National Science Week: Fusion in the language lab: William Waldegrave opens National Science Week with a call for dialogue to reunify our fragmented culture

IS SCIENCE good for a society? The answer may seem self-evident. But to many thoughtful people it is not. Some see science, and the methods of science, as systematically destructive of everything which makes life worth living. This bleak view has often found powerful expression in art and literature, from Richard Jefferies' grim vision in the last century of a future London sinking into a mire of pollution and self-destruction, via the nightmare of Brave New World, to the powerful genre of apocalyptic literature of the post-Hiroshima world.

Skilful politicians have usually judged that the populist vote lies with those who are anxious about where science is taking us. Winston Churchill advised that the scientist should be 'on tap, not on top'; while by far the easiest way for someone with a smattering of scientific education to become a media guru is to set himself up as purveyor of scientific scare stories, describing himself as Dr X, well-known expert in food/nuclear/ecological safety. The doctorate, incidentally, can be in anything from librarianship to physical education.

Yet for every misuse of our creativity there are a hundred positive uses - including increasing our skill in learning how to moderate our dangerous side. Any society which is truly vigorous is so by integrating and ordering not the lowest common denominator of our nature but the highest factor; a society organised to allow and celebrate the creative spirit in science will find itself also productive of the other forms of creativity which make life worth living. They are all bound in together, and always have been. The societies - national or more local - where you get the bursts of scientific energy which astound the historians also span the other arts, too. The rule runs from fifth-century Athens to Renaissance Italy to Queen Anne's England, and on down to the modern world.

A society that is alive looks forward, has energy, will not take no for an answer: all those characteristics throw the scientists, philosophers, painters, musicians and the rest in one benign ferment. Often if you look at those societies it seems almost an accident who turns into what: would Bach in a different family write as Leibniz and vice versa? The Jewish violinists and physicists get inextricably muddled up; and it's not difficult to imagine Newton designing classical buildings. And then there is Leonardo da Vinci.

Over-specialisation can be a cause of sterility and decay in a vigorous society. What C P Snow said of his literary friends' ignorance of the second law of thermodynamics can in fact be duplicated a thousand-fold within each of Snow's divisions. We do not have a Cold War confrontation between science and arts; we have a balkanisation of all culture into thousands of fragments.

The expert on the Athenian Tribute lists may be as ignorant of Romantic German painting as he is of the human genome project; the numbers theory man may make a less good fist at describing how an internal combustion engine works than does the econometrician, whose graphs in turn may mean less than nothing to the politician in charge of the finance ministry.

This balkanisation is a real source of weakness. In that list of super-creative societies I mentioned the unity of intellectual life is rather obvious: in fifth-century Athens the scientist actually knew the historian who knew the philosopher and the playwright. So, too, in Florence and Milan; so, too, in London in Wren and Newton's day. Our danger now is that although communications technologies give us the methods of doing it, we have not learnt to use them to recreate the vital interactions and cross-fertilisations which through history seem to spark the engine of those societies at which we look back with most envy.

If vigorous science is a characteristic of a healthy society, how do we ensure our scientific strength? You will see that I think that one essential is cross-disciplinary fertilisation. We should be careful of the health of the classical institution invented for this purpose, the university. But buildings and physical propinquity are not enough if esteem is given only to greater esoteric specialisation. We must equip ourselves with enough language in common to be able to communicate across disciplines. My conclusion is not just for scientists - in fact, it is relevant, if I am right, to all those who are engaged in the essential human activity of creation and innovation, whether in the arts or technology or politics or anywhere else.

How do we learn to talk to each other again, in order to explain to one another the difficult parts of our subjects? There are some practical things we could set our hand to. We could seek to give all scientists and engineers a wider grounding in history, philosophy or aesthetics. We could ensure that our arts graduates are not innumerate and know a little of the history of science. Then, we could take care to ensure that there are a decent number of strong, multi-faculty universities, and should beware of the temptation to allow mobility of students to take us too near to specialist universities.

But what of the wider culture? We need to reward, with esteem but not only with esteem, those who are willing to cross frontiers. We can deploy money to support such work through the media. We can, from the science side, ask for a little evangelism as a necessary part of the job of those we back to do research. We can work with those in industry who live by selling the products of science - and that is, to all intents and purposes everybody in industry - to emphasise the utilitarian arguments; the arguments based on the pressing need for new products to sell and new processes to enhance the quality of life. We can, whatever our discipline, seek to reunify a culture in danger of fragmentation.

If we can do that, we will have created conditions for the preservation of the strength of our science, but not just of our science. The money? Well, indeed, proper government funding of science is vital. But ask yourself whether the funding will be safer in a democracy where the university physicist feels him or herself part of the same culture as the economics graduate reading the news and both of them understand somewhat more the engineer running the railway - that is, where more people understand the importance of science; or in a world where science holds the place of the Eleusinian Mysteries? I think the answer is obvious.

An extended version of this text forms the speech to be given tonight by the Minister for Science to the Royal Institution, to mark the start of the National Week of Science, Engineering and Technology.

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