Scientists in da house

The internet is awash with commentary on the car crash that is American politics right now, thanks to its embarrassing and dangerous clown-president.  There have just been mid-term elections there, and I saw some election news at least relevant to this blog;  that there are eight new scientists elected to the US Congress.  One, Elaine Luria, is a nuclear engineer, having majored in Physics and History at the US Naval Academy.  That's her picture, taken from her official campaign website, at the top of the post.

The US congressman–scientist closest, though, to nuclear physics (as opposed to nuclear engineering) is probably Bill Foster, whose 1983 PhD from Harvard was on the experimental limit of proton decay via the reaction p →e⁺+π⁰.  He then went on to a career at Fermilab where, among other things, he was a member of one of the experimental collaborations which observed the top quark and is a coauthor of the discovery paper.

I don't think scientists necessarily make better politicians than those of any other particular background, but having a good range of different sensible backgrounds in any parliament seems like a good idea to me.  I don't know if there's an up-to-date list of scientists in the UK House of Commons, but I do recall a few years ago some clamour at the lack of those with science backgrounds in parliament compared with those with a background in other fields.  Here is one commentary by Mark Henderson suggesting that there was only really one scientist (who had worked in science as opposed to having a degree in science and going into some other career) in parliament in 2012.  This may be an extreme way of measuring, but even counting those with science degrees puts them at a much smaller proportion in parliament than in the graduate population at large.

People's Vote March

Today I was one of the c.650,000 people who marched in central London, hoping to push for a vote on any final deal on Brexit.  Hopefully a "Leave with the presented deal, or Remain" kind of vote.  Not only were there a lot of people there, but what seemed to me a very wide cross section of people.  Clearly in terms of age there were, but also in terms of, say, proxies on social indicators and lifestyles such as dress.  In other words, it wasn't a group of semi-professional protestors, but a lot of people frustrated at the omnishambolic brexit route we are currently heading down.  Guess we'll see if it has any effect.

Piers review

Since my last post about my contribution to Piers Morgan's #papoosegate, I have found myself appearing in various places in the media.  

Here I am in Huffington Post; here in BuzzFeed; here MSN; here bento.de.

Fortunately, though media attention can be unwelcome, it is not the dads with children in slings who are being mauled here.  The whole thing is somewhat silly, prompted by a ridiculous statement from Piers Morgan that couldn't be left unchallenged.  The men who are walking round carrying their children in slings are not heroes.  We are just doing what we are supposed to -- parenting.  Too bad that some prominent men try to put us off doing it.

Carrying the baby

My good deed for this morning was to respond to a tweet by Piers Morgan, in which he bemoans that James Bond actor Daniel Craig should be so emasculated as to carry his child in a sling:

Oh 007.. not you as well?!!! #papoose #emasculatedBond pic.twitter.com/cqWiCRCFt3

— Piers Morgan (@piersmorgan) October 15, 2018

Already, there are a lot of great responses to the tweet.  A lot of pictures of men happily carrying their children.  I couldn't resist posting the same:

I love carrying my kids. If @piersmorgan is the arbiter of being a man, then I'll gladly not be one. pic.twitter.com/nEBgiXcX2S

— Paul Stevenson (@gleet_tweet) October 16, 2018

The picture is actually a little over a year old.  I carried the same child, now bigger, in the same sling, as I dropped one of his sisters off at school this morning, but I seem not to have taken a sling-selfie with him for quite a while!

We don't need no (nuclear physics) education

Way back in January 2010, the big political topic in the UK nuclear physics community was the cuts being forced on STFC from above, and how they would distribute them amongst the various areas it funds.  That was assuming that they didn't have the stomach for a fight with BIS for more money, based on the apparently correct argument that there was a kind of accounting error when PPARC and CCLRC merged, along with nuclear physics from EPSRC, to form STFC.  If they did have the stomach, then they didn't win the fight.

Lo and behold, Nuclear Physics was disproportionately cut.  We had lots of arguments at the time as to why it should not suffer in this way, not least because a joint EPSRC/STFC-commisioned report highlighted how we were already disproportionately small - not just compared to other fields, but also to other countries - yet provided important training: e.g. "In all application areas, the panel felt that a vibrant, healthy research base is a key component in providing a high quality training programme and skills base."  The then science programme director of STFC, John Womersley publicly defended the apportioning of the cuts as "fair and balanced" (I'm not sure that I hope he used this phrase because Fox News have changed its meaning to be quite the opposite, or whether that would be more depressing).  He also denied the link between academic nuclear physics and the nuclear industry, in defiance of the commissioned report. He has since been promoted to CEO of STFC.

A little before the funding announcements were made, I speculated that no-one really cared about academic nuclear physics, irrespective of a link between the existence of the field in the UK and our ability to build nuclear reactors, understand the safety issues, the radiation issues, to innovate in new technologies, to understand the nature of nuclear waste, to train a body of potential nuclear industry workers with a knowledge of the basic science and so on, because we could buy everything, including expertise from France.  They have a large nuclear power industry, and a commensurate investment in basic nuclear science to drive developments and deliver innovation (as the commissioned report notes).

I was hardly surprised to read today that we have signed a nuclear energy agreement with France. Good.  We can carry on having a thriving City of London, the workhorse of the economy, based on solid financial transactions, and use the proceeds to buy in technological solutions to problems that we can forget, through underinvestment, how to solve.  Allez les Bleus!

Science and Politics

So: the Home Secretary dismissed a scientific advisor for being a scientist and complaining that the Government deliberately ignored the advice of his panel. There's been a huge amount of rather interesting commentary about the link between science and government during the fall-out of the sacking of Prof David Nutt (which has the glorious Twitter hashtag of #NuttSack). It sort of surprises me and sort of doesn't that one arm of the people who run the country (the government) think that basing decisions on scientific evidence is a bad thing to do, and that another (the Daily Mail and its constituency) rants that it would be hell on earth to be governed by those that weigh up the balance of evidence and come to conclusions based on that evidence.

It's a real shame - and part and parcel of the two cultures that are as alive today as they were 50 years ago. It's a bit tiresome when the presenters of the Today program fail to challenge scientists like they do politicians because they don't have the ability or confidence to do so. It's a little annoying when Jeremy Paxman is impressed and surprised when contestants in University Challenge answer a basic science question but is scathing when a poor guess is made to a question in the arts. It's really annoying, though, when things that really matter - things like government policy - deliberately ignore the evidence.

Still, in other news, universities aren't going to be "ivory towers" anymore, with the intellectual and research freedom that goes with it. Instead they must concentrate on being drivers of the economy and respond to social need (which they already do alongside the "ivory tower" aspect). Research grants will be rated according to their financial payoff (as if it could be measured), not the science. Soon Universities can be a fully paid-up part of the service economy too, and we will no longer have to worry about troublesome disinterested scientists and their crazy evidence-based reasoning.