Hawking, Mlodinow, the media and god.

Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow have written a new book called The Grand Design. The publication of extracts from the book in The Times has unleashed a media storm with headlines like Stephen Hawking: God did not create Universe and Why God Did Not Create the Universe.

First lets be clear that they are not saying God is ruled out. While most (but not all) articles managed to avoid claiming that, the lack of clarifying details , sloppy phrases used and tedious discussions about what this might mean for religions allowed exactly such a confusion to spread.

Phrases like "God did not create the universe" do appear in many newspapers, implying that any universe creating God is ruled out by science. This is not what Hawking (or Mlodinow) actually said. In phrasing it this way the BBC, The Wall Street Journal, The Guardian, The Daily mail, CNN, and many more are misrepresenting what Hawkings and spreading misinformation. Richard Dawkins, a famous science communicator, also seemed to have an exaggerated view bof the statements religious significance in a debate. Some newspapers, like The Telegraph and The Huffington Post, report "there is no need for a creator" much closer to what Hawking appears to have actually said.

The other big confusion spread by the press is that this is a reversal of Hawking's previous position. For example the BBC state

In his 1988 bestseller, A Brief History of Time, Prof Hawking appeared to accept the role of God in the creation of the Universe. "If we discover a complete theory, it would be the ultimate triumph of human reason - for then we should know the mind of God," he said.

apparently missing that Hawkings was using god in a metaphorical sense, and was not suggesting that a physical creator god made up part of his understanding of the universe.

The actual statement which does appear to originate from Hawkins and Mlodinow is:

"Because there is a law such as gravity, the universe can and will create itself from nothing. Spontaneous creation is the reason there is something rather than nothing, why the universe exists, why we exist. It is not necessary to invoke God to light the blue touch paper and set the universe going."

To me the god reference seems merely an attempt to express the grand scope of their claim. Hawking seems to think there is a now a theoretical framework which provides a satisfactory natural description of the universe coming into existence. Seeking natural models to describe physical reality is what theoretical physicists (religious, agnostic and atheist) do and from a science perspective this is a very interesting statement, and while I suspect I may not be as convinced as Hawking I nonetheless look forward to reading his view. But what about all the religious ruminations discussed in newspapers?

The first point to make, almost entirely absent in the newspaper coverage, is that Hawkins argument involves many elements not tested experimentally. Believers can still think that god created the universe without conflicting any observational evidence. They simply can't state there is no framework in science which could explain the universe existing to motivate their belief. Therefore there is still no inconsistency between science and a creator god.

Secondly God didn't really have a role in science prior to Hawking's statement, because to invoke god as a solution to existence involves infinite regression and of course makes no testable predictions. You may as well just postulate the universe exists as postulate god exists then created it. The absence of satisfactory physical model of how the universe came into existence motivates scientist to investigate the question, it does not motivate god. This does not mean one cannot believe in a creator god, but the motivation should not be the lack of a fully fleshed out competing theory.

So on the religion side nothing has really changed. But this has not stopped many angry responses from religious people. And for many others correcting these misunderstandings has been a huge distraction; Jon Butterworth paused while writing a paper to clarify the situation for channel 4 news.

So who is to blame? The press have certainly been irresponsible, both in misrepresenting Hawking and treating his words in a popular science book as prouncements of "What The Science Says", without ever wondering what scientific papers are behind the comments. So far it sounds like the media are entirely responsible, but it is difficult to be sure to what extent this was fed by a publicist promoting the book or even by the authors themselves. There is also the question as to what extent they explained that much of the physics used to construict this argument, like M-Theory is not confirmed experimentally. And while their words have be taken out of context perhaps Hawking and Mlodinow should have realised this might occur when they agreed to have the extracts published in The Times. I'll leave those questions to people who are more media wise than I am though.

Finally some brief, wild speculation on the physics. Since i don't actually know what the Hawking has really talked about in the book I am simply going to discuss some of the ideas which try to explain our universe and why I am skeptical that we really have a good explanation for everything. Sean Carrol made a nice video post trying to explain the physics which may have inspired Hawking's statement. My comments here are really tangential to this, based more on the idea of a theory of everything. Please read this with the 'rant' title of my blog in mind :) and remember I am talking a little outside my area of expertise now.

String theory is probably the best candidate for describing gravity at small scales, thus allowing a theory of everything. There is however an alternative of loop quantum gravity and also the possibility that we haven't invented the right model yet. M-theory is a unification of the 5 different types of superstring theories (the 'super' stands for supersymmetry, which is needed to describe matter as well as forces but don't worry too much about this) and a nice candidate for a theory of everything.

String theory now sadly seems to make few real predictions because there are 10^500 vacua with all kinds of different physics. Many string specialists talk about exploring the string landscape, and some think this is a positive development, but I find the lack of predictivity disappointing. Of course I am not a string expert and they might say I am missing the point.

Quite a long time ago Andre Linde proposed chaotic inflation where you have lots of "bubble universes" forming a multiverse. The model was not arbitrarily invented and was motivated by problems with the standard big bang theory. Unfortunately once again there are difficulties in testing many aspects of this model since the other universes are not observable. This model and the string landscape do fit together well and give a rather nice picture of how our universe might have appeared but the difficulty of testing these ideas remains.

Now if you hypothesise lots of possible physics in different universes then you can always end up with the features we need for life etc, even if the parameters look really fine tuned. Therefore some claim this is a "natural explanation" for all observable features of our universe.

However they are essentially invoking the anthropic principle (we are here and therefore our universe must have the parameters we require or we wouldn't be around to observe it). To me this is not an explanation, since it relies on an untestable hypothesis, much like god, to evade the question. This does not make the model wrong or even a bad idea, but I do not consider it a satisfactory explanation our universe without some experimental confirmation of the different universes, which seems to be a fundamental stumbling block.

Beauty, beliefs and GUTs

When I discuss a previous blog on the controversial topic of religion and science, the issue of belief without evidence sometimes comes up. Some people take the viewpoint that you should not believe in anything without evidence (I might caricature this as militant agnosticism :P), but this strikes me as a bit over constraining and does not really match how scientists actually behave.

Although we must try and objectively assess the evidence and make clear scientific statements about it, this does not mean we have to be opinion less about everything else. Indeed my experience of scientists is they are more likely to be opinionated (I am for sure ;) ) than opinion less. But even with regard to the science, when we are doing research at the frontiers of knowledge we do not yet have scientific evidence to know what will be the right approach, how nature will have solved the problem we are interested in. What motivates us in our work can be opinion based on our expectations about nature, and this is why different people look at different possibilities to solve the same problem.

In particle physics, for example, I have a (fairly dilute) belief in both Grand Unified Theories (GUTs) and Supersymmetry (SUSY). Others have a stronger belief, while some seem sure they are not realised in nature. Nonetheless everyone in the field knows that ultimately these are scientific theories which need to be tested. But where does our prior belief or theoretical prejudice spring from?

I have already talked briefly about motivations for supersymmetry so I will focus on GUTs here. As I previously discussed the Standard Model of particle physics describes three fundamental forces (strong, electromagnetic and weak) through gauge symmetries. The different forces have different 'strengths' by which the fundamental particles interact, and the fundamental particles are sensitive to different forces. Quarks, the particles which form hadrons like the proton and neutron, are sensitive the all three forces, while leptons, like the electron, to only the electromagnetic and weak forces. The fact that the strong force is much, well... stronger than other two explains why quarks are confined into hadrons and cannot be observed as free states.

So we have three (not counting gravity which is so weak we don't notice it) different forces with different strengths and fundamental particles which interact with different forces. This description matches the data incredibly well giving some of the most precisely tested predictions in all of science. But why do we have these different forces? Perhaps nature is simply like this, some scientists may well believe that is all there is to it. But for me this seems to leave nature looking rather arbitrary and messy.

Grand Unified Theories are a possible explanation for where these different forces come from. In these GUTs the different symmetries are embedded into a larger symmetry group which unifies all forces into a single unified one. All fields describing matter particles then transform together under this larger symmetry and interact via this single force. The different forces can then arise as a consequence of the breaking of this GUT symmetry. Additionally the larger symmetry of this gauge group means it has fixed charges, allowing for the possibility that the different values of electric charge we observe at low energies (unexplained in the SM) are fixed by the breaking of this GUT.

The simple elegance and beauty of Grand Unified Theories fits well into my expectations about nature. There is no proof that nature can be described in increasingly simple ways (the idea that it can is often called reductionism) but the aesthetic beauty of it appeals to me. As does my hope that I can explain or understand the forces and the electric charges we observe in nature.

This hope may seem in stark contradiction with the observation of three separate forces with different interaction strengths. However the vacuum is not empty but filled with 'virtual' particle and anti-particle pairs which are being created and annihilated and when particles interact across the vacuum such virtual particles are affected. For the case Quantum Electro-Dynamics (QED) the positively charged particles in the vacuum are drawn closer towards a negative charge and vice versa, and this effectively screens the interaction strength from the charges between two particles separated across the vacuum. The further apart the particles are the weaker the interaction strength. Since how close together particles can get in collisions depends on how energetic they are, interaction strengths depend on the energy at which the interactions take place.

For more complicated symmetries describing the weak and strong force there is a similar effect, but one also gets anti-screening from the gauge bosons so that interactions interactions can either increase or decrease with distance depending on the particle content of the model. This is the basis for having quarks which are confined into colorless hadrons at low energies while behaving like free particles at high energies, known as asymptotic freedom, for which the 2004 nobel prize for physics was awarded.

This also allows for the possibility that the separate three forces we observe at low energies have a common interaction strength at higher energies. This possibility is precisely realised in models with Supersymmetry at the TeV energy scale (the scale we are probing at the LHC), as is shown by the red lines in the figure to the left.

To motivate Supersymmetry I previously described the hierarchy problem and pointed out that this motivates new physics at the TeV scale based on our lack of understanding as to how two unrelated masses could be tuned to be incredibly close, but not equal. While this is not a fundamental proof of new low energy physics it is at least a physical question which we want to understand and the Supersymmetric solution is very elegant and therefore in my mind compelling.

I am personally very attracted to this picture of a simple Supersymmetric Grand Unified Theory at high energies which as we move down to lower energies has some of it's elegant symmetry spontaneously broken, leaving us with the complicated set of massive particles with different interactions which we have already observed. I find this idea beautiful, fascinating and compelling.

Others do not find it so convincing, but that is fine. This does not make either them nor me poor scientists who misunderstand the evidence, we simply have different theoretical prejudices based on our expectations of nature. Ultimately questions like this will be resolved by data and this is what we excitedly await from the LHC.

In search of reason: Melanie Phillips

So previously I briefly blogged about a rather repugnant attempt by Melanie Phillips to use Dawkins mistakes to slur all of science. I wrote about her in a colourful hyperbolic way, hopefully reminiscent of Hunter S. Thompson, whose books I love. However as I acknowledged at the time this was not written in a way which would persuade any fans of Melanie Phillips or indeed anyone who did not already share my view of her. Let me address this now, because while my previous comments were cartoonish exaggeration, her writing is insidious and her suggestions dangerous.

We all remember the well known adage, sticks and stones may break my bones, but words can never hurt me. And there is truth in this in the sense that words rarely represent any direct physical threat, and this is part of the reason we support freedom of speech. Nonetheless words do have power because they can persuade people to change their ideas, make different life choices and interact with each other in different ways. Words can guide the most important decisions we make, such as whether or not to go to war and whether or not to invest in hospitals to save lives. Melanie Phillips' words direct people in the wrong direction in this respect and as such could cause a lot of harm if taken seriously.

I hope that people are able to evaluate arguments when exposed to reason and favour the more rational, while discarding those which don't make sense. But it is only hope really, I can neither be sure that people will favour logic over exciting rhetoric nor even that producing increasingly rational justifications will lead to a "correct" answer. Nonetheless I do wish it to be true and suspect that a presentation of rational arguments at least helps.

Science, however, is something more than this. It is based on objective experimental evidence, with postulates which are linked to empirical predictions by rigorous mathematics. No matter how silver tongued and slick a theorist, like me, presents his or her ideas, if they are falsified by the evidence we know they are not realised in nature and reject them.

Melanie Phillips has her own ideas and she thinks they trump science. It doesn't matter that scientists say, based on evidential studies, that there is no basis to believe that MMR vaccine causes autism , based on isolated case studies and her wisdom, she knows better. It doesn't matter that intelligent design (ID) cannot be falsified because it makes no specific predictions and can fit any evidence, Intelligent Designers are making scientific arguments and ID came out of science. Evolution "is not a fact. It is a theory with holes in it." It is irrelevant what the scientific consensus is and what Britain's chief scientist states, Melanie knows that "there is no firm evidence that warming is happening; even if it is, it is most likely to have natural, not man-made causes".

It is very difficult for people with science backgrounds to read Melanie's articles and not cringe. It is not just that she takes a contrary viewpoint on so many different issues, but the that she so forthrightly insists that the expert scientists are wrong and she is correct; her continued misuse and misrepresentations of scientific literature and her ridiculous claims that scientists are dogmatic and ignore evidence.

In addition to this she writes many articles on other subjects which I find offensive for non-scientific reasons. She frequently stirs up hatred towards Muslims, takes very strong pro-Israel stances and attacks not just those who take equally strong pro Palestine positions (which I would also criticise) but also moderate Jews who criticise some Israeli government policies (you can read her words first hand here and read the mission statement of the people she is insulting here). She also argues against gay rights, accused Obama of promoting revolutionary Marxism through community organisations and was a strong supporter of the war in Iraq.

It is ironic that I'm writing this to clarify why I dislike her after writing what should have been clearly exaggerated and comical description of her, and then read articles titled "Jews for genocide", which I do not believe was intended as a joke. I think she genuinely believes that criticising the Israeli occupation of Palestine and calling for human rights on both sides top be respected is equivalent to supporting genocide of Jews.

While I am sure there are many intelligent people who hold some (or all) of her political views I expect their arguments would be more nuanced and careful. Normally I would rather challenge those people rather than pick a soft target like Melanie Phillips because it is more interesting and intellectually challenging (and there is always the possibility they'd respond with something which changes my mind). To be honest I find what I have wrote here all rather obvious and boring, but felt the need to explain why I dislike her so virulently since a few people have asked me about this. So one time only, here you have it.

Anyone but England

Not posted in a while. Too busy, in part, because I've been watching the world cup in my spare time. A few Germans have asked me why I am not supporting England, while at the same time I've noticed some English people working themselves up into a fury when they find Scots cheering for their opponents, so I will talk about this.


When Andy Murray said he was supporting "anyone but England" (which he now claims was a joke) some were outraged. The Daily mail is apoplectic with rage at the selling of t-shirts with Murray's words as the slogan, with accusations of racism being thrown about. This sentiment is certainly based on the arbitrary nationality of the players but so is all support for your national team. Complain if you will that this is divisive and could encourage nasty nationalism, but please don't rant about Scotland fans supporting England's opponents while waving the England flag with a St George's cross painted on your face.

There are of course those who genuinely hate English people, but they are a very small minority and they don't represent the rest of us, just like English people who hate all foreigners don't represent the majority of England supporters. Beyond this there are many reasons why Scots don't support England.


The Media
In Scotland we broadly share a media with England and we watch the British/ English coverage of the world cup. The patriotic fervor built up in the newspapers and various sports comments are often over the top and jingoistic, especially in the build up to games with Germany and Argentina. The actual in game coverage is very England centric with the commentators making many references to England during the games and this can be annoying, especially (but maybe not only) if you are not English. The expectation that England should be the best team in the world and always succeed is ridiculously unrealistic (most o0f the time) and very annoying to constantly hear. Then when England play there is undoubtedly bias towards them from the commentators (true of Scottish commentators for Scotland games but not quite as bad), calling fouls when there was none and berating the other team for faking when they actually got clobbered. All of these complaints may well be true for most countries, but Scots don't have to listen it from them in order to follow the world cup or keep up to date with current events.

The Politics
There are large differences in political tendencies between Scotland and England, indeed between Scotland, Northern England, Wales and the South of England. It is the south if England which consistently votes conservative in large numbers and ensure that for Labour to get into power post Thatcher they had to move much further to the right. Since the all Tory MPs were vote out in Scotland in 1997 there has only been one constituency (Dumfries and Galloway) where the Tories have gotten an MP elected and this remains the case now that we have a Conservative government again. While of course only Tory voters can be blamed for this the geographical distribution of votes breeds resentment amongst Scots which can find release through sport.

Local Rivalry
I think above and beyond those motivations though it is just a local rivalry. Local rivalries are fairly common and Scotland definitely think of England this way, there even used to be an annual England-Scotland game. I doubt many Rangers fans cheer for Celtic when they are not playing each other, or vice versa, despite sharing a city. And I believe it is similar in England. Do Man City fans cheer for Man Utd? And I'm not sure how many English club fans cheer on their rivals English club rivals when they play in Europe

The History
Driving this rivalry is Scottish history. International football is about nationalism, as silly as that all is and England are the Auld Enemy. While English kids might grow up reading propaganda stories about Wellington fighting Napoloean or the great achievements of the British empire, Scots grow up with propaganda stories about Scotland fighting off the English to remain a "free" independent nation. Our heroes are William Wallace, Robert the Bruce and Bonnie Prince Charlie, all famous for wars with England. Our adopted national anthem, Flower of Scotland presumably references the battle of Bannockburn, one of Scotland's most famous victories over England.

So tomorrow I will be cheering on Germany and I can't understand why anyone would expect Scots to do anything else. But if this isn't enough for you and you still want to shout at me, call me bitter or fulliminate about how awful it is that we don't all support our fellow Brits, then in the words of Rab. C. Nesbit "Get it right up ye!"

Why God made YouTube

Recently I've been giving tutorials for Quantum Theory and since starting this blog I've been thinking a bit about physics communication. As a result I had a look at Leonard Susskind's lectures on Quantum Mechanics available on you tube and was reminded again just how nice they are.

I sometimes get annoyed with popular communicators in my field, though perhaps this is unfair because I am not their target audience. I might blog on my feelings on this at some point. However I have nothing but good things to say about Susskind's lectures and for non-physicists who really want to learn something I highly recommend them. They are not designed to teach undergraduates physics, but what he calls continuing students, apparently older students attending mostly from interest. They provide an incredible amount of insight with minimal (but seemingly sufficient) mathematics.

While I would never consider this minimal maths route appropriate for undergraduate students who need to really learn the mathematical techniques to understand derivations and perform the necessary calculations, as a supplement to a standard education these could be great and for people who are just interested in the subject this is one the few ways where you can really get the a proper understanding without actually going off and doing a physics degree.

All of the videos can be found at Stanford's you tube page and are linked from the wikipedia page on Leonard Susskind.

Melanie Phillips and Richard Dawkins

Melanie Phillips is a disgusting, puss filled, barely human wretch that every now and then crawls up from the underworld to spew faeces onto the pages of tabloid newspapers, magazines and sometimes our tv screens. Recently she wrote a vitriolic anti-science pile of poo here.

Normally I can't be bothered writing about such feeble minded drivel. I think mistakes like this are only worth discussing if there is a possibility I could be challenging an otherwise intelligent person's thinking. However what got my attention here me here is that she is using Dawkins' anti-religious rants to paint all scientists as irrational.

``For example, Professor Richard Dawkins' told me he was ‘not necessarily averse’ to the idea that life on earth had been created by a governing intelligence — provided that such an intelligence had arrived from another planet. How can it be that our pre-eminent apostle of reason appears to find little green men more plausible as an explanation for the origin of life than God?

The answer is that in certain areas science has overreached itself by trying to play God, and as a result has turned into an ideology.''

When I wrote my blog criticising Dawkins some people defended his inaccuracies saying they they wouldn't do any harm and they didn't understand why I was so annoyed. Well here is one reason why. It isn't the best example and I am sure there are plenty of others but i don't exactly read trash news very often and rarely get a chance to write about it, so I thought I'd take the opportunity here, along with a chance to try out a Hunter S. Thompson impression in the first paragraph.

Science Voting

The UK just had a general election during which there was an interesting attempt to create a pro science voting block by the Campaign for Science andEngineering in the UK (Case) and some science communicators. I don't know all the details of this since I live in Germany, I'm still largely blog unaware and don't even have a twitter account.

Nonetheless I noticed the scivote campaign backed by Case and that Brian Cox (whose style of popular physics communication is admittedly not always to my tastes) has been doing very good work raising public awareness of the funding crisis within physics, while Martin Robbins has been evaluating the various parties' science policies and Ben Goldacre has pushed for electing pro science MPs. Sadly this ended in bitter and dismal failure. Despite it's (lack of) immediate impact in this election it brings up interesting issues. What can or should scientists aim for in politics?

The first minimal possibility is a movement to only promote direct science interests -- i.e. funding, pay and support. For scientists funding, dominates. In the UK there are real dangers here due to the squeeze from recent economic problems. Additionally in my own field of particle physics this squeeze has come following a disastrous merging of funding councils which left particle physics burdened with liabilities from other research areas, and a push that research be justified in terms of immediate economic and social goals. For research into fundamental areas this is difficult as the economic and social benefits are in the long term and we cannot predict what technological applications will come from fundamental understandings of nature which we have not yet obtained. Nonetheless all technological progress is ultimately driven by fundamental research and without it society cannot advance.

Many physicsts have fought hard in this direction and it appears they at least had some success in influencing liberal democrat policy: http://www.newscientist.com/blogs/thesword/2010/05/uk-election-lib-dems-plans-for.html.


The second possibility is to push governments to adopt an evidence based approach to policy making, where we clearly differentiate between the objective evidence based facts whhich should come from scientific experts and the values which should be specified by the representatives of the public. The lack of evidence informing UK policy came to prominance following the sacking of Prof David Nutt for offering his scientific opinion on the relative dangers of ecstacy and alcohol, which happened to offend the government and also previous tensions where the government ignored the scientific advice and reclassified cannabis to a class B drug.

Ultimately the framework of this discussion is meaningless since the aim of the drug classification is to rank them in terms of harm, while the true determining factor of whether or not drug laws or changes in penalties can be justified on a basis of protecting people harm needs to consider the effect of the laws themselves. Whether or not they actually reduce harm and if so to what extent. The evidence suggests drug laws fuel markets in addictive drugs, making more, not less, addicts and therefore more harm.

Nonetheless this restricted framework of drug classification based on harm, can be used to illustrate the kind of convolution between values and science I advocate. The harm rankings which were discussed by Nutt are in stark disagreement with current law. However one must be clear that some values go into such rankings because one is comparing different types of risk. How do you compare the risk of developing long term lung cancer with a risk of sudden death or blindness or developing mental health problems? So if we are to properly separate value judgments from the evidence, the scientists should provide quantisation on all the risks, while elected representatives of the people would provide weightings for the qualitatively different risks and the classification would be the result of combining these. This is not really how it currently works though and it is very hard to pick a reasonable set of values which could lead to the current drug classifications, given the science.

Many appear to want to go further still. As a third option a pro science movement might draw conclusions on issues where it seems clear most "normal" sets of values lead to to the same, or relatively similar policies. For example very few scientists would support the funding of homeopathy on the NHS. The technical science issue is whether or not homeopathy works, and it is clear that there is no evidence to believe it does work, many reasons to doubt it could and strong constraints on any impact beyond placebo in some cases. To believe, in spite of this, that homeopathy treatments should be funded by the public either requires a very strange love of giving people sugar pills or a strong belief that placebo benefits justify deceit coupled with an odd favoritsm for homeopathy over spiritual chanting or other equivalent options.

Finally it is clear that some science communicators want to go even further and promote issues where the values are shared by most scientists. For example in both animal rights issues and abortion I think many scientists may share similar opinions on these issues, and they have been cited as science reasons to vote for certain politicians. However there are clearly a wide range of fundamental values held on these issues and there is plenty of scope to use the same evidence, with the same understanding of it and draw dramatically different conclusions. If you fundamentally believe that an animal's life and comfort is of equal importance to a human's you will never support animal testing as a preliminary to human testing to protect humans from potential dangers. No matter how strongly you are aware of the scientific need to do them in order to save or help human lives. Similarly in abortion, while science tells us about the level of awareness and development of the life growing in the mothers womb, what weight you give to his/her life vs the impact on the mothers (and to a lesser extent fathers) life depends fundamentally on how you value it.

I personally really want to see the first and second options promoted. The latter is essentially already how the government is supposed to operate with science advisors, but it is obvious that something is badly broken in the system. If pro science lobby groups are going to pursue option three of taking policy stances against funding homeopathy and other obvious quack practices I am still comfortable as there does appear to be a need to rectify the current situation. I am a little worried though by the possibility of the forth option though, and while I agree with what is presented as the scientific viewpoint in both the animal rights and abortion issues I am well aware it is misleading to present them as uniform positions amongst scientists and feel it could be dishonest to cloak clear value based judgments like that under the name of science advocacy. I also wonder what else might get promoted in this way. I have already blogged on how Richard Dawkins has misrepresented what science can say and would not appreciate more of this.

I am not against science communicators offering their opinions on these issues or indeed joining political campaigns on them. But promoting issues like this (rather than simply informing the debate with the actual facts) should not be part of any science movement informing people which politicians' policies have the strongest evidence base, seeking to influence the election on this basis. Whether such a movement will ever properly emerge as an effective force still seems an open question though.


Anyway I know I'm new to this movement but .. um ... make me your leader? oh go on...