Dr. Liam Dodd (40:18)
I think the biggest secret science is keeping from the general public is how little money we make just across the board. Like, as a PhD student, I made about €1300amonth, and I lived in a city with rent that was €1,000amonth. So when you do the maths, you realize that I was homeless for periods of my PhD. So that's the biggest secret that we're keeping from people is that we don't have any money. But I think the general distrust comes from the facts. I think it's in two places. Firstly, science is actually quite hard. Not in a bragging kind of way, like just science is difficult. Any subject done to a high level is difficult. And then you add in the complexity that the language of science often isn't the natural language in which you otherwise interact with the world. So, for example, if I went into an undergraduate history course, I might not know what's going on to a great extent, but I can at least follow what's happening in the lecture. I can follow that names are being said and events are being described. If a history graduate walked into an undergraduate physics course, they might not know what the maths on the board even does. They might just physically not have the context or learning at that point to know what it does. And that's not to say they're stupid, it's just to say that they, they don't know, which is fair. I don't know what happened in the Napoleonic wars, but it generally doesn't affect my life to much extent. And then you add on that, like in other fields like chemistry and biology, the wording is quite difficult as well. We use things like autonomic nervous system or whatever it was that the ans that the machine said it would cured. These are technical words that have confusing double meanings because if you say someone is nervous and then you talk about the nervous system, they're different things, they're not the same word being used for the same context. So I think to an extent there is a general impenetrability to science when it's not explained well. I think these days scientists are trying their damnedest to explain it better and trying to get people interested in science and trying to get them to understand what is happening. I was in my second year at university when the Large Hadron Collider found the Higgs boson. And for the first time in my experiences, everyone was talking about physics. Everyone wanted to understand physics, everyone know what was going on. But in general, physics isn't cool and isn't sexy. I spent four and a half years slaving away and my contribution will be read by 30 to 40 people, probably for the next hundred years. You add on to that the science is then attached in some places to such important parts of life, like cancer treatment Cancer is terrifying. I've lost people to cancer. I think everyone I know has lost people to cancer. And if you were told that there was some secret way to cure it, everyone jump on it. And then even the word the cure for cancer is itself like a misnomer. Like there is no cure for cancer. Cancer is a multitude of different diseases which is often relatively unique to each individual. So there will never be a cure for cancer. There will just be better and better treatments until we get to the point where we can effectively have said we've cured cancer because our treatments are such to that that cancer isn't a cause of death anymore. And I think also on top of that is that there is a relative snootiness among some in the scientific like establishment that they think that spending their time talking to average people about physics or chemistry biology isn't the best use of their time, that they're not the majority. But there's a definite strain of disregard for the rest of society. And you can feel this a lot when you're in places like CERN in like very subtle ways that, like, I was in a room where everyone has a doctorate or higher. Like everyone in the room has that and there's like 100 of us in the room. That is not statistically normal, that's not statistically average. There's no way that the rest of society will ever do that. Like, I don't know anyone from my girlfriend's circle of friends that is doing a doctorate. That's just not the case. But I know obviously hundreds of people who did them. So there's kind of an isolationism that builds up within us because we are just in our own circle and in our own separate world. And then so you have. The mixture of the language we use is complicated at times. We're not always the best at explaining it in simple terms. We live in effectively relatively isolated groups because we work on people who have the same qualifications as us. Like we don't apart from outside of HR and secretaries and cleaners, we don't have staff that have different roles and different backgrounds. Everyone has the same background. The kind of perception of eliteness among us and then the fact that like a lot of us use public money to do all our research, then you have that strand of we're wasting the government's money. It makes it much more comforting than to say when something is scary in the world like cancer, to say there's some sort of conspiracy or trick occurring than it is to say that, like, the world is just random and no one knows what happens for any reason. Like, I think the reason why there's a conspiracy that pharmaceutical companies have cured cancer, but they won't give it out because it's more. It's more profitable to like, not do that is that it's much more comforting to think that there's a scary bogeyman. There's nothing you can do about it. Like, you can't do that. They're rich, they're released. There's nothing you can do about it. Than it is to kind of stare in the face that you don't have a choice whether you get cancer. Like, it just happens. There's nothing you can do about it in terms of like, you can obviously lower risk factors. You cannot smoke, you cannot drink, you cannot eat red meat. But end of the day, there's nothing you can do at the end to stop it. If it happens, it happens. So I just think it's a kind of trying to understand a world which is scary. Scientists are a relatively easy group to kind of demonize for treating everyone else as if they're not deserving of what we have, which is kind of not what we're trying to do.
