I can honestly say that my first day at The Amazing Meeting, London comprised the most memorable set of talks I’ve ever seen. And I’ve been to SciFoo.
The programme for Saturday was kept simple. Five of the world’s most interesting people were each given a generous hour to entertain and inspire. Between speakers, Richard Wiseman cracked jokes, pratfalled his way through stage tricks and endeared himself to the most skeptical audience on the planet.
Yes, the audience. Around 600 folk packed into the Mermaid Conference Centre on Queen Victoria Street – overly represented by white, balding males, it has to be said – for a weekend of rational thinking, skepticism and scientific insights. If you’re not familiar with the skeptical movement, let me give you a quick précis. It’s all about countering woolly thinking and dodgy claims that aren’t backed up by evidence. That could include the seemingly trivial, such as debunking supernatural explanations, or countering misleading advertising on health products, but also encompasses very serious issues such as state-supported AIDS denialism. One of the best places to get a feel for the range of issues that skeptics campaign against can be found on the What’s The Harm? website, which keeps an estimated tally of deaths and injuries caused by widely reported misconceptions.
But back to the event. The first person to take to the stage was Prof. Brian Cox of the University of Manchester. Readers in the UK will know him from the telebox, where he’s regularly recruited as a talking head or main presenter for any show with a physics element. And with good reason. Brian is a sparkling science communicator. One of his proudest moments was getting the Radio Times to print “Anyone who thinks the LHC will destroy the Earth is a twat”.
His days as a pop star (keyboard player for ‘Things Can Only Get Better’ band D:REAM) make him a natural on stage. He spoke for over an hour on developments at the Large Hadron Collider, where he works. And here he did something I’ve never seen done before: he explained the Standard Model of Elementary Particles – leptons, quarks, bosons, Higgs – to a largely lay-audience in an intelligible and engaging way. Of course I’ve forgotten it all now, but it made sense at the time.
The real flying kick in his hour-long presentation was aimed at the perceived diminishing support (from a UK perspective) in ‘big science’ – the sort of projects that give us the LHC, great astronomical observatories, or deep space probes. Brian offered a cris de coeur in favour of pursuing ‘wow’ science. He first tilted his lance at a slide from the Science and Technology Facilities Council, which puts ‘contributing to the economic competitiveness of the United Kingdom’ ahead of promoting curiosity-driven science. To illustrate, he showed the famous image of Earthrise from Apollo 8, and opined that the value of that one image to the richness of our culture was alone worth the cost of Apollo. Similarly, the ‘pale blue dot’ shot of a distant Earth from Voyager 1, requested (with much opposition) by the ‘incomparable’ Carl Sagan, has a value beyond any monetary worth. All very romantic stuff, which I happen to agree with. This being a conference about skepticism, though, it might have been good to see some evidence that spending money on such projects really does improve and enrich people’s lives more than spending funds on, say, health or environmental science.
Brian went on to describe the current situation at the LHC. We’re just weeks away from the big re-switch-on, with the first collisions expected in December. Certain sections, such as the feeder lines, have already been successfully tested. As for the accident which closed the LHC for over a year, Brian reckons ‘We know why that error occurred; it won’t happen again.’
More from TAM London tomorrow, when I’ll give an update on Simon Singh’s tangle with the chiropractors, and the fight to change the UK libel laws.