Comment: Comfort in a world full of uncertainty

Feb 19 2009 by Stewart Watkins, The Journal

THERE are constants in science, the acceleration of freefall for instance, but currently it can feel like the freefall has forgotten that it is a constant. Certainly the pace of economic change and uncertainty seems to quicken day by day.

In past times of doubt, science has often seemed to offer comfort. In the 1620s, Sir Francis Bacon sketched out in his The New Atlantis an optimistic vision for Solomon’s House. In many ways it was a blueprint for a modern research facility.

Yet at the start of the century, as the Copernican heliocentric world view began to percolate beyond scientific circles to a broader range of thinkers, Shakespeare has Hamlet observe that the ‘time is out of joint’.

Science has always impacted on our lives. In less than half a century, the disorder and bloodshed of the English Civil War that had driven the materialist Thomas Hobbes to describe the life of man in a state of nature as “poor, nasty, brutish and short” had given way to a new era of optimism, ushered in by the Royal Society’s encouragement of experiment.

A confidence in science attended the Age of Reason – the idea of inexorable progress was born. It would be a massive overstatement to describe the nineteenth century as simply Science versus Religion, but it was an age of secularisation.

The heavyweight bout was probably T.H Huxley v Bishop Wilberforce slugging it out over Darwin’s theory of evolution in 1860.

And the 20th Century? An age of doubt? A mid-century warning from Einstein posited that: “The unleashed power of the atom has changed everything save our modes of thinking, and we thus drift towards unparalleled catastrophe.”

In a new, uncertain century we’re entitled to look for something we can be sure of – some constants. In a world that’s constantly changing and too often given to knee-jerk reactions, science can, at its best, be a benchmark of objectivity.

Stewart Watkins is managing director of County Durham Development Company, which is driving the development of NETPark and NETPark Net.