Subrato Banerjee
Among the things that worried him most was the increasing level of scientific ignorance among our world leaders who speak for mankind. Till his last breath he hoped things to turn for the better. He wasn’t the only one – Stephen Hawking didn’t give mankind much of a chance to survive another geological epoch before destroying itself.
When Sir Arthur Eddington experimentally confirmed the predictions of Albert Einstein through his famous gravitational lensing experiment, it became front-page news on many national dailies back in 1919. The episode involving the Higgs-Boson hardly got the global attention it deserved in 2012.
Something happened in this intervening century from the early 1900s to the early 2000s. Scientific readership has significantly declined among the general global populace. Could the involvement of scientists in the world wars have led people to distance themselves from the sciences? Was scientific progress too fast for the world to catch on?
Has scientific curiosity been replaced by other forms of entertainment? After all, in the words of the economist Daniel Cohen ‘television offers immediate gratification to the viewer, to the detriment of pastimes that require learning, like playing a musical instrument.’
Relishing the scientific high is very similar to delighting in classical music. Each demands a sufficient time investment. Nobody becomes a connoisseur in a day. That the world has become impatient is evident in the significant reduction in the average word-length of a sentence in books published between the early and the late 1900s.
Yet, the hopeful wonderer within me predicts that the recent lunar (Chandrayaan) and Mars (Mangalyaan) explorations by India and those by other countries (including for example, the Lucy mission of the USA) would, in the coming years, keep the spark of general scientific interest alive with a cumulative effect that exceeds that of (say) the Big Bang Theory (which was yet another attempt in making scientists look cool).
Whenever I think about how my interest in the pure sciences has remained alive, I remain in gratitude for the top science communicators that include Carl Sagan, Stephen Hawking, Michio Kaku, Leonard Mlodinow, Neil deGrasse Tyson, and Richard Dawkins among a few others.
This article is dedicated to a wonder woman who shares a common space with these heroes.
You are probably thinking of a beautiful lady who is known for her athleticism and physical strength – and you are not incorrect, but Dianna Cowern is so much more (notice the double ‘n’ in the name). She has engaged in the athleticism of the mind with a formal training in physics that has led her to leap the highest wall – one between scientists and everyone else.
Through her scientific video-content she has kept the sense of wonder alive in children who are below ten, in their teens – and even those children who are at least in their thirties and forties.
She has made physics her strength – and as for physical strength, we all hope it returns as soon as she recovers from the effects of long COVID that she has been battling for over a year. Haven’t we all wished Wonder Woman to always fight and succeed?
She reached out to all who needed help with an understanding of physics, and more generally those who felt intimidated by the demands of the formal sciences. In India, where tertiary-level textbooks are often a luxury, the only thing that keeps the pupil going is the innate desire to learn more.
In her avatar as the Physics Girl (the title of her YouTube channel), Dianna has fueled that innate curiosity to the extent that it has left many with the desire to see more scientific content from her – and they have eagerly waited for the next video for some time now – so with every passing day, the wishes for her recovery become stronger.
In her endeavor to scientifically educate the populace she, along with the other heroes, has taught us that the boundaries of language, religion, geography, history, politics, color and culture blur away in these higher forms of human involvement.
Science unites people in its own way. Dianna has reached out to the rich and the indigent alike, as she has in an equal measure to people of all races, languages, and ethnicity among other things, perhaps with a subliminal understanding that each scientifically-literate individual plays a crucial part in a global connectome.
‘Wonder Woman’ has fought off many villains from distant stars who have ever wanted to cause trouble in our planet – a pale blue dot floating in eternal cosmic vastness. She has thus, in a sense, literally engaged in ‘Star Wars‘!
The inhabitants of this pale blue dot feel grateful to Dianna for reaching out and wish to see this wonder woman back in action to fight scientific ignorance – a truly global problem of the day which in turn, associates with other issues of global warming, nuclear arms race, and pollution to name a few (and unfortunately supported with an army of bellicose and recalcitrant private interests that frequently oppose scientific wisdom with an attitude of intransigence).
We wish her recovery in a globally unified voice in the words ‘May the force be with you!‘
The author is Assistant Professor, IIT Bombay; Behavioral Scientist, Centre for Behavioral Economics, Society and Technology (BEST) Brisbane
Views are personal and do not reflect those of Qrius and/or any of its staff
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