ABSTRACT
Science, in the form of pictures, exhibitions or travel books, might be easy to engage with, and ripe for public understanding. There were naturally also all sorts of possibilities for misunderstanding, reinforcing nationalism and stereotypes, which could also go with public enthusiasm. But much science is arcane, indeed rather dull: chemical analyses, astronomical observations, classifying plants, tabulating magnetic and meteorological readings do not lift the spirit. Something startling, some anomaly, may present itself to the trained mind doing these things, but most of the time this ‘normal science’ requires skill, discipline, trustworthiness, and other such solid and mundane virtues. Careful observation and accurate reporting, scrupulosity indeed, are an important part of what a scientific training is about. Mastering technical terms, formulae and equations, statistics, manipulation, technique: these things are the grammar of science, necessary for those who want to pursue it. Those who don’t master these things are all too liable to be carried away by quack treatments, nostrums, panics and dogmas. Public understanding of science is always going to have to face the problem that the natural sciences are ‘unnatural’: carefully controlled laboratory experiments, lengthy statistical investigations, graphical print-outs, or microscopic taxonomic work are recondite and forbidding to most of us.1 Anything worthwhile has this element of training about it; everyone knows that real ‘effortless superiority’ is a chimera. Science is not distinct from other difficult activities, like practising law, or playing sports at international level. Natural history such as bird-watching can provide the equivalent of playing games for fun rather than for a living, but isn’t what a lot of science, particularly the expensive kinds, is like.
