and uh so whenever i asked him a question his usual instinct was to take a piece of paper and draw a vector and there was x and there was y and there was a sort of wave thing and then on the top of the wave at some point he put uh x minus one in brackets and then squared and i and i would immediately say but i don't understand i just asked you why the sky was blue or whatever you know but don't you see and and there is this enormous gap but and you scientists who are tuned into this zoom must probably know it's true but i don't think you understand how stupid we are when it comes to numbers i mean i i i i i think i doubt that i think i'm sorry to say nobody's going to mistake you for me i can read a book but two pages later i have to turn back to remind myself that that happens to i think that happens to all of us but i want to get back to this point about people believing what they choose and then automatically trying to discredit the other side and so you know if if they don't like a scientist's opinion or views or data they will uh start attacking the scientists we've seen that even with the pandemic you know some of the epidemiologists are harassed yes for example has been really uh badly you know people are issuing death threats and and things like that and i he even in in britain uh you know our scientists have often been attacked on twitter threatened etc and harassed and so this is a kind of disturbing situation and the question is how do you convey to the public that look science is what it is don't shoot the messenger is there a way that we can explain the motivations and perhaps could we be more transparent about the incentives in science could we change the incentives in science so that people would trust scientists more and this might involve a change in the science culture you know it might and i i think that that's part of it and uh i don't mean that the the important questions of science should go unexplored and that you should reduce the you know the budgets of a big science things like you know the hadron collider or whatever these they're all obviously immensely important areas of science that one wouldn't as it were touch but in terms of the everyday interface of scientists with others within universities and within industry and within other institutions and establishments and society generally things have been tried the the chair of the public understanding of science in oxford for example which is a brilliant idea and unfortunately and i say this because he's a friend of mine and we have much in common richard dawkins is probably the most famous holder of that chair but he was a polemical figure and people will always associate him with something and um and and those who found his uh you know his dismissal of of of religion in particular so um they found it brittle and uh angry and uh ungenerous perhaps uh and uh so that uh and i mean this with greatest respect and love of richard that in some ways that it held back what it was supposed to do that far from increasing the justin friendly nature of science it only seemed to increase the it is odd you know because in his writings he comes across as much more strident than he is in person personally and he's very courteous and and you know charming almost he's warm and he's open to the mystery and the wonder of the world which you know he'd be an idiot if he weren't so the idea that he's a cold rationalist is of course nonsense but uh yeah it's it's but but one shouldn't sort of rest it all on on on him in that sense i think um you know it's been tried when i was a boy and still going on the royal institute christmas lectures and but you know it was always the goody two-shoe blue peter watching middle-class children who sat there with their shiny faces laughing and enjoying the experiments that were being shown to them and uh somehow something else has got to happen and and i'm trying to you know i can't i can't give an answer here and now as to how science is going to be integrated into into the public discourse in a way that allows uh you know a reciprocal understanding of science and across cultures and so on um because well one thing i think scientists can do and that is be better prepared for what is coming the image i have is we're looking out to sea which picks up on newton's idea of being a beach coma perhaps we're looking out to sea and there are upswells on the horizon of 5 six seven eight nine ten different complete separate technologies which are converging into one tsunami and they are nanotechnology and biotechnology gene editing genomics you know crispr and so on um brain machine interfacing um quantum computing new materials graphene and all the others um and of course artificial intelligence unsupervised machine learning and robotics and and so on and bio augmentation all these are coming together and are on the horizon and and it won't be long before suddenly that huge tsunami is over us and each one of these technologies is capable as being as wickedly used for ways that are not good for human polity and comity if i can use those words um as the internet was or as social media was but together the possibilities are terrifying and i would have said 10 years ago they are blissful look how wonderful it's going to be but now i'm so doubtful because the fact that all science and technology can cast a shadow has never been clearer and often the brighter and better it is the starker the shadow that you know so i mean in the late 90s late 80s and early 90s when i when i joined the internet as a almost like a kind of radio ham it was just an amateur hobby and tim hadn't even invented the tim berners-lee hadn't even invented the world wide web yet and i saw this thing and i imagined how it was going to break down borders and dissolve differences and it would be a huge university for everybody a resource a library a museum a theater a concert hall a public square it would be the most wonderful thing that humanity had ever created and it would end our problems and it's something yes the reverse happened yeah and that is it you know and i of course i feel stupid about should i have guessed well i don't remember i read almost every book on the internet there was to read in the early 90s which was only about three a year and not one of them said look out it's going to be dangerous the dark side well and i i think it's a lesson that perhaps scientists should not just remain disengaged yeah but when technologies develop we have to carry society along we have to get them involved get them to understand the technology and often they will have they will see things that we perhaps very in our very narrow technical ways might not and and they and also what people do with technologies and new science is really a social uh problem it's a it's a matter for society to decide not just for scientists to decide and perhaps that's the only way we can sort of tackle this tsunami is by really engaging broadly with the public and bringing them along and and dealing with it collectively i i think that's probably going to be more and more needed as these things develop i mean genome editing machine learning those are two very classic cases where society will have to decide how these things are used yes just not just the people who develop them and of course we're no longer in the sort of situation that uh the world was in in the 1930s where oppenheimer and einstein could write to the president and inform him of a technology of which he was never aware and give him the terrible choice as to whether or not to repress the green light for it to go ahead and and the atom bomb to exist we all you know we all know you know that crispr editing exists we know that machine learning exists and we know that there is no locus of authority there's no equivalent figure who can say yes this is a wise thing and we should do it and no this is a terrible idea we mustn't do it because different nations will do things there's no consensus around the world there's no belief in international organizations or the very nature of internationalism and so for example at a university one might imagine that a solution to such a thing and you could widen this out is that in the same way that if i were to write a novel that involved some scientific ideas i would send the manuscript to the physicist the biologist the geneticist the various disciplines that the book tried to write about and say does this make sense and they would say it's a no that's not really how it would be done and oh yes that's kind of right and so on and similarly if a scientist has an idea has a has made a breakthrough naturally they publish it and peer review happens and so on but in the old days it would be that [Music] hardy and hardy and whitehead or something would go and see wittgenstein or g.e moore or or russell of course and say is there a philosophical ethical problem with this this is a bad idea and and and you know you would trust a scientist to say uh this is what it is and i can explain it to you and you trust a philosopher to say you do realize that when people get hold of this they will want to do that with it or that it's possible you know because most of philosophy these days is what's called consequentialism isn't it it's a you know the modern fancy word for utilitarianism that that almost all morality and ethics is predicated on its consequences is it good or bad and that's how you judge morality not by some external thing like god or conscience but but through consequences well actually consequence consequentialism should also be put into all scientific breakthroughs and ideas that the consequences of new ways of thinking new models and and apprehensions of the world new discoveries um the consequences should be thought through and i don't mean you can never ban a new thought or you never in the history of technology as a new technology not being taken through and so you can't you know you can't sit on it but you can maybe have an element of understanding that it doesn't exist in isolation as a pure scientific model or idea but that once it's out in the world just as a pure gas well it will mix with the atmosphere of the human atmosphere and become something else and you know well this has been a fascinating hour at least for me uh stevens so i want to thank you again for agreeing to do this and i hope those of you who've listened have enjoyed it as much as i have so thank you stephen and real pleasure venky and thank you and thank everybody for tuning in and good luck everybody and keep fighting the good fight for truth and honor in the scientific way good night good night joel thanks very much indeed bye you

Channel: The Royal Society

Views: 40,244

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Id: gXRRoscN3DY

Length: 66min 56sec (4016 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 20 2020