This issue of SPA is graced by the stunning photographs of Charles Jencks’s Garden of Cosmic Speculation. It is, as he explains, a landscape with about twenty areas dedicated to the fundamental units of the Universe. Each insight into deep nature becomes translated into nature and sculpture. Thus, the garden contains a Black Hole Terrace; a DNA Garden of the Six Senses; a Quark Walk, and so on. In an era when Tracey Emin and Damien Hirst are the public face of art, he says, ‘these cosmic laws can give us a public iconography that is as eternal as anything there is, and more engaging than an unmade bed.’

Paul Drayson, the new Science Minister, is profiled by Joanna Carpenter. The enthusiastic racing driver tells her that he’s learned to handle the pressure of waiting to answer questions in the Commons through coping with sitting on the grid waiting for the race to start. He is already under pressure over his department’s Science and Society consultation, as we relate on in Consultation critics. Two of the academic authors who have written to him with their complaints explain their motives.

And Tom Wakeford, whom we welcome as our Engagement Correspondent, takes a sideways look at the consultation process from the Minister’s point of view.

More comment on controversy comes with Mary Midgley looking behind the Royal Society’s decision to dispense with the services of their Director of Education, Michael Reiss, after comments he made at the BA Festival of Science in Liverpool. She traces the development to a desire to stir up ‘a Cold War in which neither party even tries to understand the other’. But this quarrel is, she says, a ‘trifling distraction’ when compared with the ‘vast horizons beyond’, which most newspaper readers would like illuminated by the conflict, and which the protagonists fail to address. 

Our SPATalk shows what we can extract from a debate about Peak Oil. Kjell Akelett is in no doubt that we should be worried about oil running out, while Mike Ryan thinks a peak is nowhere near. It’s all a matter of how you estimate the reserves. 

Public engagement has tended to emphasise scientists’ relationships with the public. It has paid less attention to how they might influence policy. We focus on this in three pieces in this issue.

Michael Elves and Branwen Hide spell out the benefits of scientists advising policy makers. Peter Brooke makes some recommendations for the policy and academic communities to forge clearer, more coherent and more professional relationships. Tom Webb explores how scientists can minimise controversy when their recommendations fall foul of vocal sections of the public.

Wendy Barnaby, Editor

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