YouSaid · the spoken record

Philip Ball

lines on the record: 72
first: 2024-09-04
most recent: 2024-09-04
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“You see, having written that book and having looked into the history of it, I would like to feel that if someone came along and said, here's a ring of invisibility, it's all yours and just yours. Do what you want with it. I would like to think that I would be like Gandalf. And I would say, no, take it away. Don't tempt me with it because I know where that stuff leads. If one had it, then of course the sky's the limit. You could take what you liked. And that's the worry. So, yeah, for me, I would say I would love to feel that I would resist that temptation”
2024-09-04 · Conversations with Tyler · Philip Ball on the Interplay of Science, Society, and the Quest for Understanding · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Seemed to have this kind of moral conclusion that actually invisibility, it sounds like it would be a wonderful superpower, but we have to really beware of that temptation because it's a very strong corrupting influence. I mean, look, that's, of course, that's what happened in the Lord of the Rings, right? That was entirely the metaphor of the ring of power there. So I would say, I mean, in military terms, invisibility would probably be worth enormous amounts. And the military in particular is investing in research that is trying to find.”
2024-09-04 · Conversations with Tyler · Philip Ball on the Interplay of Science, Society, and the Quest for Understanding · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And invisibility there is a kind of metaphor for lack of responsibility. When you can evade responsibility for your actions, which is exactly what you're talking about we could do if we had this ring of invisibility, that is a corrupting capability to have. And it seems almost inevitable that that is what happens. And in fact, it's what we see happening all the time now, particularly on the internet, where that anonymity effectively, that invisibility that the internet provides, that social media can provide to some people, or they think it provides anyway, we see that that encourages them to do things and to say things that they would never do to someone in person. And sometimes it's even called the Gaiji's effect. So these stories that we have told traditionally about invisibility.”
2024-09-04 · Conversations with Tyler · Philip Ball on the Interplay of Science, Society, and the Quest for Understanding · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, exactly. And Tyler, it's so interesting that those are the two things you, you know, alight on us. Hey, you could do those things because that really is the message of HUL's book. And it's a message that he took from an ancient myth that first crops up in Plato's Republic, a myth of a chap called Gaijes, who is a shepherd who finds a ring of invisibility. So he's just going about his job as a shepherd, and then he comes across this ring. And what does he do? The first thing he does is he gets to go on the expedition of, I guess it's sort of taking the taxes or something to the king and uses the ring to kill the king, seduce the queen, and become the ruler, the tyrant, in fact, of the population. And the message that Plato wanted us to get from that story and that H.G. Wells wanted us to get when he rewrote it as the invisible man is invisibility corrupt.”
2024-09-04 · Conversations with Tyler · Philip Ball on the Interplay of Science, Society, and the Quest for Understanding · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To these small asymmetries that appear certainly internally in the body, I'm really not sure. You know, it may just in some cases be an evolutionary accident.”
2024-09-04 · Conversations with Tyler · Philip Ball on the Interplay of Science, Society, and the Quest for Understanding · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, it's pretty symmetric. It's, you know, we do have this bilateral symmetry, but it's not perfectly so. And the question of why that is so, why we have these small asymmetries, I'm not sure, I may be wrong, but I'm not sure that that's something to which we have a clear answer. It may be, I mean, we have some understanding now, and it's a really interesting understanding of how developmentally that happens, how that symmetry is broken in the body. It's really fascinating to see how that happens. And when you start to think about it, it's not obvious why it should happen at all if we start from this symmetrical bundle of cells. How does that symmetry get broken in the first place to create any sort of structure? So we have some understanding of how it happens developmentally, but whether there's an adaptive benefit or a physiological benefit.”
2024-09-04 · Conversations with Tyler · Philip Ball on the Interplay of Science, Society, and the Quest for Understanding · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Has to be a good thing. And I think that, you know, if that's the case, if women are finding actually, you know what, I would rather not, you know, start a family young, get married young, I would rather actually have a career. I would rather have my own independence. It seems to me that not only is that a positive thing in itself, but that is something we need to understand why they faced with making that choice, why they faced with the choice of either a career or a conventional family life. Again, these seem to me to be social questions that we need to ask that don't have and shouldn't have a technological solution.”
2024-09-04 · Conversations with Tyler · Philip Ball on the Interplay of Science, Society, and the Quest for Understanding · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't know that they're going to disappear. I think it would be it's important to understand why it is those trends are happening and to have some sorts of projections of how they might ultimately play out. My understanding is certainly that in some Asian countries where birth rates are falling, but I think this may be true actually in some African countries as well, there seems to be some connection to the increasing empowerment of women, which has to be a good and important thing. And particularly in some Asian countries, women are increasingly thinking, you know, why should I follow the traditional route of getting married young, raising a family rather than having a career? And also as women in those countries get greater access to education, they become a bit more discerning about what they're going to accept or what they're going to look for in a partner and what they're not. And I think that.”
2024-09-04 · Conversations with Tyler · Philip Ball on the Interplay of Science, Society, and the Quest for Understanding · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, in my experience, kids are a lot of fun, but I think it's really important that not everyone is made to feel as though they ought to feel that way. So absolutely, I think if people choose not to have children, then, you know, I think there's often a problem, actually, that if people make that choice, it becomes stigmatized. It becomes, what is your problem with children? And I absolutely, you know, I think that's a terrible sort of attitude to take, I think it absolutely has to be a matter of personal choice. I think for some people also, I mean, there are all sorts of reasons why this seems to be happening, you know, for some people, it may be an economic one. Kids cost a lot of money. Not everyone can afford that.”
2024-09-04 · Conversations with Tyler · Philip Ball on the Interplay of Science, Society, and the Quest for Understanding · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“For food production, for energy, for economic growth generally. So I don't see any reason to believe that a decline from that if we reach that figure of 9 billion, that a decline from that is going to be inherently bad in itself. And I certainly don't think that at this point there is any reason for anyone to fear that somehow the population is going to shrink to nothing. I don't think anyone feels that's the case. But I do.”
2024-09-04 · Conversations with Tyler · Philip Ball on the Interplay of Science, Society, and the Quest for Understanding · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I think one of the, as you say, one of the issues that that raises is more about the change in demographic where you have an increasingly aging population. And, you know, that's also because we're living longer in a lot of countries. And so that certainly needs to be talked about. And we need to think about what the answer to that is. I'm not sure that the answer to that is simply to have more children. It's been predicted by, I mean, I'm no expert in demographics, but it's been predicted by demographers for a long time that actually we were going to go and are going to go through a population hump that we're going to, it's going to peak at maybe something like 9 billion or so. And then it's predicted to decrease to something more like perhaps 6 billion or something, which I think would be a fantastic thing, because that is one of the big challenges that we have been facing is the growth in population. It demands that that...”
2024-09-04 · Conversations with Tyler · Philip Ball on the Interplay of Science, Society, and the Quest for Understanding · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“At to, you know, if we're concerned about a problem like that, I mean, it's not clear to me that it actually is a problem at the moment, the problem of population growth is the problem that we still face. So I'm not sure that we're going to see artificial wombs developed in the near future for human reproduction because I don't think that there's a clear need for them.”
2024-09-04 · Conversations with Tyler · Philip Ball on the Interplay of Science, Society, and the Quest for Understanding · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, if we'd need more people in future, I don't think, I mean, I think this is one of those problems like many problems that is a social and economic problem that is not going to be solved by technology. So, you know, the idea that it's questionable if this really is the case, but if there is the case of declining fertility, it's not at all obvious that what we therefore need is more children made by artificial means, not only because we have no means of doing that at the moment, not only because we don't understand all of the ethical and safety issues associated with a potential technology like that, but also because if there is a decline in fertility rates in the number of children being born in some countries, that isn't because it's impossible. That is because of social changes that are the things that we need to be looking at.”
2024-09-04 · Conversations with Tyler · Philip Ball on the Interplay of Science, Society, and the Quest for Understanding · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Human embryos because in just about all countries that's forbidden for longer than fourteen days but with animal embryos it's clear that they can be grown for much longer than that almost to the point of full gestation actually certainly up until about sort of halfway through where you've really got something like a fetus so we have the technologies that are getting there from these two directions I think the broader question is why would we need a technology like that to do the whole job certainly for humans it's not clear that there's a cool for it it's not clear that there's any real social driver for that sort of technology”
2024-09-04 · Conversations with Tyler · Philip Ball on the Interplay of Science, Society, and the Quest for Understanding · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, well, this has been certainly a question for the part. Well, it's actually been a question for almost 100 years now. This was something that some scientists were debating in the 1920s and 1930s. In fact, it was that debate that led to Aldous Huxley's brave new world, which essentially talks about this sort of in vitro gestation of whole populations. So, you know, that question has been around and that research has been around for at least 100 years now. We're getting closer. It's an incredibly slow process. And we're kind of coming at it from both directions now. So there are technologies, there are techniques now that are being used to keep alive babies who are born very, very prematurely that would previously have died. And then from the other direction, it's becoming possible to grow embryos for longer and longer periods outside the womb. This isn't done with...”
2024-09-04 · Conversations with Tyler · Philip Ball on the Interplay of Science, Society, and the Quest for Understanding · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I wouldn't say they are, actually, well, in policy. Now that really depends what you mean. I mean, there are, for example, you know, we can raise this question during the pandemic. Was there too much caution with...”
2024-09-04 · Conversations with Tyler · Philip Ball on the Interplay of Science, Society, and the Quest for Understanding · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That they are hoping to find, so there's a strong pressure for cognitive biases to creep in. So this is something that ought to be eminently fixable because there is no reason science has to be this way, that there have to be these tremendous pressures on scientists to constantly be producing results, constantly be chasing after what sometimes seems like the diminishing pools of funding. There must be better ways of doing things than this, but we haven't yet found them. And I think that's really one of the things that the scientific community as a whole has to address. How can we reverse these unrealistic pressures to produce in science?”
2024-09-04 · Conversations with Tyler · Philip Ball on the Interplay of Science, Society, and the Quest for Understanding · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“An increasing problem simply within the structures of academia itself. I think this is the thing that perhaps worries me most about the way science is being steered or pushed these days, that there are these tremendous pressures, absolutely unrealistic pressures on scientists and particularly young scientists starting their careers to publish as much as they can, and commonly hear the complaint from young scientists that they have no time to think anymore. You've just got to do. You've just got to put work out there. And it has led in recent times to some quite high profile cases of scientific misconduct where results have been basically data has just been invented to create a publishable piece of work. And I think that even when that's not quite so obviously fraudulent, I think there are strong pressures on scientists to find the result.”
2024-09-04 · Conversations with Tyler · Philip Ball on the Interplay of Science, Society, and the Quest for Understanding · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“People have spoken up. Absolutely, there are questions being asked and concerning situations arising with the relationship between science and what you might call commerce, really, between and industry. So particularly, for example, in drug development in pharmaceutical companies, there have been instances where it seems like the science has been either knowingly or unconsciously distorted by the commercial interests involved. It's very clear that certainly pharmaceutical companies themselves tend to underreport any work that seems to conflict with what the message they want to put out if they're developing a drug. So there's underreporting of negative effects or of null effects. So I think the conflict between scientific research and the commercial interests relating to it is one area where there are real problems to be solved and questions to be asked.”
2024-09-04 · Conversations with Tyler · Philip Ball on the Interplay of Science, Society, and the Quest for Understanding · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And that it's removed from all the nastiness and the dirtiness that goes on in the political arena. I think that that attitude hasn't gone completely, but I think it needs to go. I think scientists need to get real, really, about the fact that they are working within a social and political context that they have to be able to work with and to be able to, when the occasion demands it, to take some control of and not simply to be pushed around by. And that, I think, is something that can only happen when there are institutional structures to allow it to happen so that scientists are not left to their own individual devices and their own individual sense of morality to do something about it. So I'm hoping that science will do better in the future than it's done in the past.”
2024-09-04 · Conversations with Tyler · Philip Ball on the Interplay of Science, Society, and the Quest for Understanding · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Whatever. So history doesn't give us a very encouraging view of that. I think that said, I think it's fair to say science is doing better these days. I think there's a recognition that at an institutional level, science needs to be able to mobilize its resources when it's threatened in this way. And I think we're starting to see that certainly with climate change, which scientists have come under fire a huge amount in that arena. And I think there's more sort of institutional understanding of what to do about that. Scientists aren't being so much left to their own devices to cope as best they can individually. But I still think that this attitude, I think, that is still somewhat prevalent within science, that it's a bit like we're above that. This is exactly what some of the German physicists, particularly Werner Heisenberg, said during the Nazi regime, that science is somehow operating in a”
2024-09-04 · Conversations with Tyler · Philip Ball on the Interplay of Science, Society, and the Quest for Understanding · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Gosh, now there's a question to start with. Where they have most effectively stood up to power, you know, this is a question that I looked at in a book. It must be about 10 years old now, which looked at the response of German physicists during the Nazi era to that regime. And I'm afraid the response, my conclusion was the response was really not very impressive at all. You know, on the whole, the scientists acquiesced to what the regime wanted them to do, even if they weren't, I mean, very few of them were actively sympathetic to the Nazi party, but they mounted no real effective opposition whatsoever. And I'm afraid that looking at that as a case study, really, made me realize that it's actually very hard to find any time in history where scientists have actively mounted an effective opposition to that kind of imposition of some kind of ideology or political power.”
2024-09-04 · Conversations with Tyler · Philip Ball on the Interplay of Science, Society, and the Quest for Understanding · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source