How rational is America?
The home of conspiracy theories, creationism and climate scepticism is also a scientific powerhouse. Neil Denny is on a road trip to explore this contradiction
Neil Denny
guardian.co.uk, Friday 11 May 2012 09.51 EDT
This is the first of a short series of columns, so I'll begin with a brief introduction. I'm the producer and presenter of a radio show and podcast called Little Atoms. It's a talk show mainly concerned with popular science and rationalism, encompassing the "Sceptic" movement. We're interested in how science and culture, and often science and religion, rub up against each other.
I'm not a scientist by training, my interest in science and scepticism coming quite late in life. As a child in the 1970s I was obsessed by the space race, and I was a fan of the science fiction of the era, such as Star Wars and Close Encounters and Silent Running. I read a lot of post-apocalyptic science fiction. I'd therefore have claimed that I was interested in science, but what I would have really meant was weird phenomena: Bigfoot, UFOs, and the Bermuda Triangle.
I presumed all of these things to be, if not true exactly, then at least plausible and worthy of study by researchers. I certainly wouldn't have been able to tell you the difference between palaeontologists searching for ancient bones, and the search for the Loch Ness Monster.
Then one day I accidentally bought Carl Sagan's masterpiece The Demon Haunted World, presuming from the title that it was another book about unexplained phenomena. And it was, just not in the way I was expecting. Sagan calmly explains in the book that there are natural physical phenomena that are provable, and others that are not, and that there exists in the scientific method a mechanism for telling this stuff apart. This was a revelation to me.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2012/may/11/how-rational-america
This will be fun to follow.
http://feeds.feedburner.com/littleatomsroadtrip
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