Method and Madness Science Britannica

On 28th March, 1726,

a coffin was carried into Westminster Abbey.

In it was the body of a man who had held high office,

although he wasn't a politician.

He had had men hanged, although he wasn't a member of the judiciary.

And he'd written extensively on the Scriptures,

although he was no cleric or priest.

His coffin was carried by the Lord Chancellor,

two dukes and three earls.

That man was Isaac Newton.

To be buried in Westminster Abbey

was an honour usually reserved for kings and nobles,

not commoners like Newton.

But Newton was no ordinary man.

Even here, it's written,

"Mortals rejoice that there has existed such an ornament of the human race".

Now, Newton was the first natural philosopher,

or scientist, as we now call him,

to be honoured in this way.

But he certainly wasn't the last.

And here is James Clerk Maxwell.

Here, Michael Faraday.

And here, Paul Dirac.

With his equation describing the behaviour of the electron

inscribed into the stone on the floor of Westminster Abbey.

It's perhaps no coincidence

that a country that honours its leading scientists in this way

has produced far more than its fair share

of trailblazers and innovators.

Men and women who explained heredity by decoding DNA.

Who provided the physics for every space programme ever conceived.

And transformed communication for ever with the World Wide Web.

In this series, I want to explore Britain's pivotal role

in creating modern science.

Reveal the characters who have made science what it is today.

Show how Britain has used its scientific strength

for over 300 years.

And explore what the future holds for British science.

British scientists have made and continue to make,

some of the great scientific discoveries.

But of equal importance from a historical perspective,

was the development of the means by which we do science.

The idea that you build theories, you test them by experiment

and you publish the results.

This is known as the scientific method.

It is the bedrock of science.

And it was developed and first used, to a large extent, here in Britain.

This is The Royal Society.

A fellowship of the world's most eminent scientists

that has existed since 1660.

Its members include virtually all of the great names in science.

From Charles Darwin to Michael Faraday.

These are people whose ideas and investigations

have transformed our understanding of the natural world.

That they were able to perform such a transformation

is remarkable enough.

But what's also remarkable

is that many of The Royal Society's members

would've traced their towering achievements

back to the work of one man.

Sir Isaac Newton.

This is Newton's death mask.

It's a plaster cast of his face

that would've been taken moments after he died.

And the technique was to make these masks

whilst the body was still warm.

And it's really quite an eerie thing to look at.

When you think of Newton as a physicist,

you think of Newton as almost an abstract set of theories.

You know, F = MA, force equals mass times acceleration.

You think of his universal law of gravitation.

That first universal, physical law that's still used to this day

to send spacecraft to the edge of the solar system and beyond.

But when you look at this,

you see a different Newton.

You see Newton, the man.

Newton certainly wasn't the easiest person to get along with.

He was obsessive, malicious

and prone to outbursts of rage.

But there was something quite extraordinary

about the way that he worked.

In an age when people still believed in magic,

Newton devised a revolutionary theoretical framework

with which to accurately investigate the nature of the world.

Newton was born in 1642

into an England that was a country in transition.

That was the start of the English Civil War.

It was a country where they were still hunting for witches.

But also, it was a country where science,

where rational thought, where reason were beginning to flower.

Now, at the time, one of the great questions

was about the nature of light.

It was known that if you take a prism and shine sunlight through it,

then it splits that sunlight

into all the colours of the rainbow.

The question was why.

Now, the prevailing scientific view

was that sunlight must be perfect.

This dated all the way back to Aristotle and the Ancient Greeks.

How could something that comes from the heavens

be anything other than perfect?

The common explanation for the appearance of the colours

was that they were impurities added by the prism

to the pure white light.

Newton thought that the colours

were already present in the white sunlight.

But what set Newton apart

was the fact that he devised and performed an experiment

to test his hypothesis.

Then, and here's the genius,

he introduced a slit into that rainbow beam.

And that allowed him to isolate a particular colour of light

and shine that into a second prism.

Then he looked for the deflection of the coloured light onto his wall.

You can see that over there.

Now, look what happens

when I move the red light across the slit, to the green light.

On the wall, what you see is green light into the prism

equals green light out.

Now, that implies that the colours themselves are pure.

The prism is not adding or subtracting anything.

That means that Newton's hypothesis was shown to be correct.

The colours themselves

are the basic building blocks of light.

And white light is made up of all those individual colours.

That's genius.

Newton was one of the first to interrogate nature

using the principles of what we now call the scientific method.

In other words, he observed the world,

came up with theories to explain what he saw,

then tested them with experiments to see if he was right.

The power of this approach

is that it aims to remove preconceived ideas.

And in doing so, deliver a more accurate description

of the natural world.

But for all his clarity of thought and experimental technique,

Newton himself seems to have been strangely unaware

of the importance of his work.

This is a priceless book.

It is the first handwritten manuscript

of Newton's great masterpiece, the Principia.

It's in here the first time

that the universal law of gravitation is outlined.

It's also his laws of motion

that say how objects move around in the universe.

It's pretty much everything you do

in the first year of an undergraduate degree in physics.

And the story behind the writing of this book is fascinating.

It reveals a lot about Newton.

The astronomer Edmond Halley said,

"Is it true that there's a universal law of gravity

"that can explain the observed orbits of the planets?"

Newton said, "Yeah, I've proved it. "I proved it a couple of years ago."

And he went to look for his notes,

and the story is that he couldn't find them.

And so he just sat down and wrote the whole thing out again.

And it's that conversation with Halley that led to the Principia.

So, it's interesting to speculate

that if it had been left up to Newton,

then maybe the greatest work in the history of science

wouldn't have been published at all.

The joy of exploring nature was enough for Newton.

And the act of writing it down and sharing his knowledge

with others was somehow secondary.

Newton was certainly a man of contradictions.

Given that he lived and worked in the middle of the 17th century.

He stood at the cusp, at the dawn of the Age of Reason.

And so, he was undoubtedly a man with feet in both worlds.

The mystical and the scientific.

He was an astrologer, an alchemist,

but he was also a man who understood

what it is to be a scientist almost innately.

He said that the nature of things

can be most naturally and securely deduced

by their operations one upon another,

rather than upon the senses.

By which he meant that the only way to understand how nature works

is to look at it

and then use logic and reason

to understand and explain what you see.

On the face of it, it seems baffling

that the scientific method took so long to emerge.

After all, Newton lived just a few hundred years ago.

Part of the problem is that our world

IS a complicated and baffling place.

But it's much easier to understand if you simplify it.

It is possible to deduce the nature of light by investigating a rainbow.

But by creating a controllable, repeatable experiment,

Newton was able to support his hypothesis

and then transfer that understanding

to the much more complex world outside the laboratory.

It's this logical, systematic approach

that has enabled British science

to shed light on nature's great mysteries,

from the structure of matter to the orbits of the planets.

It's also improved our lives through its application

to medicine and technology.

And 250 years after Isaac Newton laid its foundation,

the scientific method

provided Britain a lifeline in our darkest hour.

NEWSREEL: 'Nazi strategy is to starve Britain of food and munitions.

'Scores of Nazi U-boats set out to harry the ships

'that bring essential stocks and supplies to Britain.'

In 1940, the convoys bringing supplies of food and ammunition

from America to Britain were suffering a frightening rate of attrition

at the hands of German U-boats.

And Churchill and others genuinely thought

that we were within weeks of losing the war.

Now, salvation came, not in the form of a new weapon system,

a new aircraft or warship,

but at the hands of a few dedicated people,

geniuses even,

with pencils and paper,

working here in sheds in Buckinghamshire.

Bletchley Park was the centre

for British code-breaking during World War II.

It was here that intercepted German messages were brought for analysis.

Captain Jerry Roberts was part of the group

assigned the task of decrypting the daily flow of communications.

He'd just graduated with a degree in French and German,

but it was his keen interest in chess and crosswords

that landed him the job.

Did you take delight in just the intellectual challenge

of breaking the code every day?

Did that almost, I don't know, remove from your mind

the bigger picture because you had to focus so much on that act?

We greatly enjoyed the process of breaking, you know?

It was great fun.

I have to be quite honest

and say, we were not thinking too much about the impact on the war,

we were thinking about how we could get a bit further along, you know?

Yeah.

The Nazi war machine ran on radio communications,

coded signals between the forces in the field

and the high command in Berlin.

Most of the general traffic was encoded by a machine called Enigma.

By the time Gerry Roberts arrived at Bletchley,

the Allies had broken the Enigma code thanks to the

mathematical work done by Alan Turing

and also because a working Enigma machine had been captured.

But the big prize was another code that was

reserved for the highest level signals from Berlin.

It used some of the same principles as Enigma,

but it was far more complicated.

The Nazi high command knew this code as the Lorenz cipher.

The Allies called it Tunny.

Tunny had not one, not two,

but three levels of encryption.

It should never, ever have been broken.

And it might not have been were it not for the scientific approach

taken by a shy and unassuming man called Bill Tutte

of reducing the complex to the simple.

He dedicated every waking hour

for nearly three months to cracking the code.

I was actually sitting in the same office as he was

when he was doing it,

and I saw him staring into the middle distance,

twiddling his pencil,

and making counts on reams of paper,

and I used to wonder whether he was getting anything done!

My goodness, he was.

It was an extraordinary feat of the mind.

I find it remarkable. Do you understand how Tutte did it?

It's partly mathematics, but mostly logic.

If this is this and that is that,

then it follows that this must be the other conclusion.

No-one on the Allied side had seen the machine that produced Tunny.

So the fact that Tutte cracked the code with little more than his brain

and a pencil is a testament to an extraordinary work of genius.

The Allies had recorded a message that had been sent twice

using the same Tunny encryption or key.

It was this tiny lapse in procedure that gave Tutte a way in

to crack the entire system.

His approach was scientific.

Because the messages were similar, but not identical,

and they used the same key,

he knew there would be repeated patterns

and if he could find those patterns by careful observation,

he could crack the code.

He eventually did find a pattern

and in that pattern, was hidden a prime number - 41.

His hypothesis was this was the number of settings possible

for the first of Tunny's scrambling wheels

and this turned out to be correct.

It was the key to unlocking the entire cipher.

As a cryptographer,

I find that almost impossible to believe that he did it.

One man called it the outstanding mental feat of the last century.

Not the war, the last century.

Unlike the Enigma code-breakers, Tutte had never seen the machine

the Nazis used to produce the code that he cracked.

But by using logic, careful observation

and by producing testable hypotheses,

he managed to determine exactly how it worked.

And that meant it was possible to build a machine

to automatically decipher the coded signals as they were issued.

By applying a scientific approach, Bill Tutte allowed the Allies

to listen in to virtually every word uttered by the Nazi high command,

and the consequences were breathtaking.

I strongly suspect that our generals sometimes saw the text

of the messages before the blessed German generals did!

General Eisenhower said, after the war,

that Bletchley decrypts helped shorten the war

by at least two years.

At LEAST two years.

And this was a war

in which ten million people died each year on average.

Bill Tutte had achieved the seemingly impossible.

He'd done it by applying the principles of logic

enshrined in the scientific method.

But that's only part of the story.

Tutte was fascinated by problem-solving

long before he'd ever heard of Tunny or Bletchley Park.

Like Newton, Darwin, Faraday

and countless other scientists before and since,

Tutte was interested in, perhaps even obsessed by,

discovering how things work.

Richard Borcherds is a latter-day Tutte.

..First I start adding up squares, so I take nought squared, plus one squared, plus two squared...

He's a professor of mathematics at the University of California at Berkeley.

An elliptic modular function looks like this...

Another British scientist on a quest

to solve an apparently uncrackable code.

What I'm doing is trying to understand

not just how the universe works, but why it exists or why it works.

That's a very scary question that...

You know, why does the universe exist at all?

Richard has spent the last 15 years trying to solve an abstract problem

that lies at the heart of quantum field theory,

our best current description

of the building blocks of the natural world.

It's something that has defeated mathematicians for almost a century,

but Richard is undeterred.

He spends many hours a day working on the problem.

Watching me work is pretty much indistinguishable

from watching me sleeping.

I'd generally just be sort of sitting there like this...

for a long time, just thinking.

Most months you ask me what I've produced this month

and I will say, "Well, I've discovered this idea doesn't work."

And that's it.

Most of the work is not in doing calculations,

but in trying to figure out what calculations to do.

That's the part of mathematics that takes years

and years without really getting anywhere.

Richard has, without question, an unusual mind.

A mind similar to the Bletchley Park code-breakers.

One capable of dedicating years on end to the almost incomprehensible task

of understanding the abstract mathematics that underpins the universe.

But although his dedication may appear extreme,

it seems that an element of obsessiveness is something that many scientists share.

From Isaac Newton to Paul Dirac,

James Clerk Maxwell to Bill Tutte and Richard Borcherds,

Britain has produced an array of driven scientists

who have contributed enormously to our understanding.

They stand out, not because of their wealth, power or notoriety,

but because of the way they thought.

Which might be the reason that they were drawn to science in the first place.

Professor Simon Baron-Cohen studies the psychology of scientists

and has discovered that many of them share some specific characteristics.

Many people in the population

are quite happy to flit from one topic to another.

They're happy to chat about something, but they don't want to go on about it for half an hour,

let alone many, many hours, or days or weeks.

And, I think, someone with a scientific mind often does want to stay on one topic,

they want to go deeper into whatever they're studying.

Now, I'm grinning because I definitely see that in myself,

and my wife would certainly say that that's the case.

Once I start talking about something

I'm likely not to talk about anything else for a long time. Yeah.

That's interesting, actually, cos I recognise that.

Yeah, but it's not negative, that's the point.

That, effectively, we're talking about a mind that prioritises depth over breadth.

And that used to be seen as something negative,

that if you go too deeply into something you're obsessional and it should be discouraged.

But what we can now see is that... Unless you're the aircraft designer that designed the aircraft

you're sitting on. In which case, it would be desirable!

I'm delighted that the aircraft designer is obsessional, yeah. Yeah.

As part of his research, Simon has shown another trait

to be more common amongst scientists - attention to detail.

This is an example where we're looking at how well you can pick up detail.

So, how quickly you can find the target shape hidden in the overall design.

Scientists are quicker at this test than non-scientists,

and again, we're not just talking about eccentricity now,

we're actually looking at a specific psychological process.

Using a questionnaire, Simon has also measured a trait he calls "systemising".

This is the drive and ability that people have to understand

how things work, from the weather to road maps,

from politics to car engines.

There are questions in there about how interested

you are in the electrical wiring in your house.

I'm very interested in that.

So, you would probably score, you know, you'd score one point

on that item and there are lots of items of that kind.

I once got a fuse box for my birthday when I was young,

I actually asked for a fuse box. Right. It was my 12th birthday or something, what does that say?

Well, it's telling us that the test has validity.

Yeah! It's a sign of a systematic mind.

What's also interesting is that the personality trait

Simon has shown to be characteristic of scientists

are expressed in their extreme in children with autism.

Kids with autism we know have difficulty socialising,

but they often have excellent attention to detail

and they like to look for patterns in things, just like a little scientist really.

An example might be electrical light switches,

that they want to look at the effect of putting a light switch

into different positions, the on and off position, all around the house.

So it's experimentation. It is. Essentially the scientific method

in action, just isolating a particular system and...

It is, but it's in the real world, absolutely.

I mean, there's no claim in which you would label scientists

as autistic in some sense, it's ridiculous.

Absolutely not, that is ridiculous.

What the evidence is telling us is that on specific measures of relevance,

scientists are just scoring mid-way

between people with autism and the rest of the population.

It will come as no surprise to most people,

that there are certain character traits that we associate with scientists,

the idea that you want to deconstruct the world,

that you pay attention to the smallest details.

Actually, I can identify some of those traits in myself as a child.

Some of the questions that Simon asked me about of collecting things...

I was... I liked to spot buses and tick them off in a list,

I liked to do the same with trains.

I also liked to collect electrical apparatus and wire it up and understand how it works.

And, I suppose, in retrospect, that may have marked me out

as being statistically more likely to be a scientist when I grew up.

Scientists' dedication to their subject may sometimes appear

to be quirky or even eccentric.

But it stems from a trait that I think many scientists share -

an all-embracing curiosity.

This is the only picture of Henry Cavendish,

and the reason is that he was very uncomfortable about sitting for portraits. In fact, he never did it.

So this was done mainly by an artist who glimpsed him over dinner

and then sketched it from memory.

It shows all the essential eccentric features of the man.

He's wearing a hat which has been described as something

from the previous century.

Remember, this is a man who was living in the 1700s,

so he's got a 17th-century three-cornered hat.

And he always wore the same coat and he liked it

so much that every year when it wore out,

because he wore it every day,

he had a new one, exactly the same, tailored.

Cavendish's main aim in life was to weigh, measure and classify

as many objects in the universe as he possibly could,

and fortunately, like many scientists at the time,

he was fabulously wealthy so he was able to indulge his curiosity

with hundreds of extraordinary experiments.

Like this one,

which he first reported in 1766.

It involves taking a metal,

we'll take zinc,

and then I'm going to pour

concentrated hydrochloric acid onto the zinc.

Now I'm going to bubble the gas that's produced into this soap solution,

so these bubbles are now going to be filled with this gas,

and very quickly and carefully I'm going to light the gas.

GAS POPS

Now, Cavendish called that, not inappropriately,

I suppose, "inflammable air".

It's the gas that we now know as hydrogen.

GAS POPS

But Cavendish didn't stop there,

he doggedly continued his quest to quantify hydrogen

until he could describe every aspect of its existence.

So, he wanted to see how his newly discovered gas,

hydrogen, as we now call it,

reacted with other things, including air.

So, I'm going to repeat Cavendish's experiment again

but this time with a vessel.

What I'm going to do is fill it with hydrogen...

GAS HISSES

So, that's full of inflammable air, and I'm going to light the spark.

COMPUTER BEEPS

LOUD BANG

Now, what you saw there was a chemical reaction,

the reaction of hydrogen with air, and if you look closely

on the sides of the flask,

you'll see that it's... Well, it's wet.

That is water and it's appeared as a result of the chemical reaction.

In many respects, Cavendish embodies what science

and what being a scientist is all about.

His curiosity about the world drove him to design experiments

in an effort to gain new insights into the way the world works.

Now, Cavendish didn't really have any idea what happened in these chemical reactions,

indeed his whole theoretical framework was nonsense to modernise,

it was based on alchemy.

He thought things burned because they contained a substance called "phlogiston".

LOUD BANG

But even though that is complete nonsense,

because he was a great experimental scientist,

his measurements were correct, so he managed to measure that water

is made of two parts of hydrogen to one part of oxygen, H2O,

even though he didn't believe that water was made of anything at all!

So, that ability to get your theoretical picture,

your ideas about the way that nature works completely wrong,

and yet make honest and precise measurements

that stand the test of time and are correct,

is the mark of a great experimental scientist.

Cavendish has rightly gone down in history as one of this country's greatest scientists,

but perhaps he should be remembered more for his association

with another aspect of science,

because he was instrumental in establishing this place

at 21, Albemarle Street, London.

The Royal Institution.

This fireplace occupies a central place in the history of British science.

It was part of a house in Soho Square

where three of the great characters in British scientific history

gathered to discuss the foundation of this place, The Royal Institution.

Those three men were Count Rumford of Bavaria,

who is a colourful character.

He was born in America, he was a soldier, a philanthropist,

a scientist, an engineer. And many people say, a philanderer.

Then there was Cavendish,

that most eccentric of British scientists and experimenters.

And finally, there was Joseph Banks who is an iconic figure

in 18th and 19th-century science.

He began his scientific career as a botanist aboard the Endeavour

with Captain Cook in 1768 on the journey to Tahiti

to measure the transit of Venus.

And he was not a stereotypical scientist,

I've seen him described as a man with a thick bramble of curly hair,

he had a brooding, romantic intensity.

He sounds more like Heathcliff than a man of science.

But Banks, although he was president of The Royal Society for 40 years,

was passionate about democratising science.

He felt that British science was to insular -

a preserve of the rich, famous, and politically well-connected.

And so the three of them came up with the idea for this place,

centred around this lecture theatre.

Where the vision was that the public could hear of the great discoveries of science.

The Royal Institution became a platform for a new breed -

a science personality.

From Humphry Davy, the showman who famously danced with joy at his scientific discoveries,

to Michael Faraday, who began the tradition

of giving the, now famous, Christmas lectures.

And the theatre is still used by scientists to engage with the public to this day.

If now I remove the filter... LOUD BANG

..something happens.

DULL BOOM

APPLAUSE

Oh, yes!

APPLAUSE

LAUGHTER AND APPLAUSE

So, I'd like you to grab some of that hydrogen in the soap bubbles.

Um...

LOUD BANG Whoa! Ow! You all right?

LAUGHTER AND APPLAUSE

Banks and his colleagues were right, people really do want to hear

about the findings of science and engineering,

about the exploration of the universe.

So popular were the public lectures here at the Royal Institution,

so crowded was Albemarle Street with horses and carriages delivering people to hear those lectures,

that Albemarle Street had to be made the first one-way street in London.

Britain helped to give the world what we now call the scientific method.

It produced great scientists like Newton and Cavendish

who used experimentation to make discoveries.

It was amongst the first countries to understand

that the pursuit of science is a vital part of nationhood,

and that public engagement ensures science's bloodline.

But there's another British phenomenon that has had perhaps

the greatest impact on the progress of science,

and that is the simple act of writing down and sharing ideas.

The roots of that sharing can be traced

to one of the most iconic books in the history of science.

It's considered so valuable that it's kept in a climate-controlled vault.

Published in 1665, this is the first edition

of the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society.

It is the first scientific journal.

And I think the best description of what scientific journals mean

should be left to the first editor, Oldenburg,

who wrote that the purpose of this

is to allow scientists to "impart their knowledge to one another

"and contribute what they can to the grand design of improving natural knowledge

"and perfecting all philosophical arts and sciences".

Henry Oldenburg had created a platform, where for the first time,

scientists could widely share their findings with others.

So this is the publication, the presentation, of scientific knowledge

and if you step through here and follow the Philosophical Transactions on through the years,

you will find all the great names of science publishing their research in here for all to see.

So, you'll find Newton, you'll find Darwin, you will find Faraday,

this is where the sum total of human knowledge is stored and archived and rests.

So, the history of science is laid out for everyone to see, here.

Isn't that wonderful?

Nearly 350 years after that first issue was printed,

the Royal Society still publishes its Philosophical Transactions,

and every issue of that journal is kept here in their library.

It's fascinating to just grab them at random.

Here's one from 1897, and it's on,

I don't even know the words,

"afferent and efferent tracks of the cerebellum",

and the regeneration of nerves.

And then you can go, here's one, 1895, "organic oxymides,

"or the organisation of the fossil plants of the coal measures".

Now, obviously there's no point in finding interesting things out

about the natural world and keeping them to yourself,

not telling anyone, but there's much more to publishing than that.

This is an edition of the Philosophical Transactions

of the Royal Society from 1861,

and one of the papers here by John Tyndall

is one of the first pieces of research

on what we now call the "greenhouse effect",

the way that different gases absorb heat.

There is table after table of results,

but he also describes precisely how he got those results,

and there's a beautiful diagram of his apparatus,

and this is there so that anyone else reading this paper, if they're sceptical about the results

or even if they just want to check them, can rebuild the apparatus

and redo the experiments and check that Tyndall didn't make any mistakes.

So these results are not a matter of opinion, they're here,

they can be checked by other scientists, they can be verified.

So, this is how scientific knowledge progresses.

Publishing is the reason why science gets to our best view of the way that nature works.

Since the Philosophical Transactions emerged in 1665,

thousands of journals have been published on every aspect of science.

Scientific journals have flourished in this way because they can be trusted.

What's printed in them is as close to a statement of fact as you can hope for.

And we can trust in that science

thanks to a unique British-born system of self regulation

that lies at its heart - peer review.

Dr Philip Campbell is the editor in chief of the journal, Nature.

And peer review is central to its reputation

as one of the greatest journals in the world.

Could you run through the peer review process,

and describe exactly how that works?

So, peer review is an attempt by colleagues, as it were, of the authors,

their peers, to see whether what these authors have produced looks valid.

He or she will look at that and really rip it to shreds,

digging into the data and then coming back to us and saying,

"I've really looked at this stuff and it's stood up to what I thought."

Or they'll say it doesn't.

So, how would you assess the effects of this,

of the peer review process, just objectively? Does it do what we all want it to do?

Which is be absolutely objective in a pure assessment of where our scientific knowledge is.

It's full of little holes, that's how I see it.

There are all sorts of ways in which bad papers can slip through.

It's not perfect and I'm sure that there are degrees of bias.

But I would feel a lot more worried

if we were retracting a lot of our papers.

Actually, we retract very few of our papers.

I believe that's because what we publish is, by and large, robust.

I really cannot think of a more critically minded group of people than scientists.

Peer review is not the only service provided by scientific publishing.

Because the journals are one of the key voices of the scientific community,

providing a forum for continued debate.

This continuous interrogation by the scientific community helps sort the good science from the bad.

Gradually, this gives way to a consensus

with scientists agreeing on the latest findings and their meaning.

No paper is the end of the story.

So, even though it's got the Nature name on it,

from my point of view, I know that it's only when it's been out there

and people have really tested it and try to build on it, that we really know whether it's true.

Global warming is a good example.

There's an overwhelming scientific consensus that carbon dioxide

and other emissions into the atmosphere is changing the climate,

warming the world. So, how did that consensus develop?

The climate system is enormously complex

and I don't think there is any single paper that can ever show

one way or another that climate warming because of carbon dioxide

or other greenhouse gases is occurring.

So, it's only over a lot of time and a lot of cumulative evidence,

and a lot of critical scrutiny that you end up convinced

that something is really happening.

I would so love to show that climate change isn't happening

in a way that I do actually believe threatens my grandchildren's future.

But, it's so unfortunate

that we don't seem to be getting papers that show that it's wrong.

Peer review is an attempt to introduce

an additional level of rigour to the process of discovery,

allowing us to distinguish between tested hypotheses and speculation.

The difference between a book and a scientific journal

is that, in a book, you're reading an author's opinion.

Nobody else in the world may agree with the contents of this book and you wouldn't know.

It's a statement of opinion.

Whereas a scientific journal has been through some level of checking,

experts in the field have looked at it and found that it's not obviously wrong.

So a scientific peer review journal is in a sense a snapshot

of our best view of the world, of a particular subject, at any given time.

From Newton's rational approach, to publishing and peer review,

Britain has arguably had a greater influence on how science is done than any other nation.

But perhaps that legacy can be seen most clearly in France.

Or rather, UNDER France,

and Switzerland.

This rather unimpressive set of buildings

might look like a third-rate provincial technical college,

but housed in them are scientists engaged in what is, without doubt,

one of the most important experiments ever undertaken.

Below the ground here, around 100 metres below the ground, is the Large Hadron Collider.

It's 27 kilometres in circumference.

Its job is to accelerate protons to 99.9999% the speed of light,

at which speed they circumnavigate these 27 kilometres 11,000 times a second.

The protons are collided together, and with each one of those collisions,

the conditions that were present

less than a billionth of a second after the universe began, are recreated.

The sheer audacity of it,

that human beings might be able to reach back 13.7 billion years

to discover how the universe evolved, is breathtaking.

And yet, that's what's being done here on an epic scale.

The Large Hadron Collider is the most complicated scientific experiment ever built.

But it's still just an experiment like any other.

At its heart, there is repeatable process...

..as with Newton's prism.

There are teams of people dedicated to making detailed measurements,

as Cavendish did with his flammable air.

LOUD BANG

And the same rigorously logical thought processes

used by Bill Tutte are, of course, applied here too.

These are simple principles, yet they hold great power.

Half of the world's particle physicists, 10,000 of them,

are gathered here because of the tantalising prospects of what they might discover.

CERN is now the place to be because everything is happening here.

New physics, new stuff, supersymmetry, dark matter.

So we're solving problems which are fundamental to all, all people, everywhere.

You don't really care where anyone comes from, we all want the same thing.

And being part of this

is just...brilliant.

What do I do? I'm going to have to think about that for a second...

HE CHUCKLES

But while one or two of them

can't remember what they're supposed to be doing individually,

as a group, the scientists here

have made one of the most important discoveries in physics.

Researchers at the Centre for Nuclear Research near Geneva...

..have just announced in the last few minutes that Higgs boson,

the so-called God particle, has been glimpsed.

In July 2012 it was confirmed that a new particle, the Higgs boson, had been detected.

This elusive piece of the subatomic jigsaw

is responsible for the masses of the building blocks of the universe.

The particle is named after British physicist Peter Higgs,

who worked on the theory some 50 years earlier.

The discovery is a vindication of the ideas behind CERN,

but the reason that we can be confident in the discovery

is the painstaking effort that has gone into the design of the experiments.

Even to the point of funding two separate teams of researchers, analysing exactly the same things.

A cross-check so vital that the teams are not allowed to discuss their work,

even with each other.

My institute in Manchester is part of an experiment

about a few hundred metres in that direction called Atlas,

it's a collaboration of over 160 institutes from 38 countries,

and together, we designed, we built and we operate that experiment.

Now, if you go several miles in that direction,

over to the other side of the LHC there's another collaboration.

It's called CMS and it's run by different physicists.

It was designed, built, and it is operated completely independently from Atlas.

But they're both designed essentially to do the same thing,

which is to search for new physics like the Higgs boson.

And because these two groups found exactly the same thing,

everyone could be confident that the Higgs really had been discovered.

It's this, the scientific method, that gives CERN

and all of scientific investigation its power and validity.

CERN is the best example of what modern, international science has become

and you see all the basic principles of science

put into action here, from precision observation to peer review.

So, I suppose, CERN perfectly embodies all the things that Britain

over four centuries has given to science.

Science is one of this country's success stories,

many of its important characters are British,

and Britain has always been a place where crucial discoveries are made.

Newton's theory of gravity, the structure of the atom,

the form of the DNA molecule,

all courtesy of a few small islands in the North Atlantic.

But these great discoveries haven't happened by accident.

The existence of organisations like the Royal Society

and the Royal Institution demonstrates that here is a place where enquiring minds are valued,

and the apparently unknowable is thought worthy of investigation.

This is also a nation that celebrates curiosity,

and when combined with a powerful method to investigate nature,

this has always ensured that British science

is disproportionately represented amongst the world's best.

Britain, with only 1% of the world's population and 3% of the investment,

produces almost 15% of the most influential scientific papers.

And given that our civilisation is built on science,

that science is the only way we have of understanding how nature works,

then it seems to me that Britain's place today

as the best place in the world to do science

is something that's worth cherishing, investing in,

and protecting for the future.

Next time, I'll be looking at where some of Britain's greatest discoveries came from.

And asking whether we benefit more from science when we know what we looking for.

Or whether the best ideas come out of the blue.

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd