So the question is, what is invisible?
There is more of it than you think, actually.
Everything, I would say.
Everything that matters except every thing and except matter.
We can see matter.
But we can't see what's the matter.
As in this cryptic sentence I found in The Guardian recently: "The marriage suffered a setback in 1965, when the husband was killed by the wife."
(Laughter) There's a world of invisibility there, isn't there?
(Laughter) So, we can see the stars and the planets, but we can't see what holds them apart or what draws them together.
With matter, as with people, we see only the skin of things.
We can't see into the engine room.
We can't see what makes people tick, at least not without difficulty.
And the closer we look at anything, the more it disappears.
In fact, if you look really closely at stuff, if you look at the basic substructure of matter, there isn't anything there.
Electrons disappear in a kind of fuzz, and there is only energy.
And you can't see energy.
So everything that matters, that's important, is invisible.
One slightly silly thing that's invisible is this story, which is invisible to you.
And I'm now going to make it visible to you in your minds.
It's about an M.P. called Geoffrey Dickens.
The late Geoffrey Dickens, M.P. was attending a fete in his constituency.
Wherever he went, at every stall he stopped he was closely followed by a devoted smiling woman of indescribable ugliness.
(Laughter) Try as he might, he couldn't get away from her.
A few days later he received a letter from a constituent saying how much she admired him, had met him at a fete and asking for a signed photograph.
After her name, written in brackets was the apt description, horse face.
(Laughter) "I've misjudged this women," thought Mr. Dickens.
"Not only is she aware of her physical repulsiveness, she turns it to her advantage.
A photo is not enough."
So he went out and bought a plastic frame to put the photograph in.
And on the photograph, he wrote with a flourish, "To Horse Face, with love from Geoffrey Dickens, M.P."
After it had been sent off, his secretary said to him, "Did you get that letter from the woman at the fete?
I wrote Horse Face on her, so you'd remember who she was."
(Laughter) I bet he thought he wished he was invisible, don't you?
(Laughter) So, one of the interesting things about invisibility is that things that we can't see we also can't understand.
Gravity is one thing that we can't see and which we don't understand.
It's the least understood of all the four fundamental forces, and the weakest.
And nobody really knows what it is or why it's there.
For what it's worth, Sir Isaac Newton, the greatest scientist who ever lived, he thought Jesus came to Earth specifically to operate the levers of gravity.
That's what he thought he was there for.
So, bright guy, could be wrong on that one, I don't know.
(Laughter) Consciousness.
I see all your faces.
I have no idea what any of you are thinking.
Isn't that amazing?
Isn't that incredible that we can't read each other's minds?
But we can touch each other, taste each other perhaps, if we get close enough.
But we can't read each other's minds.
I find that quite astonishing.
In the Sufi faith, this great Middle Eastern religion, which some claim is the route of all religions, Sufi masters are all telepaths, so they say.
But their main exercise of telepathy is to send out powerful signals to the rest of us that it doesn't exist.
So that's why we don't think it exists, the Sufi masters working on us.
In the question of consciousness and artificial intelligence, artificial intelligence has really, like the study of consciousness, gotten nowhere.
We have no idea how consciousness works.
With artificial intelligence, not only have they not created artificial intelligence, they haven't yet created artificial stupidity.
(Laughter) The laws of physics: invisible, eternal, omnipresent, all-powerful.
Remind you of anyone?
Interesting.
I'm, as you can guess, not a materialist, I'm an immaterialist.
And I've found a very useful new word, ignostic.
Okay?
I'm an ignostic.
I refuse to be drawn on the question of whether God exists, until somebody properly defines the terms.
(Laughter) Another thing we can't see is the human genome.
And this is increasingly peculiar, because about 20 years ago, when they started delving into the genome, they thought it would probably contain around 100,000 genes.
Geneticists will know this, but every year since, it's been revised downwards.
We now think there are likely to be only just over 20,000 genes in the human genome.
This is extraordinary.
Because rice -- get this -- rice is known to have 38 thousand genes.
Potatoes, potatoes have 48 chromosomes.
Do you know that?
Two more than people, and the same as a gorilla.
(Laughter) You can't see these things, but they are very strange.
(Laughter) The stars by day.
I always think that's fascinating.
The universe disappears.
The more light there is, the less you can see.
Time, nobody can see time.
I don't know if you know this.
Modern physics, there is a big movement in modern physics to decide that time doesn't really exist, because it's too inconvenient for the figures.
It's much easier if it's not really there.
You can't see the future, obviously.
And you can't see the past, except in your memory.
One of the interesting things about the past is you particularly can't see.
My son asked me this the other day, he said, "Dad, can you remember what I was like when I was two?"
And I said, "Yes."
And he said, "Why can't I?"
Isn't that extraordinary?
You cannot remember what happened to you earlier than the age of two or three, which is great news for psychoanalysts, because otherwise they'd be out of a job.
Because that's where all the stuff happens (Laughter) that makes you who you are.
Another thing you can't see is the grid on which we hang.
This is fascinating.
You probably know, some of you, that cells are continually renewed.
You can see it in skin and this kind of stuff.
Skin flakes off, hairs grow, nails, that kind of stuff.
But every cell in your body is replaced at some point.
Taste buds, every 10 days or so.
Livers and internal organs sort of take a bit longer.
A spine takes several years.
But at the end of seven years, not one cell in your body remains from what was there seven years ago.
The question is, who, then, are we?
What are we?
What is this thing that we hang on, that is actually us?
Okay.
Atoms, you can't see them.
Nobody ever will.
They're smaller than the wavelength of light.
Gas, you can't see that.
Interesting.
Somebody mentioned 1600 recently.
Gas was invented in 1600 by a Dutch chemist called Van Helmont.
It's said to be the most successful ever invention of a word by a known individual.
Quite good.
He also invented a word called "blas," meaning astral radiation.
Didn't catch on, unfortunately.
(Laughter) But well done, him.
(Laughter) There is so many things that -- Light.
You can't see light.
When it's dark, in a vacuum, if a person shines a beam of light straight across your eyes, you won't see it.
Slightly technical, some physicists will disagree with this.
But it's odd that you can't see the beam of light, you can only see what it hits.
I find that extraordinary, not to be able to see light, not to be able to see darkness.
Electricity, you can't see that.
Don't let anyone tell you they understand electricity.
They don't.
Nobody knows what it is.
(Laughter) You probably think the electrons in an electric wire move instantaneously down a wire, don't you, at the speed of light when you turn the light on.
They don't.
Electrons bumble down the wire, about the speed of spreading honey, they say.
(Laughter) Galaxies, 100 billion of them estimated in the universe.
100 billion.
How many can we see?
Five.
Five out of the 100 billion galaxies, with the naked eye, and one of them is quite difficult to see unless you've got very good eyesight.
Radio waves.
There's another thing.
Heinrich Hertz, when he discovered radio waves in 1887, he called them radio waves because they radiated.
And somebody said to him, "Well what's the point of these, Heinrich?
What's the point of these radio waves that you've found?"
And he said, "Well, I've no idea.
But I guess somebody will find a use for them someday."
And that's what they do, radio.
That's what they discovered.
Anyway, so the biggest thing that's invisible to us is what we don't know.
It is incredible how little we know.
Thomas Edison once said, "We don't know one percent of one millionth about anything."
And I've come to the conclusion -- because you've asked this other question, "What's another thing you can't see?"
The point, most of us.
What's the point?
(Laughter) (Applause) You can't see a point.
It's by definition dimensionless, like an electron, oddly enough.
But the point, what I've got it down to, is there are only two questions really worth asking.
"Why are we here?" and "What should we do about it while we are?
And to help you, I've got two things to leave you with, from two great philosophers, perhaps two of the greatest philosopher thinkers of the 20th century, one a mathematician and an engineer, and the other a poet.
The first is Ludwig Wittgenstein who said, "I don't know why we are here.
But I'm pretty sure it's not in order to enjoy ourselves."
(Laughter) He was a cheerful bastard wasn't he?
(Laughter) And secondly and lastly, W.H. Auden, one of my favorite poets, who said, "We are here on earth to help others.
What the others are here for, I've no idea."
(Laughter) (Applause)
Let me tell you about rock snot.
Since 1992, Dr. Max Bothwell, a Government of Canada scientist, has been studying a type of algae that grows on rocks.
Now, the very unscientific term for that algae is rock snot, because as you can imagine, it looks a lot like snot.
But scientists also call it Didymosphenia geminata and for decades, this algae has been sliming up riverbeds around the world.
The problem with this algae is that it is a threat to salmon, to trout and the river ecosystems it invades.
Now, it turns out Canada's Dr. Bothwell is actually a world expert in the field, so it was no surprise in 2014 when a reporter contacted Dr. Bothwell for a story on the algae.
The problem was, Dr. Bothwell wasn't allowed to speak to the reporter, because the government of the day wouldn't let him.
110 pages of emails and 16 government communication experts stood in Dr. Bothwell's way.
Why couldn't Dr. Bothwell speak?
Well, we'll never know for sure, but Dr. Bothwell's research did suggest that climate change may have been responsible for the aggressive algae blooms.
But who the heck would want to stifle climate change information, right?
Yes, you can laugh.
It's a joke, because it is laughable.
We know that climate change is suppressed for all sorts of reasons.
I saw it firsthand when I was a university professor.
We see it when countries pull out of international climate agreements like the Kyoto Protocol and the Paris Accord, and we see it when industry fails to meet its emissions reduction targets.
But it's not just climate change information that's being stifled.
So many other scientific issues are obscured by alternate facts, fake news and other forms of suppression.
We've seen it in the United Kingdom, we've seen it in Russia, we've seen it in the United States and, until 2015, right here in Canada.
In our modern technological age, when our very survival depends on discovery, innovation and science, it is critical, absolutely critical, that our scientists are free to undertake their work, free to collaborate with other scientists, free to speak to the media and free to speak to the public.
Because after all, science is humanity's best effort at uncovering the truth about our world, about our very existence.
Every new fact that is uncovered adds to the growing body of our collective knowledge.
Scientists must be free to explore unconventional or controversial topics.
They must be free to challenge the thinking of the day and they must be free to present uncomfortable or inconvenient truths, because that's how scientists push boundaries and pushing boundaries is, after all, what science is all about.
And here's another point: scientists must be free to fail, because even a failed hypothesis teaches us something.
And the best way I can explain that is through one of my own adventures.
But first I've got to take you back in time.
It's the early 1900s and Claire and Vera are roommates in southern Ontario.
One evening during the height of the Spanish flu pandemic, the two attend a lecture together.
The end of the evening, they head for home and for bed.
In the morning, Claire calls up to Vera and says she's going out to breakfast.
When she returns a short while later, Vera wasn't up.
She pulls back the covers and makes the gruesome discovery.
Vera was dead.
When it comes to Spanish flu, those stories are common, of lightning speed deaths.
Well, I was a professor in my mid-20s when I first heard those shocking facts and the scientist in me wanted to know why and how.
My curiosity would lead me to a frozen land and to lead an expedition to uncover the cause of the 1918 Spanish flu.
I wanted to test our current drugs against one of history's deadliest diseases.
I hoped we could make a flu vaccine that would be effective against the virus and mutation of it, should it ever return.
And so I led a team, a research team, of 17 men from Canada, Norway, the United Kingdom and the United States to the Svalbard Islands in the Arctic Ocean.
These islands are between Norway and the North Pole.
We exhumed six bodies who had died of Spanish flu and were buried in the permafrost and we hoped the frozen ground would preserve the body and the virus.
Now, I know what you are all waiting for, that big scientific payoff.
But my science story doesn't have that spectacular Hollywood ending.
Most don't.
Truth is, we didn't find the virus, but we did develop new techniques to safely exhume bodies that might contain virus.
We did develop new techniques to safely remove tissue that might contain virus.
And we developed new safety protocols to protect our research team and the nearby community.
We made important contributions to science even though the contributions we made were not the ones originally intended.
In science, attempts fail, results prove inconclusive and theories don't pan out.
In science, research builds upon the work and knowledge of others, or by seeing further, by standing on the shoulders of giants, to paraphrase Newton.
The point is, scientists must be free to choose what they want to explore, what they are passionate about and they must be free to report their findings.
You heard me say that respect for science started to improve in Canada in 2015.
How did we get here?
What lessons might we have to share?
Well, it actually goes back to my time as a professor.
I watched while agencies, governments and industries around the world suppressed information on climate change.
It infuriated me.
It kept me nathanstephens@example.com.
How could politicians twist scientific fact for partisan gain?
So I did what anyone appalled by politics would do: I ran for office, and I won.
(Applause) I thought I would use my new platform to talk about the importance of science.
It quickly became a fight for the freedom of science.
After all, I was a scientist, I came from the world under attack, and I had personally felt the outrage.
I could be a voice for those who were being silenced.
But I quickly learned that scientists were nervous, even afraid to talk to me.
One government scientist, a friend of mine, we'll call him McPherson, was concerned about the impact government policies were having on his research and the state of science deteriorating in Canada.
He was so concerned, he wrote to me from his wife's email account because he was afraid a phone call could be traced.
He wanted me to phone his wife's cell phone so that call couldn't be traced.
I only wish I were kidding.
It quickly brought what was happening in Canada into sharp focus for me.
How could my friend of 20 years be that afraid to talk to me?
So I did what I could at the time.
I listened and I shared what I learned with my friend in Parliament, a man who was interested in all things environment, science, technology, innovation.
And then the 2015 election rolled around and our party won.
And we formed government.
And that friend of mine is now the Prime Minister of Canada, Justin Trudeau.
(Applause) And he asked if I would serve as his Minister of Science.
Together, with the rest of the government, we are working hard to restore science to its rightful place.
I will never forget that day in December 2015 when I proudly stood in Parliament and proclaimed, "The war on science is now over."
(Applause) And I have worked hard to back up those words with actions.
We've had many successes.
There's still more work to do, because we're building this culture shift.
But we want our government scientists to talk to the media, talk to the public.
It'll take time, but we are committed.
After all, Canada is seen as a beacon for science internationally.
And we want to send a message that you do not mess with something so fundamental, so precious, as science.
So, for Dr. Bothwell, for Claire and Vera, for McPherson and all those other voices, if you see that science is being stifled, suppressed or attacked, speak up.
If you see that scientists are being silenced, speak up.
We must hold our leaders to account.
Whether that is by exercising our right to vote, whether it is by penning an op-ed in a newspaper or by starting a conversation on social media, it is our collective voice that will ensure the freedom of science.
And after all, science is for everyone, and it will lead to a better, brighter, bolder future for us all.
Thank you.
(Applause)