jonathan.rawle.org

Last week, pop musician turned particle physicist turned TV presenter Brian Cox wrote two articles in the New Scientist blog about the STFC’s proposed funding cuts to particle physics and astronomy. Cox claims that the cuts are some sort of conspiracy by un-named people who sit somewhere between government and the scientists at the sharp end, who have decided that funding to those areas should instead be diverted into what he describes as “maintenance of facilities such as Diamond”. He then goes on to claim that this is a threat to our national interest because physics contributes 6.4% of our GDP.

I should start by saying that Cox does make some good points. The shortfall in STFC funding is around £50 million, which is a drop in the ocean when you consider the billions being pumped into banks and other government spending. Science is always underfunded, and the answer to many of the problems facing it would be to increase spending. This would be a good long-term investment, but unfortunately politicians tend to look no longer-term than the next election. Science may have done seemingly well under Cox’s chum Tony Blair, but then it had been greatly underfunded for many years before he took office, so things could only get better, to coin a phrase.

Unfortunately, Cox seems to think that spending money on Diamond and ISIS is simply “maintenance of facilities”, whereas spending money on telescopes, space exploration and particle accelerators such as CERN is “physics”. In fact, a lot of very good science comes out of Diamond and ISIS. They support academic users from universities across the UK in a wide range of disciplines. New applicants are encouraged, so use of synchrotron light and neutrons isn’t restricted to a small number of established, large research groups.

Cox talks of inspiring science and the exploration of knowledge for the sake of knowledge. This is a noble desire, and he is right that there must always be a place for this in science. However, this sits uneasily with his statement about national interest, and the importance of physics because it contributes 6.4% to the GDP. If we must analyse which fields contribute most towards our GDP, I’m afraid it isn’t likely to be particle physics. The PR team at CERN are good at promoting their activities in the media; however, even if they succeed in detecting the elusive Higgs boson, it can never be used for anything, as it can’t be produced anywhere else, unless you happen to have £5 billion lying around and a spare 27 km tunnel. Given the huge cost of the LHC, this really is exploration of knowledge for the sake of knowledge and some. Hardly can an article about CERN be published on a news site such as the BBC without a mention of the fact that the world-wide web was invented there, yet this isn’t exactly their core activity, or what the money goes into. That this was the most commercially successful project to come out of the facility says something about particle physics’s potential to generate wealth. Cox himself has spoken of the need to fund science to combat climate change, improve energy security and fight pandemic disease – all things that Diamond and ISIS and their users are working towards, but problems that are only likely to be solved at CERN if the next Tim Berners-Lee happens to be given the task of powering the site’s vehicles on an alternate fuel.

In a slight change of tack, Cox then suggests a more tenuous contribution of astronomy and particle physics towards this 6.4% GDP. He claims that students only take up physics because they want to “explore the early universe, be part of missions to other worlds or delve deep into the heart of the atomic nucleus”. A decade or so ago, figures might have agreed with that assertion. When I was starting out on an undergraduate physics course, most people chose to combine it with study in one of those areas, with degree titles such as “Physics with Astrophysics” or “Physics with Space Science”. Few of us took what we informally referred to as Straight Physics (not that we were implying anything about the astronomers, you understand). However, times have changed and the situation is now reversed. The intake of physics students now tends to contain a smaller number who are specialising in space or astronomy, with the majority taking the straight Physics degree. That degree will be an ideal starting point for a career exploring materials for use in building safe nuclear power stations or in hydrogen storage, or for working at the physics–biology interface. It’s hardly surprising that incoming undergraduates would mention particle physics or astronomy as their inspiration, as those are the only separate fields that A-level students are likely to be aware of, and they have to say something other than “physics” or “wanting to know how things work”. What actually inspires them is all the stuff they don’t yet know the name of.

The prioritisation of funding within STFC can hardly be described as undemocratic. There was a wide consultation exercise in which scientists were asked for their views, then the decision was taken by people other than the scientists who would be affected by it. Brian Cox is the one who describes his “personal interactions” with former science minister Ian Pearson: something most scientists who are rather less in the media spotlight couldn’t have dreamed of. Yet all those other scientists across all STFC-funded fields had their views heard before the list of priorities was made. It was Tony Blair and Lord Sainsbury, who Cox is such as fan of (I should point out that Sainsbury, while generally regarded as a good science minister was not an aficionado either – in fact, as many people will realise, he was a grocer) who originally gave the go-ahead for Diamond, and now Diamond and ISIS’s second target station are built, they have to have enough money to operate. They have seen cuts in their operations budgets too, so it’s only fair that the cuts are shared with other large scientific facilities.

Cox finishes his article by asking for the extra £50m to make up the shortfall. I’d be happy to stand with him on that, but I fear wishing for that amount of money is what could be described as a pipe-d:ream. I wish science funding could become an election issue, but can’t see that happening as none of the major parties is likely to propose a significant increase. Science just doesn’t fit into a convenient five-year cycle. This time, the funding situation is likely to get worse before it gets better, and it will have to be left up to the whole of the scientific community to decide which of the large facilities should be prioritised in order to protect our national interest.

The views expressed in this article are my own and do not necessarily reflect those of my employer.

My photos from Hangzhou and Shanghai are finally online! It’s taken me five months to upload just 72 photos, but as usual they are labelled with extensively researched captions…

I have to say I find myself broadly on the side of the government in the recent row over the sacking of the government’s drug adviser. Scientific advisers are there to advise, but ultimately it’s the politicians whom we have elected to take the decisions. If we don’t like the decisions they take, we can vote them out.

The re-upgrading of cannabis to Class B is said to be the first time since the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs was established in 1971 that the government have gone against the council’s advice. I can only say that those advisers have been extremely fortunate, then. Most scientific advisers to governments can certainly expect the government to go against a sizable proportion of their recommendations. Just imagine if governments around the world took all of the steps experts on climate change suggested: the world would certainly be in a much better state than it’s in now. It seems the drugs advisers were so used to getting their way that are now having a bit of a tantrum because the government has said no.

So why can’t the government simply follow the advice of its scientific advisers? It’s because the decisions have implications that go beyond science. In the case of drugs, there may be a particular substance that is causing problems because of its widespread use, even if that particular substance happens to be less harmful than other drugs. In the case of climate change, it’s because of the effect on the economy of shutting down industry and all transport for a start.

If the amount of harm is to be the only measure used in classification, as Professor Nutt (his real name) would have it, there are surely plenty of household chemicals that cause much more harm than any other drugs – if they were to be ingested. So shouldn’t those chemicals be Class A drugs? Of course they are not, because there is no problem of people abusing them. Equally, it may be a good idea to target a drug that is more widespread as it’s more important to discourage people from using it.

Professor Nutt then goes on to criticise the “artificial separation” of alcohol and tobacco from other drugs. I would agree with him that in a system that classifies drugs according to the amount of harm they can cause, those two drugs should be at least Class B. However, it is not currently possible to make use of those drugs illegal for various social and political reasons, even if some of us would be quite happy if it were to happen.

Clearly a system of classification that only considers the harm that each drug can make in a cold, clinical sense, is not the best way to determine penalties for the use of drugs. Many other factors need to be taken into account, and the final decision on policy has to be made by elected representatives. Professor Nutt overstepped the mark – even former chief scientific adviser Sir David King says so – and so had to go. If he disagreed with government policy so much, he should have done the honourable thing and resigned, rather than attacking the government while continuing to work for it. With such a high success rate of having his recommendations acted upon, perhaps he could consider a new role advising the government on climate change – assuming he can avoid producing too much hot air.

Like many people I was in two minds about whether the BNP’s leader should appear on the BBC’s Question Time. Free speech is important, but you have to draw the line somewhere. However, after seeing Nick Griffin’s performance, I think his appearance has only made him look a fool.

I came as little surprise to discover on the programme that Griffin is racist, admires Hitler, denies the Holocaust, is friends with Ku Klux Klan members, is Islamophobic, etc. But what people may not have realised, and which was revealed so spectacularly on the programme, is what a political lightweight he is. He was completely out of his depth, his arguments were feeble. He exhibited all the signs of someone who is nervous and unused to speaking in public, with the way he smirked and laughed nervously throughout and how he attacked Jack Straw right at the beginning, when the debate had barely even begun. Racists and bigots will always vote for parties such as the BNP, that’s a fact. However, the party’s recent gains have been due to them presenting themselves as a respectable party with a range of policies on different subjects. Hopefully people who may have been temped to vote for them will now realise that there is no depth to the party at all, nothing behind the racist venir. No policies, just prejudice.

Realising that the programme was a disaster for his party, Nick Griffin is now complaining about the make-up of the studio audience, and the questions that were put to him, claiming that it was “not a genuine Question Time”. I don’t think his claim is valid at all. A few members of the audience did clap following Griffin’s contributions, and a couple of those who spoke voiced opinions at least partially similar to his own. This reflects the population as a whole, where only a small minority agree with the BNP’s views. Certainly, if the programme had been recorded in Burnley, as he suggested, he might have found the audience more supportive, but that’s becasue it’s one of the small minority of areas of the country where his party have had any electoral success. Question Time is a national programme, so having an audience with such a high proportion of BNP supporters, not at all reflecting the rest of the country, would have been the type of extreme bias the BBC strives to avoid. As with certain other obnoxious minority organisations, the BNP and its followers like to delude themselves that everyone in the country shares their view. However, outside of their meetings and online discussion forums, this is simply a fantasy. Apparently, after the show, the Question Time website was flooded with support for Nick Griffin. This is hardly surprising. No doubt they were mobilised by websites, forums and messages, and encouraged to write in support of their leader. Again, they do like to delude themselves and say, “Look, everyone agrees with us!”

As for the questions, these are always chosen by the Question Time studio audience. If this time the audience wanted most of the questions to be about the BNP and its policies, it isn’t the programme’s producers’ place to prevent that. If the programme wasn’t a genuine Question Time, that’s because one if its panellists wasn’t a genuine politician, and the audience knew that.

Various and figures and statistics will now be twisted to suit the agenda of whoever is writing about them. The BNP will claim they gained extra members. Others will claim it was a disaster for them. I can’t really see that it will do the BNP any good in electoral terms. Eight million people watched, but that means the majority of people didn’t. So who did watch? Probably people who either support the BNP already, or who totally oppose what they stand for and wanted to see Griffin made a fool of. Even if some of the former group have now decided to join the BNP, they would have voted for them anyway. As for all the working-class people in places such a Burnley, they probably have little interest in politics, so will have been among the 40 million or so adults who didn’t watch. So their votes won’t have been influenced at all.

In conclusion, I don’t think this programme will have much effect on people’s voting either way. A more serious issue is that more people are voting for the BNP (in most cases, uninformed people who don’t watch Question Time) simply because they are disillusioned with the mainstream parties. Some of the senior politicians, in particular in the Labour Party, should try concentrating their energies into doing something about this, rather than protesting about a TV programme. That’s the real way to beat the BNP.

Back in 2005, Google had to rename their Gmail service in the UK to “Google Mail” after losing a trademark dispute. All pages were rebranded with the new Google Mail logo, and every single reference in text on the website was also changed to Google Mail. Any new users in the UK signing up were allocated @googlemail.com addresses instead of @gmail.com (this is the address that messages are sent out with, although all users can actually receive e-mail at either domain).

One side effect was that, becasue the new name was longer, taskbar icons or web browser tabs displaying the Google Mail inbox often could no longer fit in both the name and the number of new messages, making it impossible to see when new messages arrived. (A recent “Google Labs” feature to switch the order of the window title fixed this.)

Yesterday, I noticed that the logo had changed back to Gmail, and that all references in text have changed back to Gmail too. However, I couldn’t find any news story or even blog post commenting on this change. I seem to remember some time ago, there was a brief period one day where my mail account showed Gmail again, but it soon reverted to Google Mail. But when it still said Gmail today, I thought it might be a permanent change.

Unfortunately, I’ve just tried the sign-up page, and it’s still branded with “Google Mail” and offers @googlemail.com addresses. So either the name change is a glitch (seeing as Gmail’s had quite a few of those recently) or else it has only happened for those of us who obtained Gmail addresses before the change in 2005.

I much prefer the Gmail logo, rather than the rather more cumbersome Google Mail one. Also, it would be better if British users could use the same name to refer to the service as everyone else in the world (with the exception of other countries such as Germany where there are similar trademark issues).

So I’d be interested to hear from any Gmail users in the UK: have you noticed a change back to Gmail, and do you have an @googlemail or @gmail address?