Easy fixes: simple corrections of some popular scientific misconceptions

A few months' ago I finally saw the film 'Gravity', courtesy of a friend with a home theatre system. Amongst the numerous technical errors - many pointed out on Twitter by Neil deGrasse Tyson - was one that I hadn't seen mentioned. This was how rapidly Sandra Bullock's character acclimatised to the several space stations and spacecraft immediately after removing her EVA suit helmet. As far as I am aware, the former have nitrogen-oxygen atmospheres whilst the suits are oxygen-only, necessitating several hours of acclimatisation.

I may of course be wrong on this, and of course dramatic tension would be pretty much destroyed if such delays had to be woven into the plot, but it got me thinking that there are some huge fundamental errors propagated in non-scientific circles. Therefore my Christmas/Hanukkah/holiday season present is a very brief, easy -on-the-brain round-up of a few of the more obvious examples.

1. The Earth is perfect sphere.
   Nope, technically I think the term is 'oblate spheroid'. Basically, a planet's spin squashes the mass so that the polar diameter is less than the equatorial diameter. Earth is only about 0.3% flatter in polar axis but if you look at a photograph of Saturn you can see a very obvious squashing.
   
   
2. Continental drift is the same thing as plate-tectonics.
   As a child I often read that these two were interchangeable, but this is not so. The former is the hypothesis that landmasses have moved over time whilst the latter is the mechanism now accepted to account for this, with the Earth's crust floating over the liquid mantle in large segments or plates.
   
   Geologist Alfred Wegener suggested the former in 1912 but is was largely pooh-poohed until the latter was discovered by ocean floor spreading half a century later. As Carl Sagan often said, "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence".
   
   
3. A local increase in cold, wet weather proves that global warming is a fallacy.
   Unfortunately, chaose theory shows that even the minutest of initial changes can cause major differences of outcome, hence weather forecasting being far from an exact science.
   
   However, there is another evidence for the validity of this theory, fossil fuel lobbyists and religious fundamentalists aside. I haven't read anything to verify this, but off the top of my head I would suggest that if the warm water that currently travels north-east across the Atlantic from the Gulf of Mexico (and prevents north-western Europe from having cold Canadian eastern seaboard winters), then glacial meltwater may divert this warm, denser seawater. And then the Isles of Scilly off the Cornish coast may face as frosty a winter as the UK mainland!
   
   
4. Evolution and natural selection are the same thing.
   Despite Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species having been published in 1859, this mistake is as popular as ever. Evolution is simply the notion that a population within a parent species can slowly differentiate to become a daughter species, but until Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace independently arrived at natural selection, there really wasn't a hypothesis for the mechanism.
   
   This isn't to say that there weren't attempts to provide one, it's just that none of them fit the facts quite as well as the elegant simplicity of natural selection. Of course today's technology, from DNA analysis to CAT scans of fossils, provides a lot more evidence than was available in the mid-Nineteenth Century. Gregor Mendel's breeding programmes were the start of genetics research that led to the modern evolutionary synthesis that has natural selection at its core.
   
   
5. And finally…freefall vs zero gravity.
   Even orbiting astronauts have been known to say that they are in zero gravity when they are most definitely not. The issue is due to the equivalence of gravity and acceleration, an idea which was worked on by luminaries such as Galileo, Newton and Einstein. If you find yourself in low Earth orbit - as all post-Apollo astronauts are - then clearly you are still bound by our planet's gravity.
   
   After all, the Moon is approximately 1800 times further away from the Earth than the International Space Station (ISS), but it is kept in orbit by the Earth's pull (okay, so there is the combined Earth-Moon gravitational field, but I'm keeping this simple). By falling around the Earth at a certain speed, objects such as the ISS maintain a freefalling trajectory: too slow and the orbit would decay, causing the station to spiral inwards to a fiery end, whilst too fast would cause it to fly off into deep space.
   
   You can experience freefall yourself via such delights as an out-of-control plummeting elevator or a trip in an arc-flying astronaut training aircraft A.K.A. 'Vomit Comet'. I'm not sure I'd recommend either! Confusingly, there's also microgravity and weightlessness, but as it is almost Christmas we'll save that for another day.
   

There are no doubt numerous other, equally fundamental errors out there, which only goes to show that we could do with much better science education in our schools and media. After all, no-one would make so many similar magnitude mistakes regarding the humanities, would they? Or, like the writer H.L. Mencken, would I be better off appreciating that "nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the (American) public"? I hope not!

Consumer complexity: engineering the public out of understanding

Last weekend my car stopped working. If a little knowledge is a dangerous thing, then an hour of internet research is probably worse. Convinced it was either the transmission or gearing, it turned out to be lack of petrol, the fuel gauge and warning light having simultaneously failed. At this point - breathing a sigh of relief that I wasn't facing an enormous repair bill so soon after an annual service - I realised that my knowledge of cars is extremely limited, despite having driven them for almost thirty years.

Obviously I'm far from being unique in this respect. In years past New Zealanders in particular were renowned for maintaining old cars long after other developed nations had scrapped them, with Australians referring to their neighbour as the place where Morris Minors went to die. However, anti-corrosion legislation put an end to such ‘canny Kiwi' tinkering so the country has presumably lost this resourcefulness when it comes to keeping ancient vehicles on the road.

Of course cars just aren't built to last any more: modern vehicles continue to be ever more fuel efficient and built of lightweight materials, but I doubt few will last as long as the classic cars still running after half a century or more. Built-in obsolescence is partly to blame, but the sophistication of today's designs means that their repair and maintenance is becoming ever more difficult without a complete workshop and diagnostic computer. As a teenager I learnt how to change my car's spark plugs but have since been told this should now only be undertaken by professionals as the tolerances required cannot be achieved by hand!

It isn't just motor vehicles that are affected by ever increasing complexity: high-tech consumer gadgets, especially those with integrated circuits (which let's face it, is most of them these days) are seemingly built to prevent tampering or repairs by the end user. Yet this is a fairly recent phenomenon. In my grandparents' generation the most sophisticated item in their house was likely to be a radio that used vacuum tube technology, but a cheaper alternative was available in the form of a do-it-yourself galena or pyrite crystal radio. Even children - Arthur C. Clarke amongst them - were able to build these self-powered devices, which worked rather well except for the fact that they had no speaker and so the user had to listen via headphones. It might seem unlikely that such as device was easy to construct until you remember that pioneer aircraft were built by bicycle manufacturers!

In contrast, the most advanced technological item my parents would have had until their twenties - when television sets started to become affordable - would have been a mass-produced transistor radio. Compared to the valve-infested sideboard gramophone, simple problems such as loose wires in these radios could be repaired with basic tools such as small screwdrivers, needle-nose pliers and a low wattage soldering iron. Whilst requiring a bit of skill and some understanding of wiring, such repairs were still within the range of many consumers.

Today, my experience suggests that the expendable consumerism that first became overt in the late 1960's is a key mind set in developed nations, with do-it-yourself work on gadgetry largely absent. In fact, it is frequently cheaper to buy a replacement item than to have it repaired or purchase the tools in order to attempt those repairs yourself. The speed with which newer models are released is such that it may even prove impossible to source a replacement part only a few years after the item has been purchased. This inevitably increases our distance from the inner workings of the ever more numerous high-tech consumer gadgets we now surround ourselves with. Surely it is a great irony that despite our ability to operate all of them, the vast majority of users have little idea of the fundamentals of the technologies involved?

My own experience with attempting to fix consumer electronics is rather limited, but I can see that manufacturers are deliberately trying to prevent this by using techniques such as hiding screw heads and using one-way pins, ensuring that any attempt to dismantle an item will snap parts within the casing. Additionally, the more sophisticated the technology, the more sensitive it seems to be. An example from a rather different sphere of activity comes from 1976, when a defecting Soviet Air Force pilot delivered a state-of-the-art fighter jet into the hands of Western intelligence. The MiG-25 ‘Foxbat' was discovered to be using valve-based rather than solid-state avionics, yet despite its primitive appearance the electronics were both extremely powerful and able to withstand immense physical stress, which is obviously of great importance in such aircraft.

Back to household gadgetry, I've seen an old cathode ray tube television repaired after water was accidentally tipped down the back of it, whilst flat screen computer monitors that were inadvertently cleaned with water - not by me, I hasten to add - were sent straight to the scrap heap. That isn't to say that there aren't a few brave souls who post internet videos on how to disassemble devices such as iPads in order to fix hardware issues, but I think you would either have to be very confident or quite rich before attempting such repairs. There are also websites dedicated to technology hackers, who enhance, customise or otherwise amend consumer gadgets beyond their out-of-the-box capabilities. Again, I don't have the confidence for this sort of thing, especially since there are hidden dangers: a digital camera for example contains a flash capacitor that can store - and deliver to the unwary - a charge of several hundred volts. Ouch!

So the next time someone declares their bewilderment with the ever-widening array of consumer gadgetry, or bores you with a piece of New Age nonsense, you should remember although we are surrounded with some extremely sophisticated devices, various causes have conspired to remove insight into their inner workings. Our consumerist age is geared towards acceptance of such items whilst limiting our involvement to that of end user. And of course I haven't even mentioned the ultimate fundamentals behind all this integrated circuitry, quantum electrodynamics...

Sandy strandings: the role of contingency in the beach biosphere

At irregular intervals over the past fifteen years I've been visiting the east coast beaches of New Zealand's Northland between Warkworth and Paihia. Although it's frequently good territory for finding shallow marine fauna via rock pools or along the tideline, a recent visit was enhanced by exciting finds unique in my experience. I usually expect to see the desiccated remains of common species such as sand dollars, scallops, whelks and assorted sea snails, but coastal storms just prior to my arrival brought an added bonus. Two days of exploration along three beaches was rewarded with a plethora of live - but presumably disorientated - creatures such as common sea urchins (Evechinus chloroticus) and large hermit crabs (Pagurus novizealandiae), along with some recently-deceased 5- and 7-arm starfish. As you might imagine, several species of seabird, notably terns and gulls, were having a gastronomic time of it with all these easy pickings.

At the nearby Goat Island Marine Discovery Centre run by the University of Auckland I told our marine biologist guide about my two daughters' attempts to save some of the homeless hermit crabs from the gulls by offering suitable shells as new abodes. The biologist responded with a story of a visitor who had thrown live starfish back into the water after a mass stranding. Someone else commented that his actions wouldn't make a difference; our guide said that as he continued throwing them, the man replied "It made a difference to that one...and that one...and that one..."

Common sea urchin (Evechinus chloroticus)

Of course we cannot hope to make much of a difference with such good intentions: nature, after all, is essentially immune to human morality and empathy, with survival at a genetic level the only true sign of success. But do small-scale events whose aftermath I recently experienced - in this case a few days of stormy weather and the resultant strandings - have any long-term effects on the local ecosystem?

Apart from a mass marooning of the large barrel jellyfish Rhizostoma pulmo on a North Wales beach around thirty years ago, I haven't experienced anything similar before. But then until three years ago I didn't live near the sea, so perhaps that's not unlikely! There are fairly frequent news stories from around the world about mass whale or dolphin beachings put down to various causes, some man-made such as military sonar. But as these events involve animals larger than humans they make it onto the news: for smaller creatures such as the crabs and urchins mentioned above, there are unlikely to be any widely-disseminated stories.

Australian southern sand star (Luidia australiae)

It may seem improbable that the balance between organisms could be profoundly altered by local events, but it should be remembered that a few, minor, outside influences over the course of less than a century can wipe out entire species. For example, although the story of how a single cat was responsible for the demise of the Stephens Island wren around the start of the Twentieth Century is an oversimplification of the events, there is evidence that current human activity is inadvertently causing regional change.

One well-known recent illustration is from the Sea of Cortez, where too much game fishing, especially of sharks, may have led to the proliferation a new top predator, the rapidly spreading Humboldt squid. Estimates suggest that the current population in the region is over 20 million individuals (which suits the local squid-fishing industry just fine), but extraordinary considering none were known in the region before about 1950. Two-metre squid may not sound menacing compared to sharks, but the Humboldt squid is a highly-intelligent pack hunter with a razor-sharp beak and toothed suckers on its tentacles, so diving amongst them is probably not for the faint-hearted.

The TV series Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey contained a good introduction to the five mass extinctions of the past 450 million years, but it isn't just these great dyings or even El Niño that can upset ecosystems; we may find out too late that relatively minor, local changes are able to trigger a chain reaction at a far wider level. The evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould repeatedly emphasised the importance of historical contingency and the impact of unpredictable, ad-hoc events on natural history. The modern synthesis of evolutionary biology includes the notion that speciation can result from isolation of a population within an 'island'. This latter differs from the strictly geographical definition: a lake, or even an area within a lake, can be an island for some species. If, for example, local changes cause a gap in the ecosystem, then this gap might be filled by an isolated population with the 'fittest' characteristics, in the sense of a jigsaw piece that fits the relevant-shaped hole.

Hermit crab (Pagurus novizealandiae)

Back to the beach. American marine biologist Rachel Carson's 1951 award-winning classic The Sea Around Us contains an early discussion of the recycling of nutrients within the oceans, but we are now aware that the sea isn't remotely self-contained. My favourite example of an intricate web of land, sea and even aerial fauna and flora centres on the Palmyra Atoll in the Pacific Northern Line Islands. Various seabirds nest in the atoll's high trees, their nutrient-rich guano washing into the sea where it feeds plankton at the base of the offshore food chain. The plankton population feeds larger marine fauna, with certain fish and squid species in turn providing meals for the seabirds, thus completing the cycle. Such a tightly-knit sequence is likely to undergo major restructuring of population densities if just one of the players suffers a setback.

I appear to have followed Stephen Jay Gould's method of moving from the particular to the general and may be a little out of my depth (okay, call it a feeble attempt at a pun) but it certainly gives food for thought when local shallow marine populations appear to suffer after only a few days of mildly inclement weather. If there’s a moral to any of this, it’s that if natural events can affect an ecosystem in unpredictable ways, what havoc could we be causing, with our pesticide run-off, draining of water tables, high-energy sonar, over-fishing and general usage of the oceans as a rubbish dump? The details may require sophisticated mathematics, but the argument is plain for all to see.

Mythbusting: bringing science into the arena

My elder daughter is a big fan of the Discovery Channel show Mythbusters, who have spent eleven years testing myths (and not a few Hollywood set pieces) via science, technology, engineering and frequent resort to high explosives. Therefore, as a birthday treat I recently took her to the live Behind the Myths tour, fronted by Mythbusters hosts Adam Savage and Jamie Hyneman. Considering how macho the series frequently is - it's only female presenter, now left, is a vegetarian who was made to eat live bugs - it was interesting to see what and how the science was presented live.

In some respects it lived up to its reputation, with the hosts apologising for the lack of on-stage explosions but claiming their intentions were to 'blow the mind' instead of say, a pick-up truck or hot water cylinder. That's not to say that there weren't some fiery moments, including several montages of explosions and the infamous paintball machine gun aimed at someone wearing a suit of replica armour. Considering a large percentage of the audience consisted of pre-teens with their parents, the big bang elements were very much appreciated. But since the presenters have a special effects rather than science background, was there anything worthwhile beyond the showmanship?

Apart from a brief introduction to Newton's Second Law of Motion (force equals mass times acceleration, in case you weren't sure) there wasn't much of the classroom about the show. Except that for two hours Hyneman and Savage managed to painlessly convey a lot of scientific ideas. Examples included:

• Archimedes' quote about using a lever to move the world was demonstrated via a fairground high striker and different sized mallets;
• Perception, thanks to a point of view camera and some comedic cheating;
• Tessellation and human mechanics, with four interlocked reclining men able to support their own weight when their chairs were taken away;
• Friction via a circus-like stunt, in which Savage was lifted high above the stage thanks to the strength of interwoven telephone directories.

Although it might be quite easy to lose sight of the science behind all the razzmatazz, perhaps that was the point. These demonstrations reminded me of the Royal Institution's Christmas lectures, aimed primarily at 'young people' and barely a decade shy of being two hundred years' old. Unlike the television series, which has sometimes revisited experiments - occasionally reversing the original results in the process - the Behind the Myths tour was more a solid grounding in basic physics, with a little chemistry and biology thrown in. If anything, the most obvious outcomes would be to promote curiosity by recognising that science is deeply embedded in everyday life, and that exploring reality can be enormous fun.

The first section of the show had Adam Savage demonstrate juggling whilst explaining how he taught himself the techniques. Since his recollection discussed patience, perseverance and learning from your mistakes, you could say he was presenting in microcosm key elements of the scientific enterprise,' eureka' moments excepted.

I'm uncertain how many in the audience would cotton on to the science-by-the-backdoor aspect of the show. If anything, the children present may be more likely to want a career in movie special effects than in science, but the sense of wonder it generated may have also rubbed off on the adults present. Hyneman and Savage have become well-known enough in their support of STEM subjects and dislike of woolly thinking (take note, Discovery Channel , home of Finding Bigfoot) to have spoken at the 2006 annual convention of the US National Science Teachers Association, as well as presenting a demonstration to President Obama. That's no mean feat for a couple of special effects technicians with no formal science training. Let's hope that the some of the audience sees beyond the whizz bangs into the wonderful world that scientific exploration offers!

The escalating armoury: weapons in the war between science and woolly thinking

According to that admittedly dubious font of broad knowledge Wikipedia, there are currently sixteen Creationist museums in the United States alone. These aren't minor attractions for a limited audience of fundamentalist devotees either: one such institution in Kentucky has received over one million visitors in its first five years. That's hardly small potatoes! So how much is the admittance fee and when can I go?

Or maybe not. It isn't the just the USA that has become home to such anti-scientific nonsense either: the formerly robust secular societies of the UK and Australia now house museums and wildlife parks with similar anti-scientific philosophies. For example, Noah's Ark Zoo Farm in England espouses a form of Creationism in which the Earth is believed to be a mere 100,000 years old. And of course in addition to traditional theology, there is plenty of pseudo-scientific/New Age nonsense that fails every test science can offer and yet appears to be growing in popularity. Anyone for Kabbalah?

It's thirty-five years since Carl Sagan's book Broca's Brain: Reflections on the Romance of Science summarised the scientific response to the pseudo-scientific writings of Immanuel Velikovsky. Although Velikovsky and his bizarre approach to orbital mechanics - created in order to provide an astrophysical cause for Biblical events - has largely been forgotten, his ideas were popular enough in their time. A similar argument could be made for the selective evidence technique of Erich von Daniken in the 1970's, whose works have sold an astonishing 60 million copies; and to a less extent the similar approach of Graham Hancock in the 1990's. But a brief look at that powerhouse of publishing distribution, Amazon.com, shows that today there is an enormous market for best-selling gibberish that far outstrips the lifetime capacity of a few top-ranking pseudo-scientists:

• New Age: 360,000
• Spirituality: 243,000
• Religion: 1,100,000
• (Science 3,100,000)

(In the best tradition of statistics, all figures have been rounded slightly up or down.)

Since there hasn't exactly been a decrease of evidence for most scientific theories, the appeal of the genre must be due to changes in society. After writing-off the fundamentalist/indoctrinated as an impossible-to-change minority, what has lead to the upsurge in popularity of so many publications at odds with critical thinking?

It seems that those who misinterpret scientific methodology, or are in dispute with it due to a religious conviction, have become adept at using the techniques that genuine science popularisation utilises. What used to be restricted to the printed word has been expanded to include websites, TV channels, museums and zoos that parody the findings of science without the required rigorous approach to the material. Aided and abetted by well-meaning but fundamentally flawed popular science treatments such as Bill Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything, which looks at facts without real consideration of the science behind them, the public are often left with little understanding of what separates science from its shadowy counterparts. Therefore the impression of valid scientific content that some contemporary religious and pseudo-science writers offer can quite easily be mistaken for the genuine article. Once the appetite for a dodgy theory has been whetted, it seems there are plenty of publishers willing to further the interest.

If a picture is worth a thousand words, then the 'evidence' put forward in support of popular phenomenon such an ancient alien presence or faked moon landings seems all the more impressive. At a time when computer-generated Hollywood blockbusters can even be replicated on a smaller scale in the home, most people are surely aware of how easy it is to be fooled by visual evidence. But it seems that pictorial support for a strongly-written idea can resonate with the search for fundamental meaning in an ever more impersonal technocratic society. And of course if you are flooded with up-to-the-minute information from a dozen sources then it is much easier to absorb evidence from your senses than having to unravel the details from that most passé of communication methods, boring old text. Which perhaps fails to explain just why there are quite so many dodgy theories available in print!

But are scientists learning from their antithesis how to fight back? With the exception of Richard Dawkins and other super-strict rationalists, science communicators have started to take on board the necessity of appealing to hearts as well as minds. Despite the oft-mentioned traditional differentiation to the humanities, science is a human construct and so may never be purely objective. Therefore why should religion and the feel-good enterprises beloved of pseudo-scientists hold the monopoly on awe and wonder?

Carl Sagan appears to have been a pioneer in the field of utilising language that is more usually the domain of religion. In The Demon-Haunted Word: Science As A Candle In The Dark, he argues that science is 'a profound source of spirituality'. Indeed, his novel Contact defines the numinous outside of conventional religiosity as 'that which inspires awe'. If that sounds woolly thinking, I'd recommend viewing the clear night sky away from city lights...

Physicist Freeman Dyson's introduction to the year 2000 edition of Sagan's Cosmic Connection uses the word 'gospel' and the phrase 'not want to appear to be preaching'. Likewise, Ann Druyan's essay A New Sense of the Sacred in the same volume includes material to warm the humanist heart. Of course, one of the key intentions of the Neil deGrasse Tyson-presented reboot of Cosmos likewise seeks to touch the emotions as well as improve the mind, a task at which it sometimes - in my humble opinion - overreaches.

The emergence of international science celebrities such as Tyson is also helping to spread the intentions if not always the details of science as a discipline. For the first time since Apollo, former astronauts such as Canadian Chris Hadfield undertake international public tours. Neil deGrasse Tyson, Michio Kaku and Brian Cox are amongst those practicing scientists who host their own regular radio programmes, usually far superior to the majority of popular television science shows. Even the seven Oscar-winning movie Gravity may have helped promote science, with its at times accurate portrayal of the hostile environment outside our atmosphere, far removed from the science fantasy of most Hollywood productions. What was equally interesting was that deGrasse Tyson's fault-finding tweets of the film received a good deal of public attention. Can this suppose that despite the immense numbers of anti-scientific publications on offer, the public is prepared to put trust in scientists again? After all, paraphrasing Monty Python, what have scientists ever done for us?

There are far important uses for the time and effort that goes into such nonsense as the 419,000 results on Google discussing 'moon landing hoax'. And there's worse: a search for 'flat earth' generates 15,800,00 results. Not that most of these are advocates, but surely very few would miss most of the material discussing these ideas ad nauseum?

Although it should be remembered that scientific knowledge can be progressed by unorthodox thought - from Einstein considering travelling alongside a beam of light to Wegener's continental drift hypothesis that led to plate tectonics - but there is usually a fairly obvious line between an idea that may eventually be substantiated and one that can either be disproved by evidence or via submission to parsimony. Dare we hope that science faculties might teach their students techniques for combating an opposition that doesn't fight fair, or possibly even how to use their own methods back at them? After all, it's time to proselytise!

An uneasy alliance: science, politics and scientifically-trained politicians

Last April, whilst speaking of the need for technological innovation in order to promote economic growth, President Obama joked that his physics grades made him an unlikely candidate for "scientist in chief". With the recent unease surrounding the (now thankfully dropped) takeover bid of leading UK pharmaceutical company Astra Zeneca by the American firm Pfizer, it seems appropriate to investigate whether science at the national level could be better supported if more politicians had a scientific background or were at least more savvy in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) subjects. After all, had the Pfizer bid proved successful, the British pharmaceutical sector was predicted to lose in the long term, both scientifically and economically.

There are many statistics that prove the notion that the past half century has seen a major dumbing down in Western politics, such as the reduction in average sound bite length for US presidential candidates from over forty seconds in the late 1960s to barely seven seconds today. It's quite easy to suggest that politicians are simply following mainstream societal trends, but such lack of substance only serves to further distance politics from science, since the latter rarely offers straightforward yes/no answers, especially in cutting-edge research.

One rather bizarre example of how little science can mean in mainstream politics can be seen in President Reagan's reliance for key policy decisions during most of his term in office on astrologer Joan Quigley. Whilst it is easy to mock the far right wing (and Reagan himself looks increasingly liberal by the standards of the Tea Party), those on the left could be equally guilty of paying short shrift to science, especially if there isn't an immediately obvious benefit to society. A combination of relativism and overdosing on political correctness make for difficulties in proclaiming judgement values: if everyone deserves an equal opportunity to air their own pet theory as to how the universe works, then science appears as just another set of beliefs.

If we look back further than the Reagan administration, how well do scientifically-inclined American Presidents fare up? Here's a brief examination of those with scientific leanings:

1. Thomas Jefferson made contributions to palaeontology and agricultural technology but perhaps more importantly promoted science as essential to national wealth. However, he was still very much man of his time, maintaining conventional Christian beliefs that sometimes overrode his scientific sensibility, including those that questioned the Biblical timescale.
2. Theodore Roosevelt is well known for what would today be called sustainable development, creating national parks and wildlife refuges at the same time as promoting a balanced exploitation of natural resources. He went on expeditions to Brazil and Africa, ostensibly to find specimens for the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, although the results appear more akin to the curious modern phenomenon of scientific whaling (in other words, somewhat lacking in the conservation stakes). Roosevelt also considered a "thorough knowledge of the Bible...worth more than a college education".
3. Jimmy Carter gained a Bachelor of Science degree and later majored in reactor technology and nuclear physics whilst maintaining a conventional Christian faith. During the energy crisis of the late 1970s he seemingly promoted alternative energy, most famously having solar panels installed on the White House roof. However, in some ways he resembled Nineteenth Century Anglican scientists such as the Dean of Westminster William Buckland, particularly in his looking for the proof of God's existence in nature.
4. An example from the other side of the Atlantic can be seen in Margaret Thatcher, British Prime Minister from 1979 to 1990, who trained in chemistry under the Nobel laureate Dorothy Hodgkin. Despite her right-wing, monetarist policies (incidentally the political antithesis of Hodgkin), Thatcher has been acclaimed as an active environmentalist: her late 1980s speeches supported action to combat climate change; policies to rapidly phase out CFCs; and the promotion of sustainable development. Yet commentators have viewed Thatcher's concerns for cost-benefit analysis as taking precedence over science, with blue sky thinking getting scant attention. At a practical level, in 1987 she sold the Plant Breeding Institute at Cambridge to Unilever, which has been deemed detrimental in the long-term to British public science.

The only current major Western leader with a scientific background is the German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who has a doctorate in physical chemistry. In contrast, eight out of the nine top government officials in China have backgrounds in STEM subjects. Is it any wonder they have already got their own space station and have become the world's largest exporter of high technology, now only second to the USA in terms of annual expenditure on research and development? Yes, the rate of progress has come at enormous environmental and personal cost, but the way in which the Chinese government is clearly imbued with science and technology is to be marvelled at.

From looking at the above examples, it doesn't appear that scientifically-trained national leaders have substantially improved science's output or public opinion and have on occasion been quite detrimental. The late Stephen Schneider, author of various reports for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), stated that since is up to governments (and to some extent the general public as well) to formulate policy rather than scientists, the former need to understand not just the data, but how to interpret it. In the UK, the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills recently launched a public consultation over spending plans for the research infrastructure of the next five years. But scientific endeavours require a certain level of knowledge and that least common of commodities, critical thinking. Science just doesn't adhere to the simple black versus white mentality so beloved of Hollywood.

This is where scientifically-literate politicians hopefully come into their own, being able to accurately represent to the electorate such difficult material as probability statistics, as well as understanding risks and benefits themselves. If anything, science will only fare better if the majority of politicians have a more thorough science education, rather than just relying on the occasional professionally-trained key statesperson. But therein lies an obvious catch-22: how to persuade politicians to invest more funds in science education? I suppose it starts with us voters...

Opening hearts and minds: Cosmos old, new, borrowed and blue

As a young and impressionable teenager I recall staying up once a week after the adults in my home had gone to bed in order to watch an amazing piece of television: Cosmos, a magical journey in thirteen episodes that resonated deeply with my own personal hopes and dreams. Now that Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey has completed its first run it's worth comparing and contrasting the two series, serving as they do as reflections of the society and culture that created them.

Both versions were launched with aggressive marketing campaigns: I was surprised to see even here in Auckland a giant billboard promoted the series in as hyped a media operation as any Hollywood blockbuster. But then I assume the broadcasters have to get returns for their massive investments (dare I call it a leap of faith?) Both the original series and the updated / reimagined / homage (delete as appropriate) version have greater scope, locales and no doubt budgets than most science documentary series, a few CGI dinosaur and David Attenborough-narrated natural history shows excepted.

The aim of the two series is clearly identical and can be summed up via a phrase from Carl Sagan's introduction to the first version's tie-in book: "to engage hearts as well as minds". In addition, both the 1980 and 2014 versions are dedicated to the proposition that "the public are far more intelligent than generally given credit for". However, with the rise of religious fundamentalist opposition to science in general and evolution in particular, there were times when the new version obviously played it safer than the earlier series, such as swapping Japanese crabs for much more familiar species, dogs. As before, artificial selection was used as a lead-in to natural selection, exactly as per Darwin's On the Origin of Species.

Another example to put the unconverted at their ease in the Neil deGrasse Tyson series is the use of devices that rely on the enormous popularity of science fiction movies and television shows today. Even the title sequence provokes some déjà vu, reminding me of Star Trek: Voyager. But then one of the directors and executive producers is former Star Trek writer-producer Brannon Braga, so perhaps that's only to be expected. In addition, the temple-like interior of Sagan's ship of the imagination has been replaced by something far more reminiscent of the Enterprise bridge. I suppose the intention is to put the scientifically illiterate at their ease before broaching unfamiliar territory.

Talking of science fiction, an echo of the space 'ballet' in 2001: A Space Odyssey can be seen with the use of Ravel's Bolero for the beautiful sequence in episode 11 of the new series. Unfortunately, the commissioned music in the Tyson programme fails to live up to the brilliant selections of classical, contemporary and folk music used in the Sagan version, which were presumably inspired by the creation of the Voyager Golden Record (a truly 1970's project if ever there was one) and with which it shares some of the same material. At times Alan Silvestri's 2014 score is too reminiscent of his Contact soundtrack, which wouldn't in itself be too distracting, but at its most choral/orchestral is too lush and distinctly overblown. Having said that, the synthesizer cues are more successful, if a bit too similar to some of the specially written material Vangelis composed for the 1986 revised version.

I also had mixed feelings about the animated sequences, the graphic novel approach for the characters seemingly at odds with the far more realistic backgrounds. Chosen primarily for budgetary reasons over live-action sequences, the combination of overstated music, dramatic lighting and quirks-and-all characterisation heavy on the funny voices meant that the stories tended to get a bit lost in the schmaltz-fest. I know we are far more blasé about special effects now - the Alexandrian library sequence in the original series blew me away at the time - but I'd rather have real actors green-screened onto digimattes than all this pseudo Dark Knight imagery.

Back to the content, hurrah! For readers of the (distinctly unpleasant) Keay Davidson biography, Carl Sagan, champion of Hypatia, has become known as the feminist ally who never did any housework. He has been left distinctly in the shade by the much greater attention paid to women scientists in the new series. Presumably Ann Druyan is responsible for much of this, although there are some lost opportunities: Caroline Herschel, most obviously; and Rachel Carson wouldn't have gone amiss, considering how much attention was given to climate change. As with the original series, the new version made a fair stab at non-Western contributions to science, including Ibn al-Haytham and Mo Tzu in the new series.

As to what could have been included in the Tyson version, it would have been good to emphasise the ups and downs trial-and-error nature of scientific discovery. After all, Sagan gave a fair amount of time to astronomer, astrologer and mystic Johannes Kepler, including his failed hypothesis linking planetary orbits to the five Platonic solids. Showing such failings is good for several reasons: it makes scientists seem as human as everyone else and also helps define the scientific method, not just the results. Note: if anyone mentions that Kepler was too mystical when compared to the likes of Galileo, point them to any modern biography of Isaac Newton...

Neil deGrasse Tyson is an excellent successor to Sagan but at times he seems to almost be imploring the audience to understand. But whereas Sagan only contended with good old fashioned astrology, his successor faces an audience of young Earth creationists, alien abductees, homeopaths and moon landing hoax theorists, so perhaps his less relaxed attitude is only to be expected. Despite the circa 1800 exoplanets that have now (indirectly) been detected, the new series failed to mention this crucial update to the Drake equation. Indeed, SETI played a distinctly backseat role to the messages of climate degradation and how large corporations have denied scientific evidence if it is at odds with profit margins.

All in all I have mixed feelings about the new series. For a central subject, the astronomy was at times second fiddle to the 'poor boy fighting adversity' theme of Faraday, Fraunhofer, etal. Not that there's anything bad about the material per se, but I think a lot more could have been made of the exciting discoveries of the intervening years: dark matter and dark energy, geological activity on various moons other than Io, even exoplanets.

The original 1980 series was a pivotal moment of my childhood and no doubt inspired countless numbers to become scientists (British physicist and presenter Brian Cox, for one), or at least like me, to dabble amateurishly in the great enterprise in our spare time. I'm pleased to add that I'm one degree of separation from Carl Sagan, thanks to having worked with a cameraman from the original series. But we can never go back. Perhaps if we're lucky, Tyson, Druyan and company will team up for some other inspiring projects in the future. Goodness knows we could do with them!