Catastrophe theory

Abstract

"So, five compelling reasons for all citizens everywhere to be informed about scientific ideas – not mountains of fact – but an understanding with which they can lead fulfilled, safe and rewarding lives. And the sixth reason to know your science? Frankly, to save the world. There are, according to Professor Paul Ehrlich of Stanford University, at least half a dozen ways in which the Earth and our place on it are threatened environmentally. Climate is just one of those. If we are to get intact through what Professor Martin Rees (President of the Royal Society) wonders will be Our Last Century, then it will be through science. Given these reasons it is galling to find our profession being diminished. In March 2008, the Pew Research Center’s State of The Media 2008 was released. It showed that in five hours of US cable news you would see an hour on politics, 26 minutes on crime, one minute on science and three on health. The journal Nature commented in an editorial: ‘Perhaps the most worrisome finding in the Pew report is that this type of resource-intensive science is precisely the most threatened: as the newspaper industry responds to falling circulation with sweeping cuts, science stories are among the first to suffer.’ Why so few science reporters when the need is manifest and the public interest is enormous? The answer is both simple and exasperating: cost."