Exploring controversy's place in science The Planet Earth Blog Tom Marshall 27 March 2015 Why is it that what look at first glance like purely scientific questions - whether our activities are warming the Earth's climate, for instance - so often turn into full-blown and acrimonious controversies? Dr Paul Williams, a meteorologist in NERC's National Centre for Atmospheric Science at the University of Reading, has made a short film exploring this question - the latest in the Royal Society's 'Science stories' series. He visits Professor Geoffrey Boulton of the University of Edinburgh to explore it out in the field in the Scottish highlands, where the two go to look at the peculiar horizontal 'roads' inscribed into the sides of Glen Roy. The two explore the history of scientific debate over how these strange geological features came about, showing that recent heated arguments about subjects from climate change to genetically-modified crops aren't really anything new. Science has always moved forward through disagreement and the destruction of untenable ideas, and even giants like Charles Darwin often get on the wrong side of controversies - as the roads of Glen Roy show. The broader point is that diversity of scientific opinion isn't in itself a problem, and that it's essential that science be a public enterprise rather than one carried out behind closed lab doors. The film contains a great quotation from Darwin's The Decent of Man: 'false facts are highly injurious to the progress of science, for they often endure long... but false views do little harm, for everyone takes a great pleasure in proving their falseness.'