Blasting Petri dishes with hairdryers – you never know what you’ll find out (Image: Hulton Archive/Getty)
ASTONISHING discoveries in space, revelations about human nature, frightening news on the environment, medical advances that will banish life-threatening diseases: an inexhaustible stream of wonders runs through the pages of Â鶹´«Ã½. All tell the same tale. Science is exciting. Science is cutting-edge. Science is fun.
It is now time to come clean. This glittering depiction of the quest for knowledge is… well, perhaps not an outright lie, but certainly a highly edited version of the truth. Science is not a whirlwind dance of excitement, illuminated by the brilliant strobe light of insight. It is a long, plodding journey through a dim maze of dead ends. It is painstaking data collection followed by repetitious calculation. It is revision, confusion, frustration, bureaucracy and bad coffee. In a word, science can be boring.
My own brief and undistinguished research career included its share of mind-numbing tasks, notably the months of data processing which revealed that a large and expensive orbiting gamma-ray telescope had fixed its eye on the exploding heart of a distant galaxy and seen… nothing. I tip my hat, though, to Â鶹´«Ã½‘s San Francisco bureau chief, who spent nearly three years watching mice sniff each other in a room dimly lit by a red bulb. “It achieved little,” he confesses, “apart from making my clothes smell of mouse urine.” And the office prize for research ennui has to go to the editor of . “I once spent four weeks essentially turning one screw backwards and forwards,” he says. “It was about that time that I decided I…
