Dealing with the War on Science

It’s hard to identify the specific issue that took the United States down so hard, so fast.

Sure, we can talk about the latent racism that slept just under the surface, waiting to be unleashed by a demagogue.  We can say it was the anger of the working class, whose quality of life has consistently deteriorated since labor unions started to disappear and the top tax bracket fell (in the course of 30 years) from 91% to 28%.

Here’s another decent candidate: Our ever-expanding distaste for science.  It’s really not ignorance of science, though there’s plenty of that.  Science has become almost irrelevant, rarely discussed in public and almost entirely absent from government policy making.  Dozens of books and thousands of articles have been written (read by a select few) on the so-called war on science, at a time in which the EPA recently removed most of its science advisers.

My colleague Wally Rippell is a Cal Tech-educated, engineer/physicist whose career spanned five decades before his recent retirement.  An experiment he likes to perform when he speaks in public goes like this: He asks the audience to name first a professional tennis player, then a famous singer, and then a movie actor; of course, the audience has no trouble with this.  Then he asks them to name a living scientist.  After the silence, he explains: What you just learned is the value our culture puts on science.

Those living outside the U.S. (just over half of all 2GreenEnergy readers) already understand that physics, biology, engineering, and chemistry are at the root of things like health/longevity, information and communications technology, and our grand effort to save this planet from environmental destruction.  We Americans, on the other hand, don’t seem to get that.

Our scientists who study disease, computers, particle physics, astronomy, cell phone apps and the like are largely invisible to us.  Those who study climate change are often accused of being corrupted by grant money coming from liberals who want to stifle the U.S. economy, destroy our cultural fabric,  and promote socialism.

It’s a sad time, and it’s getting worse.

Maybe it’s time we changed that.  We thank soldiers for protecting our freedom when we see them in uniform, perhaps at the airport.  We thank firefighters with freeway banners for their bravery in saving our lives and possessions from destruction.  Maybe it’s time to look at the fact that mean life expectancy in the U.S. went from 47 years in 1900 to 79 years today, then go thank a scientist.