When you are a scientist, your daily concerns revolve around mundane issues, so mundane that most normal people would struggle to recognise them as urgent: primarily funding woes, like I wrote about last week. But also publications, teaching, the dozen new academic chores that sprout from the hydra’s bleeding neck each time you finally manage to chop off a head. (This metaphor is brought to you by a recent Bluesky exchange about the surprising goriness of Ancient Greek mythology.)
All this stuff is vital, urgent and ever-pressing to me in my little academic bubble. It feels, sometimes, like the most important thing in the world. And it can consume all of my emotional energy, until my tank is empty.
But there is a bigger world out there, beyond the lab. Most scientists I know are interested in many other topics: art, music, film, sport, theatre, literature. And politics – especially politics. Like me, they tend to list to the left on most issues, though of course not universally.
As I write, two countries with hefty nuclear arsenals are in the process of poking a lion with a very large pointy stick. A lion with a lot of powerful friends.
Perhaps some of us will shrug and think, well, nothing truly bad will come of it. After all, the pointy stick has been deployed many times over the past few months.
As a scientist, I can’t help wondering how we have all become so inured to violence – so inured that we forget that violence might well lead to serious consequences. We witness on our news feeds those rogue states (you know who you are) killing and bombing with limited oversight, so frequently that it sometimes does not seem as urgent as this grant, that scientific manuscript revision. It is so commonplace that some forget about cause and effect, in a way that people, like me, who grew up during the Cold War (think, existential dread punctuated by nuclear attack drills in school) never fully can.
But we do forget, as a society. We forget about the Butterfly Effect. We learned in school that World War I was catalysed by the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand. This event seems, today, almost quaint, that something so small could have led to something so catastrophic. Arguably, the person assassinated today was a hundred times more consequential. Yet surely these days we are buffered by so much news, by so much going on at once, so many small, daily insults, that one isolated act couldn’t really push us over the edge.
But what if, actually, it could?
It’s safe to assume that if the unthinkable does happen, the scholarly pursuit of science will be the first thing to grind to a halt.
And if this happens, it’s these funding and publication worries that will seem quaint, in the grand scheme of things.
