Feature
Stranger than fiction
by Joanne Black
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Callaghan is a great admirer of film director Peter Jackson. “I went and saw the Lord of the Rings exhibition at Te Papa and kids were there looking at the animated battle scenes and they’re thinking, ‘This was done in Wellington.’ They’re growing up knowing we do this in New Zealand so to them it’s natural that we’re at the top of computer graphics and that sort of stuff.
“Now, imagine the next step where they think electronics are made in New Zealand. I’m sure it will happen, because we’ve got the capacity and we have talented people and a well-educated society and we’re quite nimble and creative, but we just haven’t got the belief in ourselves yet that we can do that.
“We’ve got half a dozen of these companies in the country right now – hundred-million-dollar-a-year-turnover companies like Rakon, Fisher & Paykel Healthcare and Tait Electronics. We need 200 of those companies. That would give us a $20 billion a year income, which gives us a per capita income the same as Australia. And the crucial thing for New Zealand is that our per capita income has to match Australia’s, otherwise we bleed talent.”
He says it would be environmentally impossible for the dairy industry or tourism to generate that level of economic growth. “It would be a catastrophe, and you couldn’t do it anyway.”
Hill says she likes talking to Callaghan because she can make a comment out of left field and he will pick it up and run with it; he says he likes talking to her because she really does understand science.
Their book offers those who became hopelessly lost in broadcast conversations about quantum mechanics, nanotechnology and the cosmos the opportunity to become lost again in As Far As We Know. Its advantage is that it may be referred to, and there’s a good bibliography for those keen to learn more.
“Somebody within radio said to me, ‘I don’t always understand the science interviews you do’,” says Hill. “I felt inclined to say, ‘But that’s the point.’ If you understand everything then you don’t have to think about it any more. The point is to make people feel, ‘Gosh, I don’t quite grasp that but maybe if I read more…’ We have links to reading and Paul’s always mentioning books. It’s not a tidy package.”
The book is certainly tidier than the broadcasts. Original conversations have been edited and revised; occasionally two are combined in one chapter.
Callaghan recalls the time that Hill signalled 10 remaining seconds of air time and then asked, “So, does God exist?”
Callaghan is an atheist. But he considers arrogant the view of Richard Dawkins, Oxford University Professor for the Public Understanding of Science, that the religious are deluded.
“Why fight with people of goodwill, intelligence, kindness and reason who actually are enlightened and happen to be religious? What is the point?”
In a published conversation with Hill he says creationism isn’t exposed to the same scrutiny as evolution.
“It doesn’t subject itself to peer review, to publication, to the normal debates and normal methodologies of science. It comes in with a fixed view of the way it is, requiring the existence of a creator, and therefore raising new, unanswerable questions as to what the creator is. It is based neither on observation, nor on consistency with other science know‑ ledge, nor on science methodology. I think that’s what makes it fundamentally unacceptable to scientists.”
He constantly revised the chapter on climate change to ensure it contained nothing he couldn’t defend against the sceptics. “The evidence around global climate change is all indicative, it’s not proven. We think there’s an anthropogenic cause, but it is hard to be sure because climate is such a complex system. But to me the evidence seems to point overwhelmingly in one direction.”
Callaghan’s worried by the politicised nature of the climate change debate. “People have got a mission. Now that is all right if you’re Al Gore who’s a politician, but if you’re a scientist you shouldn’t have a mission. Your mission is the lot of humanity, not to get out there and produce a political outcome. That worries me because if part of that is that you resent scepticism, and you say, ‘Look, don’t see these things because the politicians won’t act if we give them any excuse for doubt’, then that’s very dangerous and I don’t like that.
“I respect scepticism.”
He rejects the idea that the science of climate change has been proven. Even so, he says the real point is the possibility that the tipping point has been reached, a subject expounded on in a conversation with Hill, transcribed in the book.
“If you’re a parent and your child is climbing up the railing on the Interisland ferry, there’s a possibility that the child might tip over. Although there’s no proof of this, parents aren’t going to take the risk, because the consequences are too terrible. And it’s a bit like that on Earth – we are facing an uncertain risk but with consequences that are catastrophic.”
For all his concern, Callaghan isn’t convinced that climate change poses a bigger threat to humanity than the rate at which species are becoming extinct.
