Date published: 2008/09/08
The BBC says:
The most brilliant minds should be directed to solving Earth's greatest challenges, such as climate change, says Sir David King.
The former UK chief scientist will use his presidential address at the BA Science Festival to call for a gear-change among innovative thinkers.
He will suggest that less time and money is spent on endeavours such as space exploration and particle physics.
He says population growth and poverty in Africa also demand attention.
"The challenges of the 21st Century are qualitatively different from anything that we've had to face up to before," he told reporters before the opening of the festival, which is being held this year in Liverpool.
"This requires a re-think of priorities in science and technology and a redrawing of our society's inner attitudes towards science and technology."
Sir David's remarks will be controversial because they are being made just as the UK is about to celebrate its participation in the Large Hadron Collider, the world's biggest physics experiment.
The Collider, built at the Cern laboratory under the Swiss-French border, is starting full operations this Wednesday.
It will seek to understand the building blocks of matter, and, in particular, try to find a mechanism that can explain why matter has mass.
This international venture is extremely expensive, however. The UK alone has contributed more than £500m to the LHC - the largest sum of money to date invested by a UK government in a single scientific project.
Physicists had a huge amount of credibility, and hence power, after the second world war because of nuclear bombs. This has resulted in them being able to get hold of astounding amounts of money for these large toys. And somehow the astronomers have successfully attached themselves to the physicists' coat tails, and together these two subjects are given a vast amount of research money. But you could view these two areas as "old science", and it will be interesting to see what future generations make of throwing so much money at a machine whose main purpose in life is to find the Higgs boson, and where the most interesting outcome would be if it is not found. King is correct that more attention should be paid to newer problems, in particular carbon emissions. As well as research money, though, these newer subjects also have to be able to attract good students by making the work look "sexy". The high energy physicists somehow manage to make their work sound "sexy" even though they are just repeating the same old nostrums to the public that they were making over 20 years ago. It is not clear if chemistry and engineering will ever be made to sound "sexy".
_________________________________________________________
All material not included from other sources is copyright cambridge2000.com.
For further information or questions email: info [at] cambridge2000 [dot] com
(replace "[at]" with "@" and "[dot]" with ".").