To infinity and beyond

A Newsnight video podcast brought an intriguing little film to my attention the other day. Their arts correspondent was dispatched by his editors to sit a physics exam, in light of the recently reported shortage of physics students in England and Wales.

It started affectingly, with the reporter returning to a childhood scene - his father taking him up to Scotland to see a hydro-electric dam he had built, and the son remembering how unimpressed he was with its vast practicality. (To help us situate the "general know-nothing"-ness - Kirsty Wark's words - of the journalist, the piece opens with him digesting a corpulent biography of Flaubert). The clip ends with him lying in bed, blearily trying (and failing) to remember the difference between a "vector" and a "scalar".

I sympathise with him entirely, but from the other side of the parental divide. My eldest daughter (17) has been consciously constructing her identity as an engineer for about a year now. She'd been girl-handling various bits of technology since her early teens, but all of it in an artsy and expressive way - video camera, saxophone and bass guitar, and of course the expected digital literacies of instant messaging, fan fiction sites and Bebo (you know, Bee-bo).

But when she won a competition organised by Scottish Careers to spend a week in Nasa's Houston Space Centre, that was it. She came back as a girl with a direction, indeed a vocation. As she put it: "Once you've talked to the guy who's building the plasma rocket for the next generation of manned Mars missions, there's only one thing you want to do."

And that, it seems, is become an engineer - astrophysics and aeronautics her explicit interest, obviously, but now interested in the whole problem-solving, diagram-drawing shebang. Most relevantly, she's crash-studying advanced physics as the ticket of entry to the universities of her choice.

My daughter is a feisty, determined terrier, and I'm sure she'll think herself into her chosen future. But in terms of our angst about the reduction of interest in "hard" science, there might be some idiosyncratic lessons to draw from her trajectory.

She was brought up in the 90s' glory-days of "edutainment" - particularly Dorling-Kindersley's Eyewitness books (the Universe in 70 elegantly illustrated pages), and David Attenborough breathlessly traversing the natural world on television. A regular family ritual was to drag her down to both the Transport and the Kelvingrove museums in Glasgow - those cavernous sandstone storehouses of industrial reliquary and imperial booty. (My youngest one now benefits from the city's gleaming Science Museum on the Clyde).

How do you incite a lasting wonder at how form, function and utility is wrested out of the materiality of the world? I'm convinced (and she corroborates) that these family experiences at least made my daughter friendly to science and technology. Municipal authorities, and quality media, both have a real role to play in maintaining and developing these "people's palaces" of sci-tech glory.

The other observation comes from watching my daughter fill in her successful competition form for the Nasa trip, which presented various plausible engineering challenges, such as designing a robot arm for the next Mars mission. Her design was resourced entirely through Google searches, conducted from several different homes and locations during the 2005 school holidays. And all this mixed in with the usual trips and fun times.

I'm sure that a milieu of playful, inquisitive conviviality, supported by all the info-structures now available, can generate a love of science as much as any more sternly economic or even patriotic imperatives ("where are our nation's engineers?" and so on). Should we only look to schools to primarily generate more engineers - or might there need to be a much more popular culture of tinkering, hackerism, and techno-fascination?

The success of Make magazine, or TV shows such as Mythbusters, in America show a possible enlargement of the interests of the digital generation - from messing around with code, to messing around with machinery. Charles Leadbeater's forthcoming book We-Think - which you can mess around with online at the moment - speaks about the rise of the pro-amateur, those hobbyists who apply professional standards of research or practice to their obsession.

Of course, as the Stern report (and just before it, Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth) reverberates through our consciousness, evoking a society of limits and self-restraint that puts an end to heedless consumerism, we may be ending up with a lot of stray social energies floating around, looking for application. If Stern is serious about the role for technological innovation in addressing our climate crisis, then the world is ready for a new generation of inspired engineers.

But my daughter's frankly joyous and cartwheeling journey into an engineer's identity strikes me as a useful cautionary note. Is it only fear of calamity, of eventual ecocide, that might motivate young technical problem-solvers and visionaries to take up their instruments?

We need to remember the sheer excitement, that breaking of the surly bonds of earth, involved in creating a piece of engineering which does more with less, which improves the efficiency of the world. That excitement may well drive different processes in the future, if the Great Greening of the planet is about to truly begin.