My remark at the inauguration of the 102nd Indian Science Congress on the antiquity of the Pythagoras Theorem got more space in the media than it deserved. What was actually non-news got precedence over coverage of the infinitely more significant areas of progress into climate change, biotechnology and earth sciences which were deliberated at the five-day annual assemblage of scientists and researchers from all over the world. Distinguished mathematicians, physicists and other scientists, who came for this exceptional annual event, received scant attention. In fact, even though I devoted far more time in my address on the need to persist with the research for clean energy despite the falling oil prices, the matter got practically no importance. In the course of my speech I also recognised the significant presence of young Indian scientific scholars in the audience who are trailblazers on the international scene. This too was overlooked.
Science and controversy are old bedfellows. There are fundamental and secondary controversies in science. These, however, do not concern the common man in an everyday sense. For instance, physicists are caught up on the future of the ‘String Theory’. As an example of a secondary controversy, one might cite the one in evolutionary biology on the importance of ‘punctuated equilibrium’. The historicity of the Pythagoras theorem does not fit into either category. At the polite best, it may be shelved away as a media controversy, unique to India, a land where the past is often a battleground of back-projected contemporary interests.
The layman generally evaluates the goodness of science in terms of ethics. When a particular form of science fails to meet the high moral threshold, an aspectual controversy erupts. In 2001, the then US President George W Bush banned federal funding for stem cell research, thereby strengthening a case for state intervention in scientific research. This had been demanded by purists for generations. In 1875, great nationalist novelist, Bamkim Chandra Chattopadhyay, had predicted in a collection of essays titled ‘Bigyan Rahasya’ that the majority of the fruits of the Industrial Revolution --which was a contemporary experience -- would be controlled in the coming (20th) century by agents of imperialism and utilised for world domination and perpetrating socio-economic divisions.
In our own lifetime our responses to science have been shaped by existential questions which were based on fundamentally ethical questions. Between the first explosion of the atom bomb in Hiroshima in 1945 and the fall of the Berlin wall in 1989, an entire generation grew into maturity with full exposure to the benign as well as draconian faces of science. I remember during my growing years hearing radio plays with Armageddon situations. World War III, we were told, was to happen sooner rather than later and in that eventuality the entire human race would be wiped out.
Last November, while reading an article commemorating the fall of the Berlin Wall, it suddenly struck me that 25 years had passed since anyone talked of a doomsday scenario arising out of wars marked by nuclear bombings. So, in a sense, the most terrifying controversy surrounding science and technology has gone away. No more peace marches and guns-versus-butter comparisons. Human beings withdrew into complacence. But did it result in the total disappearance of controversy?
Certainly not. The first warnings of climate change and eclipse of human civilisation caused by greenhouse gases and wanton consumption of fossil fuel driven technologies were heard at the height of the Cold War -- in the early 1960s. By the mid-1970s, the first satellite images were revealing the formation of water bodies on the polar ice caps where none should exist. But these fears seemed infinitesimal in the background of imminent nuclear winter. It was only in the post-Cold War era that controversy driven by climate considerations began to make an impression on the collective psyche. This adds up to another corollary: a controversy is not one unless it reaches political fruition. Here, the media glare counts for much.
Today, the confrontation between science and controversy insofar as the popular sphere goes, is more multi-dimensional than we had known earlier. In my formative years, the questions seemed relatively more simplistic. There were ethical questions raised over the political domination of scientific research, concentration of power in the military-industrial complex, domination by a handful of countries controlling nuclear weaponry, militarisation of space, etc. Today, new tracks are constantly being added. This is not necessarily bad, but my short point is --why are people debating less and less about them? Why are we not seeing as much popular involvement in scientific controversies as we did three decades ago?
This is one of the ironies of the era of social media which otherwise sees so many mundane developments like funny songs or bizarre photographs going viral in a matter of hours. We did not see that happening over the explosion of evidence that surveillance technology controlled by the state had reduced all traditional concepts of privacy to zero. The Internet is becoming increasingly intrusive but there seems to be minimum response to that. Rather than man using cyberspace, it is man, who is coming to be used.
In certain fields, science is progressing at a rate impossible for laws and regulations to cope with. The world woke up to this problem on January 26 when a tiny Drone --so small it avoided all the latest radar systems--landed on the roof of the most protected building on earth, the White House in Washington DC. It was only then that questions of ‘regulating’ Drone technology came up, something that was strangely avoided when used in Pakistan and Afghanistan against sleeping women and children.
Whither renewable energy? The rapid fall in world oil prices is threatening to distract funders, who had wholeheartedly backed research into clean energy sources during the past five years. The rivalry between the US and Russia is said to be the reason behind the present slump, which is expected to translate into a windfall for countries like India, who are 85 per cent dependent on important fossil fuels. A controversy that I can foresee is --should the Indian car user be given the full benefits of this free fall? Or is this the most opportune moment to give the benefit with one hand and take it away with the other using the Polluter Pays Principle (PPP)? The revenue thus earned could be used to bolster research into solar and wind power so that we could leapfrog to the fossil fuel free economy stage. Already in Western Europe, solar power is deemed the only option for investors in the power sector. Giant nuclear and thermal power stations are vanishing as breakthrough in photo-voltaic technology is making it possible for governments and corporates to plan solar power projects on gigawatt scales.
That, again, would open a new set of controversies. Once solar power becomes cheaper to farm, would governments be lobbied by the corporates for protection from free, rooftop units? Or, just as water taxation became the norm, would solar energy be ‘managed’ by private-public-partnership entities? Science, while dominating our lives, is constantly opening up fresh Pandora’s box of conflicts of interest. It is the duty of mainstream media to devote more and more space to the justified controversies rather than the irrelevant ones.
(The writer is Union Minister for Science & Technology and Earth Sciences. The opinions expressed are his own)