Prof. Jim Al-Khalili CBE FRS is a quantum physicist who holds a University of Surrey Distinguished Chair as well as a personal chair in physics since 2005 and a University chair in the Public Engagement in Science. He is a living three-piece suite. He spends roughly half his time as a ‘public scientist’ as a populariser and science communicator and has written many books aimed at the lay reader as well as presenting numerous TV documentaries and radio programmes, mostly for the BBC. Here we catch up after a few years and talk about science communication and Humanism.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Okay, this is an interview with Jim Al-Khalili. Our last interview was several years ago for a British magazine called Conatus News [Ed. Now Uncommon Ground Media Ltd., “Interview – Professor Jim Al-Khalili, on Science and Humanism,” and “In Conversation with Professor Jim Al-Khalili (Part 1).”]. Obviously, remotely at the time, from Vancouver, Canada, I reached out because I realized I hadn’t done an interview with you in a while.
Prof. Jim Al-Khalili: Right [Laughing].
Jacobsen: I have been doing [Laughing] more interviews in a series with other humanists. I thought I’d do another round with you. Obviously, you’ve been writing books. You’ve been doing work for BBC Radio 4. Maybe we should focus on some of the commentary that you’ve been mentioning lately. Potentially, some of the programming has been ‘dumbed down’ for scientific presenting to the public. What are some of your reflections on it?
Al-Khalili: I suppose we have to draw a distinction between television and radio. For years, I presented documentaries on the BBC. A lot of them now are available. If they are not owned by the BBC, if they are produced by independent production companies, they can sell them to other providers, e.g., Netflix and Amazon Prime. They have been great because of the programs I have been commissioned to do. You can get really stuck in the science. These are popular science programs. It is not so much the dumbing down but the fact that the BBC and other networks are simply not commissioning any more television documentaries. So, what is available there either repeats, which is great, I don’t have to do any work. My stuff gets churned out and has a long shelf life, which is fine. I don’t know if it is because of a lack of money getting stuck into the science or not appreciating that there is an appetite for viewers out there. For radio, no, it’s fine. I’ve presented my BBC Radio 4 program, The Life Scientific, which then goes out on podcast. It has been going on for 12 years now. I interviewed other scientists. We can get stuck into some serious science and talk to them about their life and work. That’s very rewarding. That’s, essentially, a big chunk of my public engagement and my outreach activity these days.
Jacobsen: Do you notice, even though there is an appetite for this scientific presentation in television documentaries, an impact on the public opinion or public knowledge of science with a decline in commissioning of these?
Al-Khalili: I’m not sure. Certainly, for viewers in North America – Canada and the US, where they are getting to see these BBC productions because they are available online on Netflix and Amazon Prime, I was recently in the US. There is a niche audience who are fans of these programs. They find them very rewarding and very fascinating. It’s nice to receive compliments about them. So, they’re not aware that I have not made anything new. They are seeing it for the first time. I say, “Yes, I filmed that 10 or 11 years ago.” I’m not sure what the impact of a drop in commissioning is being seen yet. I think all of the time, there is an audience out there, and all of the time, these things are available. But it is a shame if we aren’t producing new material. There is not that much out there. In the US, for example, PBS, Nova, National Geographic, and Discovery – who would traditionally have the output in these programs, aren’t even producing the real scientific stories that people want to hear about. There is always the natural history. The David Attenborough type of programs. With high production values, they are seen all around the world. It’s a bit more niche for someone like me to talk about quantum physics. But there is an audience out there. There are people who want to hear this stuff, who are fascinated. “Blow my mind! Hit me with stuff.” We’ll see if there is going to be a resurgence one day. We keep trying.
Jacobsen: There’s also democratic intellectual health. If the public doesn’t have these types of professionally produced, presented, and qualified documentaries on science, what happens? Who fills that void?
Al-Khalili: Yes, absolutely; the BBC, in particular, as you know, is a public broadcasting corporation. It has a remit to educate as well as entertain. Something called the Reithian value of the BBC. It is its responsibility to produce these things. It is a shame. If we end up having people getting their opinions from all sorts of weird and wacky sources, anyone can post anything. It’s great. YouTube and social media are great. But, of course, if the average person doesn’t know where to go for reliable information, we only have ourselves to blame if there is a rise in conspiracy theories or if people don’t know the value of vaccinations, and so on because they are not being exposed to serious, well-researched, well-evidenced science in these well-made documentaries.
Jacobsen: Maybe I can take a step back because this is something I don’t, actually, know. How did you first get involved in wanting to be a public presenter, public science person, or educator?
Al-Khalili: It wasn’t intentional. I followed a very traditional route in degree, postdoctoral research, getting onto the academic ladder, and becoming a lecturer, as we say in the UK, but in North America, you become an assistant professor or associate professor. You move up the ranks. That was my life. Publishing papers, getting research grants, going to conferences, at some point, it was probably early in my career – early to mid-30s. I realized I enjoyed doing outreach. It started small: talks about local schools at science festivals. I’d be the guy in the physics department that a journalist would point to: “Jim Al-Khalili will talk to you.” Everyone else was a bit nervous about it. [Laughing]
Jacobsen: [Laughing].
Al-Khalili: I got as much a kick out of explaining science and demystifying complex ideas as I did doing the research myself. It is one thing that leads to another. When I started off as a science communicator, there weren’t many people out there one could look to. There were the Carl Sagan’s of this world. But not everyone is going to be a Carl Sagan. There wasn’t any one role model to look at, “I want to be like that person.” You meet someone. If that hadn’t happened, I would not have published the first book. I would not have done that first interview on that documentary. If I… Serendipity, being at the right time in the right place, also, when I started science communication in the mid to late 90s, it was becoming more respectable. So, my generation was the first where it was okay to be regarded as a serious, respected academic but also to be someone who can communicate science and work in the media. Until then, it was regarded as something… “You’ve gone over to the dark side.” Even people like Carl Sagan were no longer regarded as serious scientists because he tried to spread the word to wider society; thankfully, that’s changed. A lot more people want to do this. “How did you get to be presenting in front of a camera?” It happened. It was never an ambition or a plan of mine. I realized I enjoyed them once those opportunities came.
Jacobsen: As the 90s moved forward into the 2000s, there was a natural incentive for that kind of presentation.
Al-Khalili: Yes, documentary providers in the UK, BBC, Channel Four, started commissioning science programs. The big multi-part series I presented first was “Atom” in 2006. Thereafter, I was making a 2- or 3-part documentary series a year for the next decade or more. “All right, you’ve done this. What’s next, Jim? What do you want to make a program about next? Is it the history of science? Is it some particular area of science?” There was a boom. There was a decade of commissioning of science documentaries between 2006/7 and 2016 and 2017. Then, money got tight. People lost their appetite. It started dwindling then. It’s not much at all now, which is a big shame.
Jacobsen: When you have been doing these big documentaries presenting scientific ideas to the public? What idea tends to be the hardest to get through to someone who may not have the specialization of training?
Al-Khalili: It so happens that the sorts of things I talk about are those complicated concepts, whether quantum physics or Einstein’s theories of relativity. Those are the counterintuitive ideas in science. There’s a lot of hard science, complicated science, whether molecular biology, genetics, or astrophysics. But they can be explained. You can find simple examples and analogies and can do simple demos on a TV program. You’d interview someone. But it is those concepts that are part of my own specialism, like quantum mechanics, which I think are the hardest. Not just with explaining and waving my hands around, but how do you give the audience that they think, “Yes, I think I get that.” Sometimes, you have to admit that the audience will need years of study to really appreciate what you’re telling them, but you can still blow their minds. “I don’t care. I’m not going to get all of this. Make me feel clever! Give me something.” Sometimes, that’s enough to excite people about science. If they want to know more, they’re going to have to dig deeper than I can provide on a TV documentary.
Jacobsen: You had a career in the formal humanist community as well, not sort of a regular member, so to speak.
Al-Khalili: Yes.
Jacobsen: How have you found being part of the humanist community, presenting science to the public more or less as a unified endeavour?
Al-Khalili: It follows naturally for many scientists to be humanists. We have a rationalist view of the world. Scientists, if they are any good, don’t say, “The world is this way because God made it this way.” We want to know why; we want to find the laws of nature. So, we are naturally of that mindset. We don’t want to appeal to anything supernatural or a higher power; we want to rationalize in a way that we can understand. Then, we are awe-struck by the wonder of nature itself. We don’t need anything more than that. What is the purpose? Why is the world? The world is the way it is; that is fascinating enough for us. We celebrate because we want to be a good person, which is part of what defines our humanity. It is not because of something external. It was natural for me. I think, like many people, I was a humanist before I knew I was a humanist. You have it pointed out to you. You realize, “That’s my worldview. That’s how I see the world. Oh, I’m a humanist, then.” Because I come from an unusual background, inThat, my mother was a devout Christian, an Evangelical born-again Protestant Christian. My father was a Shia Muslim. Religion was never rammed down our throats at all. It was very tolerant, liberal, and so on. Inevitably, that dichotomy and, being fascinated by science and looking for rational explanations of things, training as a scientist led me to move away from religion, probably in my teens. It was only relatively later in life that I embraced Humanism as what you would define it as today. I was thrown in the deep end. Not only did I embrace Humanism, but I was asked to take up the role of President of what was the British Humanist Association, now Humanists UK. So, it is interesting to be sink-or-swim, what do I think? [Laughing] Have my view of these things.
Jacobsen: [Laughing] Andrew Copson, he’s made a similar comment. A lot of people are, in fact, humanists if you check the individual boxes of premises of the orientation. They don’t take the formal title. I think that’s a very fair point.
Al-Khalili: Humanists UK has this quiz you can take online, “Are you a humanist?” People do it. More often than not, they’re 100%. “Yes, you are definitely a humanist.”
“Oh! I never realized.” [Laughing]
Jacobsen: [Laughing] That culture with humanists in the UK, not only the longer history of it, but it probably accounts for the large humanist membership and a robust one.
Al-Khalili: As we grow, more and more people are realizing. More people are choosing humanist celebrants for weddings and funerals. It’s not another religion. It’s not a tree-hugging, hippie-dippie, weird views. It’s simply, “Well, okay, I want to be good because that defines me as a human being, not because some ancient book tells me to be good or that I will be rewarded in some future afterlife or that I will be threatened with damnation if I don’t do this. No, I do this because I want to do it.” I think a lot of people think that way. That’s what Humanism is about.
Jacobsen: Even in Canada, I was in contact with someone in the Armed Forces. They are starting to get humanist chaplains in the military. Our first one was only in 2022. So, there is still quite an edge to be pushed forward, just for that form of equality for humanists, secular humanists. However, you want to phrase it.
Al-Khalili: It is good. It is changing now.
Jacobsen: When I went to Copenhagen earlier this year, the big thing was the global South was one big focus or an area of conversation among the national leaders because they, obviously, have a harder time of it when 95% of the population adheres to religious orthodoxy. That becomes, in terms of my conversations with them, a very common political tool. It makes any kind of progress in a humanistic, democratic direction difficult.
Al-Khalili: Yes, we’re in a privileged position here in Western Europe, UK, Northern Europe, Scandinavia, where there are very large humanist organizations. By and large, people are not religious. We don’t have that problem. We forget the vast majority of the rest of the world; religion is a dominant worldview.
Jacobsen: Do you have any contact with science communicators from that global South region who are trying to do the things Carl Sagan did, you did, Stephen Hawking did, with regards to the education of the public in radio, documentaries, or media in general?
Al-Khalili: It is starting. I’ll be in touch now and again with people asking for advice. “We’ve got this program. How can we progress with it?” It is starting, but it is starting slowly. They are faced with a much greater challenge. Here in the UK, whether my science communication or my non-religious beliefs, I was pushing against an open door. A wider society was ready for a rational worldview trying to understand the mysteries of the laws of nature. I didn’t have to battle against prejudice or against people who were resisting that view. This is why I say we are in this privileged position in the West, in the first world, but even in the US, it is a lot harder. Those who have a religious belief or who believe in a higher entity, believe in God, are in the majority in the US. They are in the minority in the UK. Sometimes, we forget. It is a lot harder to promote humanist ideas and ideals and, indeed, rational scientific worldviews in many parts of the world today.
Jacobsen: In the United States, on other metrics, it is an outlier with regard to religiosity. A lot of the major creationist organizations are there, too. These sorts of things. I think you get a society that… Actually, I believe the most cited epidemiologist is Gordon Guyatt. He’s at McMaster University and is a co-founder of Evidence-Based Medicine. Something he notes is that the values and preferences of society guide choices in medicine, for example. If you get places like the Scandinavian societies or Canada, you get societies. They value equity. If you go to the United States, they value autonomy. That changes how they do their national healthcare. Is it mostly private or mostly public? Canada is mostly public. The United States is mostly private. Is there that much of a difference in the quality of care? Or the argument, “I just want to be front of line.” The answer on most of the metrics: Not really, it’s just more expensive. I think one argument that they make for the healthcare system in the United States is half the outcome for twice the cost; you have a quadrupling of inefficiency. Those have a big impact.
Al-Khalili: It is the inequality of it. The haves and have-nots. If you can afford your medical insurance in the US, great, you are looked after. The technology and the medicine available to you are second to none. But plenty of people don’t have medical insurance, people who can’t afford it. It does mirror humanist values. Not being selfish, not thinking about number one, this is our world. We only have one world. We only have one shot at life. Life isn’t a rehearsal. There’s nothing else beyond this. Make the most of this time here; part of that is, I like to think, to have compassion, have empathy; I think that feeds into ideological views, whether political alignments in the US. Be nice! [Laughing]
Jacobsen: [Laughing].
Al-Khalili: It is a nice dictum to adhere to; part of that is making sure wider society is fairly treated rather than just looking after number one, which, for me, is a selfish way of living your life.
Jacobsen: Within the international humanist community, we’ve done our recent 2022 update to the 2002 Amsterdam Declaration, which is the third version. I think you’re aware. It is an empirical ethic. Therefore, it will be an evolving ethic with more evidence. What are some areas that you think Humanism will be expanding into in terms of its considerations based on new evidence from the sciences or based on a better understanding of human psychology and behaviour?
Al-Khalili: There are areas in science that are moving rapidly now that have ethical issues. Artificial intelligence is a very good example. I don’t mean if you have a computer that is conscious, it will be endowed with a religious belief or if it should have humanist values. I mean, we have to redefine what it means to be human. Studies into the nature of consciousness, for example, redefine what it means to be sentient. We know that humans aren’t the only conscious living creatures on this planet. So, whether it influences whether we become vegetarians or vegans because we don’t want to cause suffering to other animals, science is constantly giving us a revised view of the world. That means that we have to constantly revise our behaviour and our ethical values. What are we doing to the planet and biodiversity? These are huge challenges that face us. It’s a shame when they get clouded by political ideology or when people are so easily swayed by opinions that they hear because of the fact that we are constantly bombarded by information and data these days, partly due to the internet and social media. That means it is harder for us to make sensible decisions about how to live our lives. I think having humanist ideals plays into how our world is developing constantly, all the time, and increasingly so now with technology changing so rapidly. We have to examine our behaviour and how we deal with each other, how we deal with our planet. This is something that humanists need to be part of that conversation, constantly, because, if not, the ideologies and the bigotry, and the hatred… we’re seeing what the world is like today and how polarized opinions can be. I think humanist values, hopefully, would help remind people of the humanity.
Jacobsen: Two points about the edge. One is about artificial intelligence. One is about consciousness. What is it about human information processing that allows us to have this conscious arena of manipulation of information? Is substrate independence an assumption that we’re making about consciousness? If you take it from an evolved carbon-based organism into silicon circuits, would it be replicable in that sense? Reverse engineering and putting it into a different substrate, then you have a conscious system.
Al-Khalili: I think it is substrate-independent. Consciousness isn’t magic. The human brain is made of matter, made of atoms. They are fitted together to make neurons that fit together into a network and fire and exchange information. There isn’t some magic pixie dust that you sprinkle on the brain to turn this lump of squiggly grey matter into a mind that thinks itself aware is sentient. There is no reason for that complexity. The brain is the most complex system in the universe. There’s no reason that complexity can’t be replicated somewhere else. It doesn’t mean that we have an artificial general intelligence that can think and is conscious and that it is now human because what defines us as humans is more than just our brain. It is our environment, our heritage, and how we deal with our surrounding world. The fact that we’ve got hands. We experience reality in a unique way that is not going to be experienced in the same way as a computer sitting on a desk. But then, things like joy and anger and guilt and empathy are higher-lever computations. I see no reason why they can’t be replicated in some other medium. That is not unique to us as humans. They won’t behave like humans, but these higher-level emotions, I don’t see why they couldn’t be artificially created as well.
Jacobsen: Final question: Are there any books or projects that you’d like to plug in?
Al-Khalili: I’ve started writing a proposal for a new book on the nature of time, which is actually part of a research project I am working on now. More specifically, it’s on the direction of time. Why does time have an arrow from past to future? It is a very deep question in physics and philosophy that has been out there for millennia. I am not saying I have solved it, but it is something that I am very fascinated by. My research in this area is spilling over into writing a popular science book on the arrow of time. That is like way down the road. So, I don’t want to make too big of a plug because it won’t appear for a couple of years.
Jacobsen: We heard it there first. Thank you very much for your time again. [Laughing]
Al-Khalili: [Laughing] My pleasure, Scott.
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Photo credit: Scott Douglas Jacobsen.