The importance of science: an outsider's perspective

ladies and gentlemen many thanks for coming here tonight and may I welcome you to the Royal Society my name is Julie Maxton and the executive director of the Society and it's a great pleasure to have with us tonight Jim al-khalili and Bill Bryson as a special guests now I have the job of doing the housekeeping before they get started so if you could bear with me could you please make sure that all mobile phones are off we don't have any planned fire evacuations so if you hear anything it's not planned and therefore we should take note and there is a fire exit over there and there's one at the back as you can the door you came through the event is being recorded and webcast for our archives and my job is simply to say another welcome to you and a special welcome to Jim's mum and dad you have come tonight and and may I say a little bit about Jim and then ask him to introduce bill Jim al-khalili is professor of theoretical physics and the chair in the public engagement in science at the University of Surrey he was awarded the Royal Society Michael Faraday prize for science communication in 2007 and elected an honorary fellow of the British Association for the Advancement of science he has been a fellow of the Institute of Physics since 2000 when he also received the Institute's public awareness of physics award he's achieved a wide prominence as a public scientist author and broadcaster he's fronted a number of radio and television documentaries including the life scientific and chemistry a volatile history which was nominated for a BAFTA it's our great pleasure to have Jim here tonight and to ask him to introduce bill thank you very much jr. good evening ladies and gentlemen so I've got some notes in large 16 fonts so that I don't need I'm so vain I don't want to wear my reading glasses now so I don't have to look at bill over my glasses it is my my genuine pleasure to have this opportunity to have this chat i gather that this the event is is so popular that there all society have had to turn a number of people away despite filling this this hall and a breakout room a testament to it to your popularity bill i'm sure so bill bryson OBE best-selling travel writer indeed the UK's highest selling author of nonfiction although I think bill would want to correct that to say highest selling author of nonfiction provided it doesn't include food recipes provided it's not the highway code I mean that but that's getting picky Bill's an acclaimed science communicator historian man of letters honorary fellow of the Cavalier Institute of particle physics in California honoree fellow of the British Science Association and indeed an honorary fellow of the Royal Society and bill says he's always nervous about entering the Royal Society he thinks I was going to stop him at the door and say you know you're not a real scientist you can't have many awards and prizes I'm not going to read them out bill because that would just take up the whole hour basically lots of people like you and and and have rewarded you bill bryson was born raised and educated in Des Moines Iowa but has spent most of his adult life in in Britain in in England his books here have sold more than 15 million copies and translated into 30 languages probably Bill's best-known book notes from a small island written in the mid 90s was a massive bestseller and it was chosen I believe by radio for listeners as the best book ever written on the British identity he says there's something about Britain that suits him after coming here in the early 70s he did go back to the US in the mid-90s for less than a decade before he he missed us too much and had to come back he says he missed the pub and British TV I think that's the reason we came back bill then spent six years as Chancellor of the University of Durham it was about that or just over ten years ago now that bill wrote his best-selling popular science book a short history of nearly everything which even within the genre of popular science books was hugely popular I remember as a popular science writer thinking well I'm not going to read that book you know here he is he's a travel writer and he's writing about our our stuff and then reluctantly I did pick it up and it's probably the best book on popular science that I've ever read Bill's always also edited the Royal Society's three hundred and fiftieth anniversary book seeing further the format of the ceilings that I want to be asking bill some questions about his life in his work not just about his passion for science so though I do want to obviously touch on that and then leave some time at the end to open it up for questions from from you from the audience long introduction bill but good evening the pay teachers pleasure to be here thank you very much now let me start by asking this you've called yourself a tourist who writes books you're referring to your hugely successful travel books when you took that huge leap into popular science writing what you still in that mindset you saw yourself as a tourist in the world of science well in a way because I mean all I've ever seen myself as really is just as a reporter I mean I grew up in the world of journalism I worked on newspapers for many years and you know and I did a lot of freelance assignments as some but one day I was working in newspapers but also afterwards when I was trying to make a living as a freelance writer and an essentially you know you what the journalist does is you are given an assignment you go in out to find information about that you don't know anything about that subject until you go out and talk to people and you gather information and then you convey in the written word as much as you've learned what you think is a is relevant and interesting about what you've learned in the course of doing the interviews and so on so it was just expanding that two different kinds of books I never I never set out to be a travel writer that was really quite accidental what happened was the first book I did was a book called the lost continent which was about going traveling around America I went by this point I had lived out of the country for about 15 years so the idea was that I would travel around America and I would see how it had changed and how I had changed in the 15 years since I had lived there mostly grown up there and that did really quite well I mean unexpectedly well and it got good reviews and so my publisher when I went back to him to talk about a second book he said you know it has to be a travel book that's what you do know you're a travel writer whether you want to or not that's right and for several books I was I was strongly encouraged to do more travel books but it wasn't and much as I enjoyed doing them it wasn't what I wanted to spend my life doing exclusively and so I always had it in mind that I'd like to do other kinds of books and eventually I reached a point of success where I was able to start you know bullying back my publishers when they wanted me to do a kind of book Indian saying that I wanted to do something else and I'd always wanted to do a book about science try to understand science and how it works and so they indulged me it allowed me to do it but because it did quite well that changed the whole dynamics of what kind of books I I was going to write after that you mentioned your first book Lost consonants getting into travel writing was did it have anything to do with your upbringing I know used to go on these long holidays with with you of your father with your family and the beaten-up Chevy and get lost what was there something about or was it just a wanting to get out of Des Moines it was growing up in Des Moines and I look back there I realized that Des Moines I was a very very nice place to grow up it was so you know it's a very it's a wholesome clean friendly place you won't find anyone nicer on the planet than Iowans so you really won't and and it was you know so in lots of ways when I reflect on it it was a fantastic place to have grown up and I was growing up there in the 1950s you know in the middle of the country in the middle of the 20th century in a nice middle-class household so it was a it was an idyllic time to be to be a child and an idyllic place so much to have a childhood but at the time I was living in it I just thought I felt I thought they disadvantaged I thought this is the middle of nowhere everywhere I you know every well seems to have brighter light some more excitement some more interesting things going on we seem to hope this backwater and I grew up really really wanting to see the rest of the world and the only glimpses are but I had in in my childhood years was that was that every summer my father was a fanatical summer vacation list and he would put us into a into a you know an estate car and take us off on these epic drives all around America mostly to go to to Civil War battlefields and Revolutionary War battlefields and things like that so they were actually pretty boring vacations but at the same time it was a chance to see some of the wider America and you must have looking back enjoyed your your childhood there I mean more recently you wrote the life in terms of the Thunderbolt Kidd which is basically your memoirs as a child growing up so fond memories of the place yeah well I'm I wrote whenever the last continent and all I was trying to do really was be funny I'd never written a book before I'd never written a narrative look before I had done a couple of dictionaries you know word usage books and things like that for some editors but I had never had written a book that had chapters in the home was telling the story and I was mostly trying to make jokes and it was expected to be supposed to be you know it was expected to write a funny comical book about about a trip around America and and I in retrospect looking back on it years later I realized that I had I had been I think much too hard on certain things and people in in Iowa people in the Middle West of America I had been too scornful of them whereas actually I you know had some real fond memories of it so as a corrective many years later I decided that I would write a memoir which in a sense I had revisited the same territory but looked at it you know in a considerably more magnanimous way and still making lots of jokes but also talking about I think more warmly about Iowans and the people that I grew up because there were really good people and and you know I am what I am entirely because of all these Indies fantastically heartwarming formative experiences I was privileged to have now you've been quoted as saying you you think you're the world's worst storyteller I mean in writing that's that's what's so endearing about your your your writing their these are great stories do you feel just uncomfortable telling I mean on an occasion like this you'd much rather write their stories down yeah absolutely I mean I would much rather this I mean this is this is a very agreeable experience for me because because it's really nice to meet people who have read your stuff and and unlike enough to turn out on the evening no so I don't I don't mean to you know be just disrespectful to this occasion at all because when you're a writer it is it is really extremely solitary you know agree I'm sure solitary experience that you write the book and you send it out the publisher publishes it and anything back you get is just you know very much second hand you don't you don't get to an audience response the way you would if you were a performer a stand-up comedian or something so you are really quite well in far removed and all you get a royalty statements and and you know book reviews so you know that you know I mean you know that if the book is doing well but you don't actually have any sense of it occupying individual minds anyway you don't because it's it's just it's this thing that is no longer yours has gone out into the wider world so this is this is terrific when you meet people and you get a chance to talk to them and have it and insted to see them in this you know in in a single room but having said all of that my instinct is is to write to be alone to be away from you know I'm really quite an introverted person and if I had wanted to be on a stage and be a performer I would have I would have made that my career but it almost you know inevitably follows that if you choose to be a writer it's because you are a fairly retiring sort of person now you came to Britain in the early 70s and and as a introduction you fell in love with the country you didn't fall in love with everything I think you've tried some like crickets and Marmite but I haven't quite managed there was no quite quick they never I've never tried to like mom okay the law school I have tried cricket I did I didn't actually realize when because they I came to betting today and then I also met quite soon after I came here I met a student nurse at the hospital I was working at so I was falling for her and falling for Britain pretty much simultaneously and I mean I'm happy to say I'm with both of them forty years later so that worked out very nicely for me but um when I when I knew the once we you know once people became engaged I knew that both she and Britain and her family and all of that we're gonna be permanent features my life her father was very very very very keen on cricket and he's used to spend a whole Saturday afternoons just just watching cricket often was such an intensity that he would seem to lose consciousness for an hour or so and and I and I saw I thought I have to I have to sit down with this man have him explain it to me so really quite so soon after my arrival here he I knew what all you know I knew what was going on he explained patient explained to me l VW's all of the you know all the Arcana of what was going on with cricket so I understood how operated what if never entirely successfully done as understood why anybody would devote five days of eternity well actually you and me both but you know you've been in this country for so long and I guess people can hear that your your Iowan accent is has been diluted somewhat every years you've never taken up British citizens you know but I'm just about to it opposed I I've just this week come from a meeting with a lawyer and you know discussing issues of inheritance and all of that and the rather tragic case is that if you're if you're in America in the amount of Britain the American Internal Revenue Service absolutely Cobbers your wife if you should predecessor which is the statistical probability so one of the ways of getting around that would be for me to British subject and I mean it doesn't entirely solve it because America's tax situation immensely complex but the first step would be for me to become a British subject and I also think that it you know it is a recognition of the fact that I have I really have been here for a very long time and I expected and spend the rest of my days here so I have to I have to sit the test now and I've been doing the mock exams and they're really tough the questions say that not all of them a lot of them are pretty simple but but you know there's a few in there that are tough and I'm not sure that I agree with the answers well one of them one of the questions is in the mock exam anyway was true or false pantomimes based on fairy tales fairy stories and I said false and they said no true because I I don't know I mean I've I was always based on I mean you know I'm a dick Turpin said oh it's not a fairy story it's not adequate Eton and we mostly they're based on all the Christmases I've got my kids dragged me to war well you know Jack and the Beanstalk and things like that so Beauty and the Beast yeah I would say yes but ok good I'd pass there's a lot of questions so I'm gonna have to I'm going to have to study hard for the exam but it's nice but you're you sort of want to sort of get British citizenship because you feel somehow it's better not because you're on I mean you're only in the early 60s you're not on your way out yet but you feel somehow you need to sort of tie up your final person if it's time to get serious about it and it's you know I mean it's it's a strange thing because I mean the only reason I've ever resisted what two reasons of resistors one is just you know just lethargy and indolence and and not getting around to it um but the other one is that it always seems to me that you know I am an American and I will never really properly be British I mean you can't you have to be born to that and I can I can have a you know a little book that says I am you know recognized and free to come and go as a British subject but I would never be British and I just thought that there was something slightly fraudulent about me a bit like just changing your hair colour or something it's just not you know and I just I always slightly resisted for that reason but you don't offend what if I do attain a British passport I'd be very proud to have it I can tell you now you you began your working life here in in Britain as a as a journalist so the the the Bournemouth echoed then that the times the independence and and you wrote about those times in your room notes from a small island you also were working through the the whopping crisis with Murdoch I mean that's is was that something that would not have happened in America did you find that quite a strange yeah it's a strange to look back at looking back on it now it's a very strange scene but it was I think it was the last kind of really big eruption of ugliness and people taken to the streets and in Britain in a big way and and you know and most of us as journalists were very sympathetic to you know people people are coming in from all over the country and people were being bused in from all over the country miners and so on to protest about what Murdoch was doing to all these unions he was absolutely dismantling all these unions it's we were caught in a really uncomfortable position which I you know I didn't like at all the fact of the matter was that the principle print Union the National graphical Association the NGA was really a very brutish outfit and and they had they had resisted progress for four years and they actually you know it it's hard looking at it realistically to say that they should have somehow been preserved really they'd wanted to be just swept away but Murdoch also the same and the same occasionally took the opportunity to sweep away a lot of other people all of the clerical people the librarians who were not only really nice people and themselves but also were from pretty mild and innocuous unions and and so it was it was a terrible time to be a journalist the nuj the national unity journalist was really quite spineless throughout this whole thing and we were we were sort of caught in the middle and it was so I was it was a very strange experience you know how people throwing bricks at your car when you were leaving work every night it's quite it was quite unnerving and but also a bit apart nervous a little bit tempered by the fact that you really felt one you kind of served it because we were exactly scabs but we weren't really where we had capitulated and and that's the reason that so many of us left is the first opportunity I mean I had a young family I simply economically couldn't afford to do the right thing and not go to walking so I went but it's the first opportunity I went and joined the independent along with at least two or three hundred other journalists from the times because they were so dismayed by the position they've been put in I'd like to be more than you wanted to no no no no that's good but we thought we can draw a line under that good we've covered that I'd like to get on to the science you might be well probably if that's what people have come to him true and and of course you are I guess among scientists best known for your short history of nearly everything yeah hugely popular a best-seller can I just ask you who chose the title llúria publishers because it it is a good sort of play on Stephen Hawking's brief his field but it wasn't intended I didn't I had I didn't have that in mind at all obviously didn't when I was um when it was doing what it was was my I told my publishers I wanted to do a book about science and particular about the universe and and and the way I explained to us um you know I wanted to do the whole history of universe I said you know there was a a Big Bang thirteen and a half billion years ago or so that began at all and then there's us here today how did we get from there to here so you know what is the whole story I want to understand as much of it as I possibly can and I want to cover as much of that ground as I possibly can so when they were and I've been working away and then when they said what is your book about I said was about nearly everything really and so that became that means so the working title became almost as a joke between me and my publishers was just a short history of nearly everything and and then I decided that actually I quite liked that as a title him and we kept it I mean it won the the Royal Society Aventis prize that no longer exists now but I remember listening to you talking about it here actually on lists on the stage and probably 10 years ago yeah it was I mean I was I was very honoured to win that um and and I have to say I missed I was treated extremely well by scientists in the scientific community any any scientist could quite easily pick them up to pieces I mean at least it leaves the area of their expertise because you could just say this is way too superficial this is you know you've made a lot of generalizations here this is you've not properly represented particle physics you know quest for human origins or as a front close then he'd writes about particle physics leave that job to you what I'd like to max it was that you know you you covered the physics you know quite we gave it not short shrift but you covered it quickly and then he got on to stuff that I didn't know anything about you know didn't geology and things like that it's pretty simple to do so but it's intended to be it couldn't be otherwise I mean because of this because of the scope of what I was taking on and because of the you know even though the book is 500 some pages that really leaves very little room for any particular field or discipline so it wasn't ever going to be anything other than quite superficial so it's not really a book about science it's more a book about what I learned in my you know for your visit to the world of science and which is really quite a different thing it was also the the thing that I grew fascinated with was how does science figure things out I mean I still find that the most amazing thing and it's the one thing that scientists almost universally take for granted but it is it is the most amazing how do they figure things out you know how do they know where the continents were 300 million years ago or how hard it is on the surface of the Sun or you know when people left Africa and how they got to Australia and just you know what goes on in the heart of a cell or a gene or any of that so how do people think of these things out there just finding that quite amazing I'm so really an awful lot of the book is looking at that how did people work these things out so it's not really explaining what goes on at the heart of a gene it's more explaining what you know what what little mysteries some dedicated soul worked out but you spent several years so you know researching on the book so it wasn't as though it was like in some hack who just goes along and interviews people who write stuff up you really got stuck into the subject matter and got to know the people but it was so interesting in it I mean for me it was so interesting and the experience I had again and again as I was doing the book was thinking this is this is amazing whatever you know I've just learned some amazing if I why didn't they teach me in school and have paid attention if they talk why didn't they give me all this human interest stuff I mean my experience for science in school and and I say this from the perspective of somebody who is not new has no aptitude to be a scientist but my whole experience of it was that you know first day of a science class that the teacher comes in turns his back on the class and starts writing that diagrams and formulas and equations and so on on the blackboard and as soon as they do that they've lost me completely they you know they'll captivate all the natural scientists in the room but then but then lose most most of the students and I just thought you know if you told a little bit of the human interest story alongside the equations and formulas and so on you you you might just capture some of those drifting people that you're not you know that don't automatically connect with mathematics or the you know the hard science side of it and I I think that's a mistake that we make universally in terms of how science is taught that there could be a little bit more of this is cool this is neat this is really interesting you should pay attention here because this is you know that there is a purpose to it all it's not just about numbers and formulas and you know sort of fevered things being written out on the blackboard in a hurry there's this actual this actually changes lives and makes the world a better place and I got the impression I'm even listening to you talking now that the discovering some of these scientific stories for yourself you're doing the research for the book was almost in some sense more exciting and fulfilling for you than the writing of the book well I took that you know I took the view I'm very soon after I started working the book I realized no not of you know just s I'm not really good popular science out there I mean clearly I I was already vaguely aware of it but the more I started doing research the more I realized to do it you know there's just a lot of extremely good popular books and science written by scientists you know you don't need an app complete outsider to start writing popular books on science because you've already got all these books by people like you know Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Dawkins and Matt Ridley and you know you name it and and and and and these are a really terrific books written from you know from the perspective of someone who is an experts in these fields who really really knows his business so I thought well what what can I bring to this and the only thing I could really bring to it was ignorance I mean I could actually I tried to make a virtue of that because the one thing I had the one advantage I felt I had was that I had this infinite capacity to be amazed by everything that was learning because it was all new to me and and that's really all if you look at the book that's a large part that's what it is it's just me being amazed over and over again and I guess unlike these so precision of you know the accuracy required to write a biography or historical account certainly you know drawing on your travel writing where you said it's a bit like writing a novel because you know you can talk about anything and you can exaggerate you know to make a particular point but when it comes to popular science writing did you then have to sort of pull back and think well I have got to be more rigid and more precise about how I say yeah it's really hard I mean it was really hard really hard right it was often hard because you have to simplify but without you know over simplifying and an essentially very often I was I had to get permission from I had various mentors who were helping me with various fields and I hadn't you know essentially get their permission to to write a generalization about I filled in almost always I found they didn't like it you know because because to them it's it's not as simple as that you know I mean I can't really think of a good example but but if I write it about your field and physics I might say something like you know there are three basic ways to split an atom or something you know and and you would say oh gosh no there's also you know and you start listing all the other ways and all the exceptions because because that's your field you would you would be thinking of all the exceptions to that and it would be very hard for me to satisfy you in with some simple simplified version so it was hard to do that and then it was also really hard to put these in ways that hadn't been expressed by before by others I mean often I would read somebody like you know Stephen Jay Gould who would explain this thing brilliantly but I couldn't just use his words because that would be dangerous I mean I have to think of some way that was original to me and then that became very very hard because I there was with me it was not only day not only the necessity of coming up with a new way of especially but then the danger especially they didn't correctly because of my imperfect understanding of all these things I'm a nice example that I used to think in us getting into science communication popular science writing that there's always a way of explaining some difficult concepts in science you just have to find the right language you just have to remove the jargon and you put yourself in them and then you realize and I I interviewed Peter Higgs on the radio a couple of months ago and there was this lovely moment where I said wow look you are Peter Higgs it's you know it's your job to explain what what is the Higgs mechanism and and and Peter just which this beautiful sort of eloquent two minutes explanation and I'm thinking right I understand that it's beautiful it's not gonna confuse this all just going to be edited out and at the end of it I said well thank you Peter for me as a physicist that that was beautiful he looked at me said but it's not going to be understood by anyone else and I didn't say anything I said well as a challenge can you explain what the Higgs mechanism is in 30 seconds can you explain in a minute no and and and actually that whole discussion the two minutes and they asked you if they made it into the program because actually it's a good point sometimes in science that what right do we have to think that you can explain something in a Bitesize when Peter Higgs has spent years and years and years trying that we've had half a century before we can prove his ideas right what right do we have to think we can sort of simplify it down to some very little nuggets or or sound bytes quite but but in a sense you have to do that I mean you know if you're writing if you're writing as you know a sweeping look at the whole of science you you were Ken and again you put in that position I mean I was acutely aware the whole time I was writing the book that this is you know I'm not doing justice to these things and I'm often it was really really hard you know the two hardest parts to the book for me were you know the subatomic world which didn't surprise me at all because that's very you know totally counterintuitive and it's very hard to understand what's going on in all of this stuff you start talking about quarks and leptons and you know it gets really confusing very fast to any any layperson at all and and then it because really hard to have when I can only barely grasp the rudeness of this how do I didn't explain it in a book that didn't surprise me that that was right but the other part the other one that was really really hard and nearly impossible to feel as I was writing about with any confidence was was human origins because there's just so much there's this so many divided opinions about it and there's so many you know bone fragments that one group of people said this is absolutely vital and this is you know just this you know this indicates that humans went off in this whole other line here and then there's some other bone fragments and that indicates that they did something else altogether and you realized it is you don't know who to trust you don't know I mean these were everybody you talked to everybody you read about they're all you know they're all operating in good faith and they're decent human beings but their opinions are so splintered and fractured that it's impossible to know really I don't think there is anybody who you know really has taken a kind of measured view of the whole thing and doesn't have some large measure of bias involved in it well I guess luckily these days DNA plays it okay I mean there's one thing they even changed since you wrote the book yet no I was gonna say there's lots and lots of things that have changed since I wrote the book and I think you know what they doing with DNA and just things like sorting out you know whether whether Homo sapiens and Neanderthals injured bread got together I mean that was a really huge issue in ten years ago and now you know DNA is it's resolving that very quickly well like it or not you've now become sort of a spokesperson a champion of of science in November 2006 I think it was you you you interviewed them Prime Minister Tony Blair on the state of science in education how did how did that come about well that was a it was a very strange experience but it was it was um that they're in they asked me to I mean they were they were setting up a some kind of blog so I I don't know what you call podcasts that they were having various journalists interviewed the prime minister he was on his way out in those days and and he really it was very polite and very genial and this was quite exciting for me to get to be able to demonstrate and sit with Prime Minister of the country but I also felt that he was you know his term of office was coming to an end and and it didn't seem as if he was particularly engaged with the questions I was asking him there wasn't any reason why he should be so it was slightly strange experience they're very very very interesting and I mean I just I can't I can't pretend that you know that I took advantage of in some way than help get greater funding for science or anything like that I mean I think these days it does seem that you're sort of ranked alongside a lot of people from outside of science and particularly thinking of comedians Robin in Starro breehn Tim Minchin Ben Miller who are you know and include you in that group of people who are championing science and and and rationality in a way that science scientists themselves maybe you haven't been able to do very very successfully do you feel a sense of responsibility now that you're part of this movement to somehow to do your bit to come along to events like this or promoting sai-san education no not really I mean I'm happy to do it it's because you gets me you know if there's me if I did in two places like this in this deal it's a great privilege and pleasure to to be there but I really I mean I do think that scientists by a large of a pretty good job of selling themselves and I do think the one thing that Britain can be very pleased with this that it it projects popular science extremely well I mean you know and a sterling example of that was the you know television programs like the chemistry program series and I'm just you know ongoing programs like The Horizon and so on you know there's there's a lot of good I mean really really good popular science out there probably more now than there's ever been I think it's written in a time and and and but but a lot of it is really good I mean and I think that's something that kind of gets taken for granted you know it's really moved on to another level of presentation where very often just you learn a lot you know it's a lay person you can learn a lot about various fields by watching a series of documentaries on on field and I think sorry you know I don't think you really need me and Tim Minchin and all the other people that you've mentioned you know science doing a very very excellent job of selling themselves already but at the same time I suppose there's no harm the more voices you have because it is so important in science does tend to get marginalized and certainly by politicians I think that they tended they take it for granted and or they've somehow feel that it's will look after itself and then you know and that's just really foolish because science needs a lot of fun and he's a very expensive undertaking but it but it also is some hugely important economically and here just important in terms of solving the world's problems I mean I think part of the problem is that because there are so many ways of getting the message out there is that you know people just have so you know opinions coming at them for more directions that they need to understand how science works you know this evidence base and so they know you know there's a hundred blogs and and you know and then which one is written by someone who knows what they're talking about and what sort of ideas are based on peer-reviewed research you know there are all sorts of topics we're out there that people need to be able to discriminate and and it is hard to it is often hard I mean there's you know chauzu conventional science gets challenged in a lot of ways I mean in America gets challenged by creationists and who actually challenged it very effectively and you know undermine a lot of you know genuine science so that so that more than half people the United States now believe that you know they believe in the evolution is you said more than half now I used to just think it's getting worse I think it is getting worse it certainly is you know critical point where we're you know belief in in evolutionary theory is becoming a minority view and I think that's really quite scary so far that it's been it's been resisted pretty effectively in schools and things but it's constantly being challenged there so I mean I think that's a dangerous precedent there I and I think here this is I don't see any real evidence of that happening here but I have to say what what seems to be happening here is there's an awful lot of print journalist and this got pretty bad when it comes to convey in science just a lot of mistakes or a lot of very basic environmental writing and things so just you end up very confused because you know you know it doesn't seem as if you're always getting very informed views about things like global warming and the I mean science writers science writing a newspaper seems to be all over the place in kind of fits around from in it just it doesn't seem anything like his competences sorry I was praising that you see on television maybe there'd be questions later on ask me more about that but just to give except there was a famous example of a year circa which the The Telegraph suggested it was something like one card left in the North Sea you know there was that the number of cod I think up completely got the facts wrong that the cod was essentially extinct in the North Sea and that's not true at all in cotton endangered but is that there are still millions of fish out there and but somebody who you know somebody who really should have been a trained scientist in handling that story was obviously dealing something that was way out of their tabs you seem to fit in very well with with scientists because you you are naturally curious I don't know how long you've had your passion for science but for many people you know the things that you're curious about only they only realize how fascinating they are once you've raised the question I read somewhere you'd like to know how many pigeons there are in Britain anything what an interesting question I wonder who can work that out of are these questions there I don't think there's anything unnatural about the my level of curiosity but I just think curiosity is a really good thing and I think it's something that that we tend to neglect as we get older I mean you know how did he point out to that all children are intensely curious about everything and they drive us crazy with you if daddy why is the sky blue and all those questions like that but just constantly asking so and as we get older we stop asking those questions and there's the and I think that's unfortunate because you know very often they're really interesting questions and and so all that I've ever done in my career professionally is just you know when I get a question like that or when I do a book on a subject and it throws up a series of questions I've nothing and try and answer those questions it's just it's it's an interesting opportunity to do so but it's also I think sheds light on things in a way the you know brings a certain measure of novelty to the exercise your most recent book and I think this would be the last question before I open absolute to the audience and you've since gone on to write other popular science books after you wrote short history of nearly everything but your latest book was that last year at one summer and it's about this particular summer in America in 1927 that seems to have been this remarkable year with so so much happens tell us a little bit about that yeah well the summer energy trail was extraordinary I mean it's really quite a magical summer period of five months from I took the book has made the first until September the 30th so kind of long summer but but really you know not stretching things too much at all and and what it was was I'd always been fascinated by the fact that these two very iconic events in America happened simultaneously that summer one of them was the Charles Lindbergh flew the Atlantic and that was huge in a way that we forgotten now that was a Lindbergh's flight across the Atlantic I'd always just assumed that he you know he just took it into his head to fly the Atlantic and he did it and that's why he became famous but actually there was a huge race going on at the time and there were lots and lots of other teams of pilots all better funded in much more magnificent planes than his who all set to go and then from out of nowhere this this kid from Minnesota a 25 year old kid flies in from the West and because he's got to actually got a much simpler plane he manages to get airborne first but he's flying with the plane as a single-engine which everyone thought was insane it doesn't have a radio he doesn't have a co-pilot and so everybody thought he was it was just suicidal and yet the world became transfixed with is this kid gonna make it and when he did the whole world erupted in you know probably the single most joyous outpouring of human emotion ever because you know the only thing you could you could ranked alongside it would be when Wars end but of course when a war ends there's you know half the people are losers so they're not quite as joyous as all that and and and in any case it's always tempered by the fact that you know everybody's lost loved ones and it's this was just pure joy there was nothing you know there were no negatives to it at all so the whole world just went crazy and I was I've always been fascinated by that because also because the Limbourg didn't handle that Fame very well at all and his whole trajectory was was downhill after his this glorious summer but the same time the thing the other thing that happened was the Babe Ruth my great baseball hero hit 60 home runs that summer which was just an incredible achievement and and and in an again again quite a magical way because he was it was well into his thirties by this point it was it was deemed to be over the hill nobody expected him to do anything great again you know he was it was finished he was fat and wheezy and overweight and and was just thought everybody thought he was finished and then from out of nowhere he perform this feat which was just incomparable nobody's ever done anything like it I have no idea what the equivalent in a British sporting context would be but it was just it was it was like Don Bradman you know having a triple century or something and he just it was just incredible so it was it was it was an amazing feat but then when I discovered him so I'm going on a little bit but what then what I discovered was that they were at Lindbergh available only a small part of this much more eventful magical summer because all these other things happen the same time and nobody'd ever quite noticed that they were all happening simultaneously I mean it was the summer in which they filmed the jazz singer the first real talking picture which completely transformed popular entertainment and and brought American voices to the world in a way that they hadn't ever been before it was the summer of the Great Mississippi Flood which is still the biggest natural disaster in American history it was the summer they started carving Mount Rushmore which was again it's just a wonderful story everyone Mount Rushmore was just a quite as crazy scheme to carve a mountain I mean who would ever think to do that and Mount Rushmore itself was in the middle of nowhere it was it was 150 miles from the nearest paved highway no you know even if there's this guy who Compton could get it off the gun nobody was ever gonna be able to go and see it so it's just a completely crazy Hebburn scam and yet you know it was one of the great success stories in American history and so just it was just one thing like that after another it was the summer of Al Capone's downfall it was the summer in which Sacco and Vanzetti these notorious anarchists were executed in America and the whole world erupted in rioting an anti-american sentiment almost almost and the heels of the joy that followed in Charleston burn then you know when one minute everybody's embracing you as an American in the streets of Paris or Rio or wherever because of Charles ember the next minute they're throwing bricks at you were punching you in the face because of sacramentally so it's just this kind of extraordinary summer and that's the whole book became much less about Babe Ruth you'll probably be pleased to hear and back then about all these other things but you're going to write sort of became the story of the summer and how all of these events influenced each other in ways that I don't think anybody's ever really particularly noticed before and and then just I mean I just thought it was in itself it was just fascinating that all of these things were happening simultaneously it sometimes happens that that a nation or a society will be suddenly very productive in some area or all at once just it's just random occurrences you know I mean why he was bitten so productive with pop music in the 1960s you know and it's just because you it just once I mean it just happened them and you know had suddenly had all of these people spawned you know when the merit was almost entirely to the popular culture and it was all focused on this one summer it was just you know kind of extraordinary coming together of lots and lots of disparate things that were mostly most part totally you know unconnected Babe Ruth didn't hit 60 home runs because Charles Lindbergh flew the Atlantic glamour and as I said I didn't the flood because of Charles Lindbergh you know anything like that these things were just happening randomly but it was just in intensely eventful I think you'll have a few more book sales after that wonderful colorful description below I've got more questions but I do want to earn whose times getting on someone to open this up to the audience so we we have roving mics there's there's I guess there somewhere where's the roving mics one one day and one there so if people have a question for they'll please raise your hand and okay so Frank first one there's the third row in the aisle and then yes and then gentleman there that's it yeah well I view you as a travel writer and I loved your short history I saw it as your journey to enlightenment but if I mix the metaphors if I compare you writing a book to a journey do you know the destination before you start and if not how do you know when you've arrived oh well it depends very much on on the book and where it takes you and and it does vary from book to book and it's a lot I mean a lot of it is to do with the with the book and if it's a travel book it's actually quite easy you do undertake a journey and you you know you choose arbitrarily choose the starting point and you know you're going to have a destination where you're going to where you're going to finish up at the end and that's really easy then for me as a writer it's very easy to put the book together because it's all dictated the structure of the book is dictated by the actual journey itself sometimes there's a little bit complicated how you how you plot erode because you know something like Britain is a really hard country to work your way around because it just did so there's stuff everywhere and and you know you there isn't a kind of coast to coast route or a sensible north to south route you'd have to wander all over the place but but allowing for that the the journey itself kind of dictates the shape of the book other books I mean I just mentioned with the 1927 book changed completely because of what you're learning as you go in the other book I had that was that ended up being quite different from the one I expected it to be was a walk in the woods where I tried and spectacularly failed to hike the Appalachian Trail from end to end well when I set off I was I was absolutely confident that I was going to walk the Appalachian Trail every foot of it and and it was really hard for me to come to terms with the fact that I wasn't and and I thought when you know when I realized quite early on and I don't know journey that I wasn't gonna ever manage to walk all 2,200 miles because he's just it's madness to trying to do that I mean it is just the people who do it I'm full of admiration for them but but for most of us the idea of actually successfully walking up a trail that long it's just it's just insane and you just can't do it it's just it's too taxing physically and mentally so when I realized I wasn't gonna do it but I still had the commitment to get a book out if that became then it became a completely different exercise all together so yes yeah thank you I was interested in your contrast between how print journalists and the television handle reporting and covering science do you think that print journalists are still afraid that people don't want to read about science that that they can't write too much because people will lose the plot and drift away the metro seem to do a little double page spread now occasionally on the science topic it's not my favorite paper but it at least it straight seems to go a little bit more in-depth and I wondered whether you thought they were afraid you know well it's I mean I did about if afraid is the right word but but certainly with with print journalists and I mean there's just a lot of uncertainty there and I mean there's not just a bitten but everywhere in the world because the circulations are falling so you know in such a worrying way and often they're just plunging you know and in newspapers not quite sure how to reverse that or how to arrest that and and and but the one thing they absolutely don't want to do is is be boring or you know to be very risk-taking in a way that I think television can get away with television can be a little bolder because you know you have a more or less captive audience to a much larger extent and with people who actually you know actually pay for each edition as a separate purchase but as they do within this paper people can walk away from a newspaper much easier than they can walk away from television as a form of entertainment and so I think that's a factor I mean I I know somebody who works on the national newspaper they told me that I won't say what's national newspaper was but it's quite shameful that it existed all but they they had introduced a policy that would be no health stories unless there was a celebrity angle to it and it's just that's the kind of world were operating in and I mean I know that there's still quite a lot of good science riding goes on in the newspapers but I think that it it doesn't fit in with the general trend of what's happening with newspapers now and I think also that a lot of newspapers are cutting corners and cutting budgets Summerset they're ending up with people who probably don't qualify to be writing you know about the environment or about certain areas of science and aren't given the time to investigate these things carefully enough or perhaps there just isn't you know the priority there that anybody cares what they should investigate it carefully enough in anything I think that's reflected quite often in the quality of stories that you see about science and papers front row there and then gentleman halfway along here and there's someone at the back then someone about next for you yeah you contrasted very briefly public understanding in the United States specifically about evolution for example and and and in Britain is that a general difference in levels of public understanding acceptance of science and if it is what are the factors that account for it well I mean I think I think that the issue of evolution in America has become you know much more politicized than it has elsewhere and I think evolution is less to do with I mean it's it's a city with belief and in the sense of knowledge belief more to do with faith and and a lot of people in America see evolutionist real challenge to their faith and and they see it as a kind of an affront and and that that perception has just not happened elsewhere they're certainly not to the same degree I know that there are people in Britain who have very conservative religious views that are not very sympathetic to evolution as a science but but I think on the whole it's it's kept you know below the radar it's not it's not a major issue was in America almost everywhere it's there's a real struggle to keep you know to get to allow evolution to be taught as some conventional science in schools it's constantly being challenged yeah hello Belen hello again Jim I was at a lecture by Jim only yesterday say you were nothing by what it was missing the other houses of parliament opened last week I seem to be coming out khalili groupie my my question is there you are we have heard that you are read all your books and we've heard that you are a very versatile writer you've written on science you've written on language mother tongue the best book ever written on the English language were thinking made in America which is supposed about the American English but but contains a very great deal of of social social history question your versatility was was shown when about the same time out came the life and times of the Thunderbolt Kidd a memoir of life in our I've done the interview so maybe we could've asked bill the question and the biography of Shakespeare so my question is do you ever resent being typecast a as a travel writer and B as a humorous writer when a you have written about much more than travel and be a great deal of your attic is very serious I've seen your non travel books under traveling in book shops it's you do get categorized and I mean I don't resent it at all you have to be you know they have to put your book somewhere and it's I'd if if they're all in the Travel section that doesn't that doesn't actually bother me at all and but it is strange because you know I I do like to do different kinds of writing and um for long time almost everything I wrote was was intended to be comical because I was just expected of me and I am and so that was the main driving force of everything around but the same time I was doing in those days I was to a lot of articles for quite serious publications I did a lot for the New York Times Magazine and I did a lot for National Geographic in in those days and it had a couple of cases people would come to me and say I saw your article in National Geographic that's what they assumed they'd better just cut all your jokes out I think it's if I had a kind of Tourette's syndrome I have to make these jokes all the time I actually was a relief not to have to make jokes sometimes I mean I do really like writing more seriously but in terms of how you're categorized is you know if people pay attention to you at all that's that's the victory so I don't you know I don't resent I mean I wouldn't know there isn't a particular place in the book shop like I ought to go so wherever they put me I'm grateful it's a two final questions from the back then so one there and then one from this side yes waving so right down at the back okay hi I am a middle school science teacher and if you can't tell by my accent I'm from America so hello the reason why I'm what I want to ask you with this I love science and I infect it in the classroom I love having my students smile and they enjoy science with me so when you tell me that you are uninterested because of your teachers it kind of hit home my issue that I see with my students is even though they love science and they get super excited it seems like their confidence has in top up with their excitement how can we not only me as a teacher but us as society increased their confidence level so they realize they are scientists regardless of what they want to do in life and also increase that curiosity was really good where you from by the way well I'm originally from New York but I'm teaching in North Carolina and Charlotte okay and how did you happen to be here tonight vacationing well spring break really yep well I'm so honored that you here there's a lot of other things you could be doing in London oh yeah I hope you have a great time here I in terms of teaching and and how you engage in excite children I don't know I get asked this question from time to time and I've never really come up with a satisfactory answer because in the one hand you know science teaching has a duty to produce new generations of chemists and physicists and biologists and so on so you have to teach it at a fairly serious level I mean you can't be too flippant about it and and I think you know and there are lots of people I mean there's a proportion of people in any classroom who are have a natural aptitude for that and will respond to serious teaching of obviously you know there's some time in your career somebody taught you physics in a way that made you think this is what I want to spend the rest of my life doing well I can honestly tell you that that would never have happened to me and and it would never happen to a lot of people but so what do you do about those people that is never going to happen - I I think the one thing that's that schools do quite well is teachers capture the Jim al-khalili so the world didn't you know can get them I think Britain does that particularly well of turning that new generations of really good physicists and chemists and so on but there is this other large group of people like me who are never been ever going to become scientists but at the same time ought not to go through life blind to what science does for us and how it does things for us so somehow there's got to be space made in the curriculum - to capture these people and you talk about something interesting in there - one of the things you you mentioned which was that you know when you read my book you'll knew all about the physics and everything but you didn't know much about the geology and some of the other things so somehow and perhaps you know more general science teaching that they I don't think there's any harm in telling conveying to people quite often the science is amazing it's wonderful it's in and not only is it you know absolutely innately fascinating but it also answers questions and solves problems and you know if we're gonna live in a world a hundred years from now that's worth living and it'll be science that gets us there and I think that's something that schools are not very good it in America and Britain and probably everywhere else not very good at doing they get so focused on just creating new generations of scientists that they forget that there's also a sort of public relations exercise they ought to be engaged in as well so how do you do that I don't know but I'm not a teacher I just know that it needs to be done we are running out of time so I'm afraid there was a Wow hand waving wildly at the back and I'm afraid we're going to have to make that the last one I just wanted to say that I recently read your book life and times of the Thunderbolt kid and I just want to ask you're saying in in that book about how amazing the 1950s were and I should ask are you happy in how the world has changed over time how it is nowadays in science and in other subjects and aspects of the world yeah that's a really good question and they're really quite complicated questions as you can as you can imagine and one of the things I talked about in my conclusion too short history nearly everything was that we you know that we are as human beings we're in this completely insane position that we are at the same time we were the best hope for life on this planet and its worst nightmare and that just seems to me crazy um an example I gave in them in the book was that it debate at the very moment then Newton was prepared in the laws of gravitation and coming in arriving at this incredibly insightful conclusions about the universe and how its put together you know in a way that no you know it was just head and shoulders above anything that had preceded him the very same moment so you know somewhere in Mauritius somebody was beating to death the last dodo on earth and it just seems like crazy that the you know human beings can be at this on the one hand so in a creative and imaginative and productive and do all these wonderful things at the same time to all of these really felonious terrible nightmarish things you know the one species can be constantly doing these two things so when you asked me to am I happy with the way the things have turned out the answer is you know absolutely and not at all and and and I think that's the always going to be the story with humanity and I just hope that the parts that the positive parts ultimately somehow outweigh the negative ones because we aren't incredibly capable of doing the most wonderful things I mean human system as an entity do the most fabulous things and we just look around London and some of the buildings you see it or listen to music or or all kinds of things like that but at the same time I'm aware just so foolish and I just can't believe that we're still making some of the mistakes we're making it but we have to hope that would persuade others to start making those mistakes thank you Bill well that's been insightful charming entertaining I don't know about you guys but I've had a lovely hour blaze and gentlemen please join me in thanking bill greatly for a wonderful

Channel: The Royal Society

Views: 19,707

Rating: 4.768786 out of 5

Keywords: royal society, Jim Al-Khalili, FRS, Royal Society Fellow, Bill Bryson, A short history of nearly everything, science, science history, theoretical physics, university of surrey, Michael Faraday prize, institute of physics, awareness of physics award, chemistry: a volatile history, non-fiction author, science communicator, Iowa, Notes from a small island, Britain, Britain's identity, University of Durham, popular science, seeing further

Id: u7alw1BXWfU

Length: 62min 35sec (3755 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 16 2014