Question: have you ever watched a town called eureka if so do you think we will ever have a science department that avolved the programme on syfy

Tom Hartley answered on 14 Jun 2010:

Hi jejones,

I haven’t seen it and had to look it up on wikipedia, so I am not sure I understand the question. As far as I can tell A Town Called Eureka is about a community of scientists and geniuses set up by the government. Something a bit like this happened for real in the second world war, when the US government gathered together the cream of the western world’s physicists to work on the atomic bomb at Los Alamos. Although they achieved a great success they were working in a huge rush and in secret, and didn’t have time to think through the consequences of what they were doing as fully as they might have liked. I don’t think a world run by scientists alone would be a great thing, and I think it is very important that science gets input from the wider world, so that we can ensure that scientific progress does not end up having an adverse impact on the rest of society.