“THE world has entered a phase of spectacular technological advances.” So The New Scientist . Nuclear bombs had fallen on Hiroshima and Nagasaki a little over a decade before, the digital computer was in its infancy and the space race was just beginning.
The desire to “publish news of scientific progress in language as free as possible from technicalities” was the spur of this magazine’s foundation, but right from the outset we were clear about the need to look further. “For a branch of research which, today, appears as a purely abstract quest for knowledge, may turn out tomorrow to have a direct and vital application to the happiness of us all,” we wrote. “Besides, science is exciting; science can be entertaining.”
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These sentiments remain as fresh and true today, and as much a part of our mission statement, as they were 65 years ago. It is in that spirit that we have brought together 13 great “why?” questions about the cosmos and ourselves in this issue, questions that excite and entertain, and take us to the very edge of our understanding.
“Climate change and issues about our environmental impact aren’t going to go away”
One subject was conspicuously absent from our first issue, perhaps understandably so. It wasn’t until two years later, in 1958, that Charles Keeling began the measurements at the Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii that first alerted the world to rising levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. The growing awareness of the catastrophic effects on people and the planet of many of those spectacular technological advances – and in recent decades our consistent failure to do anything about it – has been a feature of this magazine’s existence.
Whether the COP26 climate conference that ended last week in Glasgow, UK, represents a turning point remains to be seen. Climate change and wider issues surrounding our environmental impact aren’t going to go away. Fulfilling our mission statement from that first issue, we will continue to report on them in the coming decades, as well as on all aspects of science and its impact on society, “conscientiously – and readably”.
