ABSTRACT
Science is not easy to understand. And sometimes it is like an ice-dance show: at first you wonder how it’s done, and then you wonder why. It is not obvious why people devote themselves to this activity, or why others should be interested and should directly or indirectly pay the bills. This book is about how people have tried to get natural science (physics, chemistry, biology) loved – or sometimes hated, for just as we all find out about religion not only from bishops, rabbis or ayatollahs, so with science the heretics and opponents can teach us as much as the academicians and professors. Mainstream ‘popular science’ often implies a reductive scientism,1 the notion that real explanations of anything must always be scientific in the way physics is, and a certain condescension to meaner intellects. It is also full of ‘breakthroughs’, good for promoting funding and careers, but often of little lasting significance: promises of a world where science and technology will abolish poverty and pain were new and exciting when Humphry Davy made them in his inaugural lecture in London in 1802,2 but have been often broken since. Just as churches have not always practised the love they preach, so peace and plenty have not always resulted from the open-minded search for truth prominent in scientists’ sermons. Mavericks too, promising what contemporaries said was impossible, have always been around to damn the complacent scientific establishment.3
