Like many others, I marched for science on Saturday 22nd April. I also spoke at the rally in Parliament Square, London, along with several excellent and varied speakers. We all had our own take on what we were there for, and why it was important, as did our fellow marchers and speakers around the world. This is the gist of what I said.
I am a particle physicist, so I think it is ok to start by paraphrasing one of our heroes, Richard Feynman. Science is a way of trying not to fool ourselves.
And we can’t afford to be fools anymore, if we ever could.
Science lies behind our technology, and the amazingly complex and flawed-but-successful society we have built. It helps us to understand, and to predict the consequences of our actions. It has brought great benefits – increased life-span, better health, better quality of life for more people than ever before – but also great responsibilities – we can mess things up globally now, not just in our own village or country.
I’ve worked in international science all my career so far – at CERN in Geneva, but also in Hamburg, and the US, and at Oxford and UCL – always in highly international institutions. I was one of the 6000+ people from all over the world who discovered the Higgs boson. That is one example of the fact that when there is a common objective, and people contribute, compete and collaborate according to their abilities, the whole is much greater than the sum of the parts.
One reason I think this march is needed is because there is a worrying trend at the moment toward isolationism and nationalism. Amongst other things, this damages science, and thus damages the ability of the human race to thrive and survive.
Science and international collaboration are what we need to survive; to avoid killing ourselves, or each other, by accident or on purpose.
In the UK, support for Science is mostly perceived as non-partisan and non-controversial. This is good. But there is a danger than it leads to science being ignored, or taken for granted. That’s another reason today’s march is a good thing.
Science will not make moral and political choices for us, or tell us what our goals should be. But it will help delineate the possibilities for achieving them in the real world. In that sense, and others, science is indeed political. And vital.
Speakers on stage at #ScienceMarchLdn , with the amazing crowd in the background pic.twitter.com/QiSmmLOtBp
— Karl Byrne (@KJCByrne) April 22, 2017
There’s a lot more could be said, and the other speakers made some different and equally important points. There is a recording of the whole London event somewhere apparently, so at some point you might get the chance to hear them – and also to compare the above, which is cobbled together from my pre-speech notes and post-speech memory, with what actually came out of my mouth.
The other speakers in London were; Pete Etchells, Andrew Steele, Suze Kundu, Karl Byrne, Angela Saini, Francisco Diego, Brenna Hassett, Helen Czerski, Robin Ince
Jon Butterworth’s memoir of the Higgs discovery is published as Smashing Physics, available as “Most Wanted Particle” in Canada & the US.
