We've made public science boring. It's time to make it magnificent.
An essay on the urgency of "demonstration statecraft" – a way of building that pairs theatrical ambition with democratic delivery.
A question: When did you last see a government-funded science project that made you catch your breath?
The kind of awe you might have felt watching a gigantic SpaceX booster land itself in the tiny arms of a crane?
Public science in the UK and Europe has congregated around a central orthodoxy of prudence and discipline. We've become excellent at justifying our existence through market-failure logic and efficiency metrics. But we’ve neglected the magnificent public spectacle – the pageantries of competence that build deep, lasting public legitimacy.
This has created a vacuum which is now being filled by tech billionaires, philanthropies, and authoritarian states who understand that pairing visible feats with central patronage is a powerful source of legitimacy.
The solution isn't to abandon rigour, but to learn from a surprising source: the playbook of the Counter-Reformation. In a new, long-form essay for Better Science, I argue that we must rediscover a form of "demonstration statecraft" to make public science awe-inspiring once more.
Read "The Counter-Reformation of Science" here:
