A chemical called mineral oil

Today is Tuesday 8 March 2011.  I have just been watching the 700th anniversary of the Sky at Night.  I am consistently amazed by people like Patrick Moore.  He has been an inspiration for decent enthusiastic people for more than 50 years.  He really is a global ambassador for scientific endeavour.  One of my great worriess in life is that the peoples of the so called developed world now seem to be turning their back on science.  There are many examples of this.  In the late 60s we were sending people to the moon.  If this momentum had continued, we would now have manned bases on the moon doing wonderful things which can only be done in low gravity.  Maybe there would be entirely new industries based on this.   People would be routinely going into earth orbit for vacations and for work.  Maybe there would be manned missions to Mars.  The lack of momentum has been a waste of 40 years. I am upset that we have been denied this progress.  Other examples of a retreat include the loss of commercially available supersonic flight.  If the pace of technological developments that led to Concord in the 60s had been sustained, human transport would now be truly amazing.  Maybe people would be travelling to Australia in a couple of hours!  The spin offs would undoubtedly include much more efficient aviation propulsion technology.  Nuclear Energy is another example where we have lost momentum and are very close to losing the skills base needed to maintain a nuclear industry.  In the 50s  nuclear energy was promoted by telling people that it would be so cheap it wouldn't be worth metering.  This was a very big excercise in deception.  The real reason for all the nuclear power stations back then was not to make electricity, but to generate material for weapons.  This technology now has an undeserved poor reputation which is only slowly changing.  Nuclear energy is the only way to mitigate carbon dioxide emissions in the medium term.

On the other hand, where are we now?  We have highly prestigious news programmes like the Today programme on BBC radio 4 pandering to the scientifically illiterate.  The same day as I was listening to the wonderful 700^th Sky at Night, the today programme was reporting that a harmful chemical was migrating from cardboard packaging made from recycled newspaper into the food within the package.  This they described as a chemical called mineral oil!  If anyone needs me to elaborate why I am upset by this, please let me know and I will gladly enlighten them.

Our world is in danger of descending back into the scientific dark ages where it is becoming politically unacceptable to spend public money on science and exploration.  Why?  Because the electorate have no curiosity anymore.  They are happy for politicians to spend our money populating university courses such as media studies and close down physics, chemistry and maths courses!  They buy into the witchcraft that is homeopathy and believe the people who peddle this crap rather than trained scientists.  I am not saying for one minute that science has all the answers, but I am saying that good science is evidence based!    What can be done about this?  I submit that the only way to engender public enthusiasm for science and technology is to fund high profile big science and engineering projects.  The world desperately needs another moon shot and this time it should be sustained.