It is fascinating to see how pure science can lead to a massive onrush of technology generations or even centuries later

It is fascinating to see how “pure” science can lead to a massive onrush of technology, generations or even centuries later. The series On Giants’ Shoulders was an extension of those conversations. I was trained as a historian, and this was my attempt to find a context, a grid.The pleasures of learning about scientists over the last two and a half thousands years were immense. This is exhilarating.I was able to pursue my own interest by inviting scientists on to BBC Radio 4’s Start the Week. The devoted – and increasing – interest of listeners underlined the fact that many people without a scientific education are determined not to miss the great intellectual stories of the century. It promises both creation and destruction, and has delivered both.But I believe it is the revival of interest in Big Ideas which is driving more people to read about science. Where do we come from? Where does the Universe come from? How was it made and of what was it made? How might it develop? We asked these questions when we were young, but put them aside as childish things when we grew up.

I suspect that we put them aside because we could find no satisfactory answers. Today scientists are unafraid of answers; they train their rockets on the targets of the obvious every day. After all, from Darwin to Dawkins, it is clear that we only made it here by a roll of the dice Science may give us the edge necessary to survival. Who knows what pull the number 2,000 is exercising? Is it the moon of numbers, pulling at the tides of thought and forcing them back from oceans of low activity to a high tide of turbulent resolutions?Science also satisfies our addiction to fear and risk. In On Giants’ Shoulders, Sigmund Freud and Poincare are the spokesmen for these two creatures of the mind. Frankenstein is the great figure for both and the monster’s penetration of our culture is symptomatic of the fear and the nightmare Perhaps homo sapiens is a fearful and high-risk species. Science now seems to promise the certainties, and therefore the securities, still available from religion but delivered to fewer people today.

As a species, we seem to be programmed to look for answers and meanings Science today delivers answers by the month. Scientists can put out a great flow of fact to a growing public urgently in search of hand-holds and guidelines.This conviction that science is a religious substitute may be accelerating towards the millennium. It is on a wide scale, and there is something urgent about it. It needs accounting for.One reason for the increased interest must be the mundane autobiographical explanation I gave of my own conversion. It seems easy to reach out for a word with a religious connotation, and that may be part of an explanation. In the time of the Double Helix, and CP Snow’s Two Cultures in the 1950s; before that in the 1930s, during the Darwinian debates of the 19th century, and in the age of Newton and Galileo But this is a phenomenon of our time. Steve Jones, Susan Greenfield, Richard Dawkins, Stephen Pinker, Stephen J Gould, Lewis Wolport, Ian Stewart, John Gribbin and others began to populate the bookshops.