Where’s the wonder?

I think it is getting harder for science to impress. Whilst the LHC and now Curiosity undoubtedly grab the public’s interest – there seems to me to be a general lack of – well, for want of a better word – wonder. When Darwin finally published his work on the origin of species, it became a best-selling book. A work of scientific literature had grabbed the public’s attention in a way that is hard to imagine happening today.  Perhaps the problem lies in scale. Indeed some of the universe’s most spectacular displays are often hidden from us by virtue of the fact that they inhabit a different scale – both spatially and temporally. The quantum world, if only we could shrink down enough to see it and indeed slow it down, would utterly blow our minds. Particles popping in and out of existence, switching from one state to another, being in multiple places at once – it is so far out of the relative comfort zone of our own existence that I fail to see how anyone could avoid utter transfixion.
Equally, the other end of the universal size scale has recently thrown up another perfect example of wonderment. It comes in the enormous form of Phoenix – a galaxy cluster with the mass equivalent of about two and a half million billion Suns. An international team of astronomers have just caught it in the act of making new stars – something never before seen.
They found the Phoenix cluster showed particularly bright emissions in the ultraviolet range of the spectrum, corresponding to hundreds of young stars and suggesting that a staggering  740 were being born each year. That’s more than 2 a day – at once truly awesome and breathtakingly wonderful. But why I am going on about such an intangible abstraction as the sense of wonderment? Does it really matter? Well yes, I rather think it does.
Government is pushing science as a genuine option for school leavers – and rightly so of course. But they do so exclusively from an economic stand point. Kids are encouraged to go into science and engineering largely because the government see this as a way of bolstering future national prosperity. I’d wager very few successful scientists took the first tentative steps into science because they wanted to improve the economic outlook – they did so because they were filled with wonder.  A burning desire to understand why the universe is the way it is – it is this sense that we have to cultivate in young people if we want to encourage the generation of scientists.