My new years resolution for next year is to hug more scientists.
This year I hugged three scientists. These are the people dedicating their life's work to the laborious, often boring work of improving the collective knowledge and hence all of our lives by tiny little increments. Hundreds of thousands of them working in parallel make things very slightly better every day. These are people who often have to struggle silently with ethical challenges. They sometimes have to balance greater rights against smaller wrongs. They often have to argue with family and friends. They often have to deal with ideas they know will challenge our culture. Most of all though, they have to dig away daily at the data trying to disprove the hypotheses that they and other scientists came up with. These people are the truest and most unsung heroes of our culture. I can make this statement secure in the knowledge that if you sit down and think about every tiny little way in which scientists, and scientific thinking have improved your life so hugely over that of our hunter gatherer ancestors, you will be overwhelmed with gratitude.
Think flushing toilets, vaccines, medicines, medical techniques against horrible debilitating diseases, checking your email over wifi, drinking coffee, painting your house, watching television, reading a book, driving a car or riding a bike, catching a plane, sitting in a house that doesn't fall down, eating pretty much any modern food, knowing that you are made up of tiny particles and waves which seem to conform to quantum mechanical laws, knowing that you live on a fertile rock floating in space which is part of a larger system which appears to conform to the laws of classical physics, reading different points of view about climate change, looking at dinosaur skeletons at the museum and realising the collosal magnitude and wonder of just existing in this universe.
So here's to you my scientist friends. I am a huge fan of you. Keep up the great work, and thank you so much.