Christopher Riley, a known (he has a Wikipedia entry!) British science journalist and author of a number of BBC documentaries on space exploration, was brought in to instruct Lithuanian science buffs on how to share their passion with others. Science, Riley says, needs role models to encourage young people to choose it as a career path – otherwise, who will carry on with this centuries-old quest of the humanity to know what's beyond the known?
- You've spent a weekend talking to young Lithuanian scientists. What do you make of them?
- There's a lot of talent here. I've trained young scientists all over the world and it's very easy to see those who are real champions and are naturally communicating their science with flair and imagination and passion. And then there are those who are a little less gifted, but still when you point out the way they can improve, they are all very receptive.
- The general stereotype of scientific geniuses is that they are somewhat challenged when it comes to communicating their ideas.
- Well, you right about this sort of perspective on scientists, because I think true genius often comes at the expense of other social skills. I think that's common throughout history, across nations. And so, I suppose, maybe there were no geniuses in this group [laughs] because none of them were really super geeky and impossible to coach. There were many very clever people.
Can science save us? Science is part of what we do, so it has to be us that saves us.
What's often impressive about this meeting with young Fame Lab people is that they're all super talented professionally as well as interested in just sharing their passion with the large audience. That's definitely the same here. There were some brilliant people working in some brilliant science, world class.
- Besides the need to pitch their scientific projects, what are other challenges to aspiring scientists?
- The thing – and this is the case across all of Europe, not just in Lithuania – is that if you all think back about to when you were children, thinking what I will do with my life, what I should want to be, how do we answer that question? We mostly look around us for other people whom we admire. And then you think, I want to be like that. So it's often a person that connects to you.
I was a scientist before I went into journalism and there were two or three scientists that impressed and inspired me to do science. One of them was Carl Sagan, American astronomer. He had a TV series called Cosmos, one of the most-watched documentary series of all times, exploring some of this extraordinary human endeavour that was about going beyond the planet. That was something that stayed with me, it is still a subject I celebrate myself in the documentaries and the books I write.
So Carl Sagan was a big influence for me, a role model, and I think Fame Lab is about building role models, about taking young people who are quite charismatic and pretty successful in their field and putting them out there, in the public arena, and saying to everybody: Look, this is a possible career path for you. It might be one that you have not thought about before, because you've just been watching “Lithuania's Got Talent” or “The X Factor” or whatever your equivalent song contest is. We also have an epidemic of these talent shows. And Fame Lab is about saying: Well, this is not just about singing and music and dance and tricks and things, you could also have a successful respected career doing science.
It's about encouraging the next generation to go into science because it's the heart of all of our national futures. Lithuania will die if there are no scientists in the new generation, the same way that America will and Britain will, and Germany and France.
- What about funding? It seems that truly ground-breaking discoveries are not any more possible while studying falling objects in your room. They need much investment that only a few countries can afford.
- Well, these days, some of the biggest challenges in terms of science involve interdisciplinary collaboration. Traditional structures of the universities often have compartmental departments – chemistry, medicine, biology, mathematics. They never talk to each other, but to solve some of these problems you need to bring all of these talents together. That doesn't cost money, that just involves cleverer ways of thinking with the pool of talent that you already have.
So, for example, creating an interdisciplinary institute here in Vilnius doesn't take much money, it takes bringing together the very best talent from all of those faculties and saying: Let's form a closer institution that allows dialogue, conversation between subjects. So if you do something smart, then you can take on the world's problems without having a CERN, particle accelerator, or collaborating necessarily on a world-wide scale by injecting millions of euros into things.
- That points to another problem of modern science – humanity as a whole knows so much and in great detail, but this knowledge remains in a closed circle of specialists. Are there any implications for the scientific endeavour itself that its results are not as popularly known as it used to be?
- I think the public perception of science is something that we always struggle with. But whenever you do surveys on this among the general population – about whether they are interested in science or if they think science contributes to the society – the vast majority, 8 out of 10, will always agree. In some respect it's a myth to say that there's no interest in science or respect for it – it's definitely still respected as an important part of our human culture.
But the counter to that is when you ask them if they feel informed about this subject, most of them say no. Science is quite complex, certain disciplines are quite challenging and seem inaccessible, requiring a certain amount of thought and time. Neither of which we can be bothered with.
- Expertise as well?
- No, not necessarily expertise on an unreachable intellectual level, but just enough reasons to be interested in it, because I think we can find a way of expressing most things in simple terms. There is a good test for any scientist, actually, which is that if they can't explain their research in two or three sentence, then why are they doing the research? That's quite important.
It doesn't mean they shouldn't be doing this, it means they haven't thought enough about why they are doing it. Or perhaps how they can explain it, because all practising scientists have a duty to explain science to those who are paying for it, through taxes.
- In Europe and North America, fewer and fewer people are choosing science as a profession, while in Asia, it's very popular. Is this one of the reasons effecting the current shift in the balance of power in the world?
- Undoubtedly, it is already shifting east. Certainly all the cash is shifting east. The brainpower is rising there and, if anything, over the last 40 or 50 years it's fallen here, because of perhaps a lack of investment or interest in science or attention that's turned to other things that are more popular – like service industries and so on.
So it's going to be an interesting century ahead in that respect. Certainly, power will move over there. Can we change that? Of course we can, we need to re-energize young people with the value of careers in these fields. Part of that – and it's already happening, I sense, in Lithuania – is to do with new opportunities through entrepreneurial businesses using the internet to create a great talent pool here for both originating ideas and also engineering other people's ideas.
- Which scientific fields do you see as most promising?
- The future seems to be in coding, manipulating huge data sets. And this sort of stuff requires inherent capabilities, very high levels in mathematics. So we all, as a population, need to become better at this powerful maths. And let's face it, mathematics is a difficult subject. It's not the language I speak particularly fluently – I'm a relatively soft scientist, even though I started in geology and planetary science. Still it's not heavy maths.
- What about space travel? Isn't it a thing of the 1960s, or is there going to be a rekindling of interest?
- Is it a thing of the 60s? It's popular to say that was the space age. Was it over once we first set our foot on the Moon? In some part yes, but actually the space age still carries on and and we're still in it. We didn't stop exploring space when the last human being left the Moon. Exactly forty years ago this year, in fact, December 1972.
So we carry on landing robots on the other planets and flying into deeper into space, or mapping the moons of Saturn and Jupiter. Our voyager probes are now beyond the solar system. So all this carried on. What we steered away from doing is sending humans – and instead we send robots. But we've vicariously lived out in the realm of the other planets for the last fifty years and we continue to do so.
In fact, in August, the largest and most sophisticated robotic rover will land on the surface of Mars. It's called Curiosity, it cost about a billion dollars and it's the size of a family car. And it's going to land in the most audacious way, using a skycrane that will hover and lower it to the surface on ropes and then cut them and fly off. If it is successful, it will be roving on Mars for the next decade, searching for traces of past lives, perhaps for potential of a present life just below the surface. So these are still exciting times and we continue to explore. And that's partly what defines us as human beings.
- Do you see any areas of science that we shouldn't pursue?
- Where we shouldn't pursue? There's a lot of science that can be abused. All breakthroughs have a positive side if we choose it and a negative side if we choose it as well. From the atom bomb to genetic engineering.
It's not a question of us stumbling across some science that we should stop doing. Once you discover how to do something, you simply can't stop it, you can try and regulate it in some way. That's what government attempts to do, quite effectively I think. But the genie is out of the bottle, as they say, once you've discovered something. So I don't think I can say: Look, here's an area we should put the genie back in the bottle and stop doing it. That's what politics is for, to protect society against misuse of things – we have to do that effectively as well.
- Can science save the planet from ecological catastrophe?
- To phrase it that way is to kind of misunderstand what science is. Can science save us? Science is part of what we do, so it has to be us that saves us. And that is a conscious choice that we have right now, it's a dilemma that all societies are facing. Whether or not we change our behaviour dramatically, certainly in the West, into something more sustainable, something that doesn't involve digging all the past carbon form underground and pumping it into the atmosphere as if there are no consequences. We do need to do that.
Now can science provide an alternative? Of course it can, with the right channelling of talent and investment in science to turn to technology – and there's a difference there – that we can then apply for a greater good, for a different world. Absolutely. We're not going to change global warming through the arts.
- An accusation levied against science very often is that we pursue it at the expense of other things, like spirituality. Do you think that's fair?
- Well, if you pitch science against the church, for example, then are they mutually exclusive? The thing about most faith is that you know your facts, your truths by revelation. So these are unquestionable truths that have been revealed to us magically somehow, from above. The danger of the belief system which is based on revelation is that it is unquestionable and therefore it cannot progress. It cannot make any progress if you believe dogmatically, because change is against your faith.
The scientific perspective, in contrast, seeks to find truths by assuming that nothing is true, it's just not yet proved wrong. So there are no truths in science, they're just theories that have not yet been proved wrong. And if you can't prove a theory wrong, it becomes as close as can get to a truth.
But maybe, centuries later, you find a way of disproving it by some new technology, new scientific data. And then, if science is done properly in this society, you should have a paradigm shift in the way you understand and believe in something and move on to a new model to explain things. And that's the fundamental difference which, in my opinion, makes science and scientific process a far more beneficial method for understanding the world than true faith. Now whether they're mutually exclusive or not, I don't know. There are plenty of scientists who have a faith. As long as you are not dogmatic about it, you can accept both.
