Professor Anne Glover, Chief Scientific Advisor for Scotland

‘Does Science Matter?’

February 13, 2007

UPDATE: please see below for event report.

At the 2007 ECRR Peter Wilson lecture in February 2007, Scotland’s first Chief Scientific Advisor, Professor Anne Glover, posed the question: Does science matter? Her conclusion? In a word: yes! But her argument was, of course, slightly more complex…

It started with the Big Bang and ended with a plea for Scotland’s scientists to stop being silent on the issues affecting us all, but Anne Glover’s lecture on ‘Does science matter?’ was sound advice for everyone concerned about the image – and the future – of science.

Professor Glover, the Chief Scientific Advisor for Scotland, explained how science helps us understand the world we live in, from the birth of the cosmos to the ongoing search for dark matter. Along the way, she also covered microbiology, climate change, cancer, renewable energy and nanotechnology (including glass that cleans itself), concluding that even though science may cause many problems, it also provides good solutions.

Controversy was never far away in the course of the lecture, including the worry that water may be the new oil (thus the need for the self-cleaning glass), and the popular notion that scientists are not just ‘boring’ but bad for the planet.

Venue: Royal Society of Edinburgh, George Street, EH2 2PQ

Event report

An event report by Peter Barr is available at scribd.com (courtesy RSE).