Watching and listening to Professor Brian Cox delivering the Huw Wheldon lecture last night was an uplifting experience.
Cox is an engaging speaker, enthusiastic and interesting. His views on the way in which science should be taught and discoveries disseminated are right and should be heeded. We have an ever-decreasing number of students taking the 'hard' subjects - physics, mathematics and chemistry - in favour of the much easier options of sociology, economics, and media studies. We need to reverse this trend and Professor Cox has taken a leading role, through his televisual appearances, in trying to bring this about. He is also unafraid of being forthright, as his comments regarding the 'rubbish' of astrology demonstrate. That the BBC and other broadcasters have drifted into a frame of mind in which every crackpot idea is given equal weighting is, as Cox says, ridiclous and, even, dangerous.
When I was at school, science subjects were serious stuff, sometimes hard to understand but always interesting. We actually did experiments without wearing all sorts of silly paraphernalia and no one got hurt. In those days, we produced multitudes of scientists; whatever happened ?
Cox is an engaging speaker, enthusiastic and interesting. His views on the way in which science should be taught and discoveries disseminated are right and should be heeded. We have an ever-decreasing number of students taking the 'hard' subjects - physics, mathematics and chemistry - in favour of the much easier options of sociology, economics, and media studies. We need to reverse this trend and Professor Cox has taken a leading role, through his televisual appearances, in trying to bring this about. He is also unafraid of being forthright, as his comments regarding the 'rubbish' of astrology demonstrate. That the BBC and other broadcasters have drifted into a frame of mind in which every crackpot idea is given equal weighting is, as Cox says, ridiclous and, even, dangerous.
When I was at school, science subjects were serious stuff, sometimes hard to understand but always interesting. We actually did experiments without wearing all sorts of silly paraphernalia and no one got hurt. In those days, we produced multitudes of scientists; whatever happened ?
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