What a great opportunity for the public to get a better understanding of
the nature of science.
I hope it's used as a chance to value the Question more highly than the
Answer.
Wouldn't it be great if the public's most asked question was one that we
can't yet answer !
What a fabulous opportunity to say 'Yes, science is about discovering
that which we do not yet know, not actually about experts trotting out
tried and tested answers'.
There could be a session at Cheltenham devoted to an open format
audience discussion to design experiments to answer some of these
questions and then comparing that with the way that current
understanding was actually arrived at.
I particularly like the question 'Why do we go grey?' because it
presumably ends up at the question 'Why do we age?'
One could have a panel taking the audience through the idea of how we
have got to our current understanding .... visible microscopy, electron
microscopy, pigments, DNA sequencing etc.... and give a really long term
view of how 'discoveries' such as 'how we go grey' are actually the
result of a very long process of experimentation.... real science.
Kevin Hollis
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