TechBlog

To some this may be troubling, but part of the problem we face with scientific advancement, is the fear of the unknown - fear that often leads to rejection.

Science is a topic which can cause people to turn off their brains. I contend that science has failed to excite more people for at least two reasons: it is frequently taught poorly, often as rote memorisation of complex facts and data, and it is antithetical to our visceral-driven way we live and interact with our world.

As a young student I was very turned off by the forced memorisation of seemingly trivial facts which were, I felt, at the expense of true understanding. Instead I was much more interested in discovering and living in my world - I caught frogs and snakes, built boats and explored my surroundings.

In the past, science and the world used to seem easier to understand when discovery was based directly on our human senses. For example, when Darwin visited the Galapagos on his epic voyage he was able to see with his own eyes the flightless cormorants, the giant tortoises and the swimming and diving iguanas. From this sensory experience, he was able then to relate what he saw in the Galapagos to his other observations and develop a new context for understanding life by proposing the theory of evolution.

When Galileo developed the telescope, the wonders of the skies were truly illuminated for humans by expanding the capabilities of our visual system. Scientists have continued to extend our vision to glimpse distance galaxies that are not even faint stars in the sky to our naked eyes. Microscopes have helped us see further into the inner world of biology, first to cells then to molecules, all advances taking us well beyond our own physiological capabilities.

Our ability to see, hear, smell, taste, and feel the world around us are wonderful evolutionary developments upon which we base our daily lives. We can recognize and respond to the minor facial differences in how the 6.5 billion of us on Earth appear, but also to minute changes in facial expression indicating astonishment, pleasure, fear, love, and hate. We devote a substantial amount of modern human existence and our economy, appealing to our love of visual and audio stimulation.

In addition to our obvious senses, we have other remarkable capabilities that most of us are not aware of, but affect our lives from minute to minute. For example, while we cannot see, taste or feel carbon dioxide, we are extraordinarily sensitive to minute changes of CO2 concentrations in our bodies. It is carbon dioxide not oxygen that controls our breathing.

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