Science is Vital, unlike Tory MPs

The Science is Vital campaign is a response to the drastic and devastating cuts to science funding proposed by the government in an attempt to alleviate the UK’s financial, shall we say, ‘difficulties’.

I would hope that to most sensible folks, questioning the importance of funding scientific endeavour at all would sound unnecessary. Such is the time we live in, and the government that we have, however, that the question is being asked in all seriousness. Thankfully, it seems that scientists have united under the Science Is Vital campaign to provide an emphatic answer. And why is science vital? Science is Vital provide a neat answer: “Investing in research enriches society and helps drive the economy. It led to our pre-eminent position in the 20th century, and will be vital in meeting the challenges of the 21st – whether they be in energy, medicine, infrastructure, computing, or simply humanity’s primal desire for discovery.”

There are three ways to support the campaign:

1. Sign the petition
2. Write to your MP
3. Lobby Parliament. Science is Vital and the Campaign for Science and Engineering are taking the matter directly to Parliament on the 12th of October, from 3:30 – 4:30pm, in Committee Room 10. If you can be there, and especially if you’ve written to your MP to ask that he/she attend, register here.

There was also a rally held alongside Her Majesty’s Treasury yesterday afternoon. Thanks to the awesome folks at the Pod Delusion, those, like me, that couldn’t make it can listen to the speeches from fantastic pro-science luminaries like Dr Evan Harris, Imran Khan, Simon Singh, Dr Petra Boynton and Colin Blakemore. There are also literally hundreds of photos uploaded from the event. The easiest way to keep up-to-date with all the rally’s goings on and the campaign in general is the Twitter hashtag #scienceisvital.

I sent my Science is Vital protest letter to Tony Baldry, the Conservative local MP for North Oxfordshire, and received my reply yesterday. The cover letter is pictured on the below.

Also attached by way of response was a four-page transcript of Mr Baldry’s recent speech to Bodicote House. You can read the whole speech here. I wasn’t expecting much by way of a direct reply to my letter or the Science is Vital campaign, but Mr Baldy was true to form. As a Conservative MP, there’s plenty in the speech blaming the previous Labour government, supporting the ‘Big Society’ and it also included this choice little quote, which summarises the Tory ideology that will almost certainly stunt scientific progress, and only benefit the wealthy, for some time to come (those of a socialist disposition might want to make sure there are no kids in the room when you read it):

“There is no particular merit or value in having to increases taxes or council taxes and taking money away from people which otherwise they should choose to spend as they would wish”.

One thing I can agree with Mr Baldry on is the opening line to his speech, that “rhetoric cannot overcome reality” (which is ironic, as that’s basically the job description for many a politician!). This is science’s trump card: science is vital and we’ve got evidence on our side, not just political ideology and rhetoric to prove it.

The Best of the 'Fest

One of Europe’s biggest science festival came to town in the same week that some bloke called the Pope decided to pay a visit. From Monday the 13th to Sunday the 19th of September Aston University and Birmingham hosted a huge number of events covering a massive variety of science. From particle physics to sexing the brain, how we can know what babies think to bone densities in Neolithic man, dancing on custard to Catholic astronomers; the festival celebrated the richness of scientific endeavour.

The festival started with a (big) bang as 40 of the grooviest geeks in town flashmobbed Birmingham Cathedral and put on one hell of a show! Not bad for only a couple of hours of practice that morning.

A few teething troubles and technical difficulties aside, feedback for the X-change events and the festival as a whole appears to be very positive. Early reports suggest around 88,000 attendees over the week and were literally hundreds of stories in the press covering the news and controversies surrounding the festival. The British Science Association, The Guardian and the BBC had the most comprehensive coverage. The BBC also hosted X-change presenter Sue Nelson’s Daily Reporter’s Log. I particularly enjoyed her sneaking in a mention of my humanism!

By virtue of the fact that I was working on the X-change team, this blog had the privilege of hosting the daily X-change programme of events, which was frantically uploaded each afternoon of the festival. The idea was to have daily blogs, but quite frankly there was so much happening that there just weren’t enough hours in the day! The reports are being collated, however, and will be put together as a yearbook, much the same as it was last year.  A few photos from the festival and the X-change can be found here.


There was too much going on to cover the whole festival in any detail, but there are some personal highlights that are sure to live long in my memory. My participation in a Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation experiment with friend and colleague, Dr Craig McAllister, went down very well at Tuesday’s X-change. Craig placed a TMS coil over my motor cortex and, much to the delight and alarm of the audience, used very high-field magnetic pulses that made my arm twitch!

I was also batted away by an amiable and PR-savvy Catholic astronomer who was one of the star guests at Friday’s X-change.  My question: ‘how do you square 4 billion year old meteorites with God and the Bible?’ Brother Guy Consolmagno’s answer: ‘Creatonism is a Protestant invention, not a Catholic one’. Case closed then! I also really enjoyed Brother Guy’s t-shirt.

In an irony that we can all enjoy, someone else has suggested that we’re still not sure that God would have said it that way. You can see more of Brother Guy and what exactly being an astronomer for God involves in this interesting BBC documentary about the Vatican  Skip to around 22:30 to hear Brother Guy’s astonishing twisting of logic as he explains that ‘my religion tells me that God made the Universe, but my science tells me how it’s done’. He obviously hasn’t read Stephen Hawking’s latest book.

Although it ran until the Sunday, Saturday was the last day of my festival and, despite recovering from some over-enthusiastic consumption of Desperados with the BSA team the previous night, it ended it on an absolute high. Baba Brinkman is a Canadian rapper and straight-up genius. His Rap Guide to Evolution is one of the best rap albums and coolest methods of science communication that I have ever heard.  When I heard he was performing at the science festival I jumped at the chance to invite him to the X-change. A busy schedule meant that this wasn’t possible, but he put on a frenetic, funny and informative show, which included this performance and a very surprising inclusion of me in his freestyle! His latest offering is the Rap Guide to Human Nature, which is also definitely worth a few hundred listens.

I finished the week exhausted, but also with lots of new friends, a million and one ideas buzzing in my head, and an ever more enthusiastic passion for science and science communication. I really must thank the whole of the X-change team, Sue Nelson, and all the lovely people from the Science Association that made it such a pleasure to attend and work at the festival.

Of course as a humanist, I was disappointed that I couldn’t take part in the Protest the Pope campaign and lend my support to the National Secular Society, but, on the whole, I was happier that I had contributed to pro-science ideals, rather than the anti-religious ones that dominated the week.

Book Review: Why Does E=mc2? (And why should we care?) by James Ellor

Ask a person on the street about the famous E=mc² equation and you might get a vague response about it having something to do with Einstein. A person with some degree of scientific training (like myself) could tell you it has something to do with energy, mass and the speed of light squared, but how and why we know this and more importantly, why it is so, would stretch even those with a physics degree.

With Why Does E=mc²? Professors Brian Cox and Jeff Forshaw, come into their own by explaining the most complex, incomprehensible and downright weird niceties of quantum physics in a simple, accessible manner. That they do this with only the one mild instance of blinding the reader with maths speaks volumes about their skills. The apparently mundane revelation that, as a direct consequence of E=mc², a sprung mousetrap weighs ever so slightly less than a set one, sends as much a tingle down one’s spine as contemplating the size of the universe.

The last chapter on Einstein’s general relativity, and the resulting warping of space and time due to gravity, adds a final dose of weirdness, just in case special relativity wasn’t enough for you.

The British Science Festival's coming to Birmingham! by Tulpesh Patel

The British Science Festival, organised by the British Science Association travels to cities across the UK showcasing the latest developments in science, technology and engineering, and from Monday 13 to to Sunday 18 September it’s coming to Birmingham, and even more excitingly, Aston University! 

Here's a montage (painstakingly put together using my awesome Paint skills!) of the posters for just a small selection of the amazing events taking place over the week.

The festival's Online Programme Page  lets you search for specific events or topics, browse day by day and has all the information on prices and booking tickets. The alternative Aston booking page lets you search events that are specifically held on the university campus. Videos giving a taste of some of the talks can be viewed here. 

Most of the events are free, the paid events are £3 or £5 (and probably the most popular, so it’s a good idea to book in advance), which isn’t bad for some of the amazing things you’re getting to see and take part in! For the super-keen science geek with a bulging wallet, a weekly pass for £120 (£60 for students or the unemployed) will get you into everything.

I was lucky enough to be picked for the X-change team for the festival, and one of my jobs is to pick the best speakers and help organise discussions at the end of each day. On the first go through the program, I picked only the events that got me really excited ended up with a diary that looked like this:

Realising that unless I find some way to clone myself I won’t be able to be in three places at once, I’ve tried whittling it down, but it’s proving nearly impossible. To that end though, here’s a list of just some of the events that I think would be most worth checking out if you’re pushed for time 

They are of a brain/evolution theme, as that’s what I’m most interested in, but there are practical workshops, magic and hip-hop thrown in there too!

Monday 13 September

Nature of Birmingham: Trail around the City Centre

Tuesday 14 September

All creatures great and small: How where you live influences your biology and behaviour 

Where can studying science lead?

The future of the brain, the brain of the future

Wednesday 15 September

The psychology science observatory

African archaeology and human evolution: Growth of a brain

Brain wave imaging: new views of the human brain 

This event is particularly close to my heart and one that I’m very excited about as it’s hosted by the department and research group I work in and showcases some of the exciting Neuroscience research that Aston is involved in. If you're so inclined, you can read about some the work I do using Magnetic Resonance Spectroscopy here (excuse the shameless plug!).

X-change

Open mic: there’s science in my fiction (and poetry)

Thursday 16 September

Standing Up For Science

Standing Up For Science are an excellent charitable organisation that  promote evidence and scientific reasoning in public discussion and do a great job tackling misrepresentation of science and scientific evidence in the public sphere.  The excellent Voice of Young Science does some sterling work helping early career researchers get to grips with dealing with the media and giving them advice on how to stand up for science themselves. You can support the charity by donating here. 

Do we need more scientists?

Something about nothing: Magic, comedy and science

Friday 17 September

Making science news

How risky is it, and how ignorant are we?

Human guinea pigs – dispelling the myths of human research

Bad medicine

Powers of ten – a musical journey from quark to cosmos

X-change

Saturday 18 September

Blood, guts and gore: The journey through life

Skeptics roadshow

I’m a huge fan of the Skeptics in the Pub (SITP)  movement and am a part of the Birmingham SITP  and occasionally write for their great blog. Those who’ve read the few post so far on here will recognise the Princess and Starting the Aston Humanist Society articles, but there’s a bit I wrote on Science in the media  after a talk from David Gregory (BBC Midlands science and environment correspondent), who is incidentally part of the Making Science News event  with one of my heroes, Ben Goldacre.

The Skeptics Roadshow will feature bunch of short talks and discussions on topics as diverse as homeopathy, ESP, UFOs, and libel law.  If they’re anything like the monthly meetings they’re guaranteed to be informative and cracking fun!

Baba Brinkman 

This deserves a particular plug because I absolutely love this guy’s work and he deserves to be huge. You can listen and download The Rap Guide to Evolution here (it’s free, although you should, of course, make a voluntary donation to prove you’re not a Creationist!). Darwin’s Acid has to be one of the best hip-hop songs ever, nevermind best Darwinsim-related hip-hip songs.

The heresy of nature

Sunday 19 September

Emergence

It’s a geek’s world

In the beginning ... A history of the Universe from pure energy to the human brain

It promises to be a spectacular week celebrating the best of the fascinating research being done in and around Birmingham, and it’s guaranteed to have something for everyone.

Keep an eye out on the British Science Festival and Aston University websites for all the latest news. There will also be regular blogposts during the festival and you can follow all the goings-on on Twitter: @BritishSciFest, @TheXchangeTeam  and #BritSciFest as well as me (@Tulpesh) and @astonhumanists!