Television is the ideal place to explain science, argues Professor Harry Kroto, so why do broadcasters get it wrong?

In the 19th century, the likes of Byron, Shelley, Walpole and many others would go to the Royal Institution Discourses to learn about science and technology. Indeed, there was an interest in understanding the forces changing society, and an awareness too, that without such an understanding one could not be considered adequately educated. How is it that, at the end of the 20th century, people consider themselves well educated without any intrinsic understanding of the greatest intellectual achievements of this century, quantum mechanics - which underpins chemistry, biology and physics - or a real understanding of the genetic factors that threaten to shake the foundations of society to its very roots in the next century?

If the public lecture was the popular medium of a previous era, television is undoubtedly the most powerful visual medium of communication today, yet we find little real science there. Science on television could do what Classic FM has done for classical music. After all, one is never going to appreciate Beethoven without some significant exposure to his music, and the same is true of science. It seems incredible that the arts have had a regular forum on television for decades, whereas no analogous outlet exists for the sciences. I am convinced that such a forum would have enabled us to avoid the BSE catastrophe and will help to avoid similar errors in the future.

You never truly understand a subject until you solve a problem central to that subject. Yet most of the decisions about what science is shown on television are made by non-scientists who are more interested in form than in content. I find the assumption that people can assess the place and importance of scientific culture without understanding it a disturbing aberration.

A producer once told me that even the BBC's Horizon, which has the best track record, is more about entertainment than about science. In the recent programme on Fermat's Last Theorem, we were treated to a fascinating account of how the mathematician Andrew Wiles holed himself up in his room for six years to solve the problem, but we were left with little insight into the nature of the solution. It told a great personal story but was like going to the opera without hearing the music. (It is also highly unsatisfactory that Bafta's annual awards have no category for science programmes, and it is an outstanding achievement that Fermat won last year's best documentary award while competing in a general-interest category).

Nobody in the media has worked harder than the broadcaster Melvyn Bragg to promote science as a culture and scientists as creators, and I look forward to his Radio 4 series, On Giants' Shoulders, that starts on Wednesday. In a sea of indifference to the educational and cultural nature of science, Bragg seems to be the only person with perception. However, television is a much more powerful medium than radio for scientific communication because explanation often needs visual information, and radio is more abstract: the scientific method is all about observation and you must approach it through more than language alone.

Bragg's first programme will deal with Archimedes. I am sure it will be fascinating because Archimedes was such a huge intellect and appears to have played a significant role in some key historical events during his lifetime. I suspect, though, that his wonderful inventions - integration (which measures areas and volumes) and indices (which let us manipulate huge numbers) - could be much more easily described on television than on radio. Such explanation may not be the aim of this series, but perhaps it should be.

One of the best recent science series on television has been Seven Wonders of the World, in which scientists choose seven phenomena and discuss why they find them so awesome. Aubrey Manning, a professor of natural history at Edinburgh, chose the hit-or-miss steam governor because, he said: "It symbolised the whole of human technological achievement." As it rotates it opens a valve, and we were shown exactly how it maintained constant steam pressure.

Television is a direct medium, and the Royal Institution Christmas Lectures also exploit the direct approach by demonstrating science through experiments involving a live audience. When Susan Greenfield presented her lectures on the brain, she said she wanted the children to pick up a real one - that is the essence of science.

Despite the success of Stephen Hawking's recent series on the universe, I am not sure cosmology is the best topic to start people on as it is extremely complicated. We are moving into an age when people do not understand what happens when they switch on a washing machine, and it is far more important for kids to learn how computers and transistors work.

It is true that there has recently been an increase in science-related material on BBC television. However, I maintain that it seldom contains real science. It usually offers some perfunctory description of a recent contribution by science and technology that has been deemed useful. More often than not it is a nature programme, the archetype of which is an eagle shoving bits of gerbil down the throats of eaglets. After a while the fascination for watching the animal kingdom eating itself wears thin, and it is debatable whether this material conveys much useful scientific information.

We scientists are continually being asked what our discoveries are useful for, but never what the nature of the discovery was and why it triggered a cathartic response. Furthermore, we can discuss the long-term value of the basic research until we are blue in the face by describing how it took 100 years to find a use for liquid crystals (in display devices such as wristwatches) and for some platinum compounds (as powerful anticancer agents), only to be told - as I was by the assistant editor of a newspaper - that we were discussing whether public money should be spent on useless research (like my own, which led to the discovery of C₆₀, one of the most elegant forms of carbon for which numerous applications are appearing on the horizon).

To understand science, one needs to understand the language. Scientists have been bending over backwards for a decade to explain themselves to non-scientists, but it is time to accept that there is a language barrier; science is a cultural and intellectual activity, the language of which must be learnt for its ideas to be understood. Like all languages, it must be acquired very early in life; if a child does not learn language early, he never learns, and the same is true of science, particularly mathematics. Attempts to redress the balance later in life are costly in time and effort, and in general will not be successful. It is about time that we took account, in our educational programmes, of the fact that the brain's ability to acquire new knowledge and use it decreases rapidly with age.

It may help to see science as perhaps the only truly international culture. Just as we must learn the Japanese language in order to appreciate the true culture of Japan (their great writers such as Kawabata) and the Japanese must learn English to appreciate our culture (which is embodied in Shakespeare, say), so those who want to understand science must familiarise themselves with mathematics and the symbolism of chemistry and physics. There is no point complaining that we scientists do not come down to some level or other. We have to be met halfway. The chemical term C₆H₆ for benzene has as much significance in chemistry and biology as the name Hamlet does in English literature. Just as one might ask how to describe a Rothko painting to someone who cannot see and has never seen, one might wonder how to explain the essence of particle physics to someone without mathematics. It is, as the late American physicist Richard Feynman said in Christopher Sykes's wonderful film about him, "a severe limitation".

The Vega Science Trust, of which I am chairman, was set up to create television programmes that treat science as a cultural activity. The programmes aim to give scientists as much flexibility as possible to present their own science in their own ways. We also want to capture an archive of key scientists talking about their discoveries and enthusing about what turned them on to science.

There will soon be numerous television channels and the science community will acquire its own home base. I have heard the comment made that we must avoid a ghetto but, as the physicist Frank Close has said, let's have a ghetto because anything is better than the present situation. How have we, who created the communications technology, allowed ourselves for so long to be told which science should be broadcast by those who have so little understanding of science? The same attitude does not occur in other areas of broadcasting and, indeed, would not be tolerated.

It is high time to recognise that the true nature of science is bound up with the intellectual nature of discovery (the greatest attribute of the human species). Until this fact is grasped, science will not be appreciated as part of our cultural heritage, and scientists will not be respected: instead they will be called on to provide ever more material wealth for a society becoming ever more ignorant about how precariously it is balanced on the achievements of science and technology.

Harry Kroto
Copyright © 1997 The Sunday Times