The Science Boom - or Death March?

Once a month The Times (£) encloses a slim magazine, Eureka, addressing ‘Science, Life, The Planet’. This month’s issue (28) includes a Science Matters piece by the science writer Vivienne Parry, Engineering Success, with the theme ‘It is vital that engineering is done, but more importantly it must be seen to be done.’:

You might call it the boson effect, or possibly the Cox effect. Either way, interest in physics is booming, both at A level and degree level. It mirrors the CSI effect that spawned, at one time, more than 400 different higher education courses in forensic anything, including my favourite, a joint honours in forensic science with childcare.
But, at a time when the Government is frantic for growth, physicists are the prancing stallions of science — gorgeous to behold, but not easily harnessed. Meanwhile, engineers, surely the fount of regeneration, have removed themselves to a field where, Eeyore-like, and between mouthfuls of thistles, they say: “But nobody loves us.”
The problem with engineers — and, believe me, I wouldn’t be writing this if I’d had a pound for every time they told me they were unloved — is that they’ve got lost within theory.
… So, creative spirits, many of whom have engineering in their bones, go to art school or into product design where using your hands to put ideas into reality is built into the fabric of the courses.
… So, all hail UCL’s proposed Make Space … [which] will allow people to prototype, to share, to exchange and above all, to make.

Certainly, previous posts here have bewailed the lot of engineers in the UK: the way we use the term engineer, and the contrasting presence of engineers amongst the elite who run China. Whether the Royal Academy of Engineering would share the particular diagnosis offered by Parry, trained as a zoologist, or her proposed cure, I’m not sure. But I do find it slightly worrying if there is a CSI-style boom in physics – or at least applications to study physics at university – spurred on by the telegenic Brian Cox, professor at Manchester and former keyboard player for D Ream. Here he is on ITV1’s Jonathan Ross Show on 7 January 2012, talking briefly about, among other things, the Higgs Boson and CERN’s Large Hadron Collider:
I see nothing wrong with Cox making physics or science in general seem a cool thing to consider as a career, far from it. But it might be worth reflecting on an article in the New York Times last November about recent American experience, Why Science Majors Change Their Minds (It’s Just So Darn Hard):

Politicians and educators have been wringing their hands for years over test scores showing American students falling behind their counterparts in Slovenia and Singapore. How will the United States stack up against global rivals in innovation? The president and industry groups have called on colleges to graduate 10,000 more engineers a year and 100,000 new teachers with majors in STEM — science, technology, engineering and math. All the Sputnik-like urgency has put classrooms from kindergarten through 12th grade — the pipeline, as they call it — under a microscope. And there are encouraging signs, with surveys showing the number of college freshmen interested in majoring in a STEM field on the rise.
But, it turns out, middle and high school students are having most of the fun, building their erector sets and dropping eggs into water to test the first law of motion. The excitement quickly fades as students brush up against the reality of what David E. Goldberg, an emeritus engineering professor, calls “the math-science death march.” Freshmen in college wade through a blizzard of calculus, physics and chemistry in lecture halls with hundreds of other students. And then many wash out.

The article goes on to explain, in a vein not dissimilar to Parry’s, how

Since becoming Notre Dame’s dean in 2008, Dr. Kilpatrick has revamped and expanded a freshman design course that had gotten “a little bit stale.” The students now do four projects. They build Lego robots and design bridges capable of carrying heavy loads at minimal cost. They also create electronic circuit boards and dream up a project of their own.
“They learn how to work with their hands, how to program the robot and how to work with design constraints,” he says. But he also says it’s inevitable that students will be lost. Some new students do not have a good feel for how deeply technical engineering is. Other bright students may have breezed through high school without developing disciplined habits. By contrast, students in China and India focus relentlessly on math and science from an early age.

If engineering requires a “math-science death march”, physics even more so. The Higgs boson derives from the Standard Model of particle physics (and its extensions), inaccessible without advanced maths.  It would be comforting to think that young people whose imagination is being caught by charismatic communicators like Cox have a realistic understanding of what’s involved in getting to degree level in a STEM subject.

Let’s hope they do, because if the UK is going to sustain an advanced healthcare system, nuclear energy, submarine and weapons programmes, world-class engineering consultancy and advanced manufacturing, with an IT infrastructure to match, together with HS2 and perhaps a Severn barrage or other civil engineering projects – it’s going to need them.

So will the USA, whose new military strategy, announced by President Obama on 5 January, and rebalancing toward the Asia-Pacific region, implies a competition in military capabilities with China of the sort that characterised the NATO-Soviet confrontation of more than 20 years ago. Such capabilities are, of course, STEM-based.