A HEARTY welcome to Scotland’s new chief scientific advisor, Glasgow University physicist Sheila Rowan. I hope her expertise in detecting gravitational waves, arising from massive collisions in the deep universe, will help her in this new secondment.

Because there are some collisions about to happen between government and scientists which would easily blow up the more sensitive of her instruments.

Just take (from a long list) GM foods and fracking. The Scottish government has officially banned the former from our national food production – but the last chief scientific advisor, Dame Anne Glover, has slammed this action as being “not based on scientific evidence” and about “fear of the unknown”.

And we have a moratorium on fracking which depends, at least in significant part, on “scientific and expert assessment” as to its environmental and social impact. Is this a never-ending review? If it does come to a consensus view, yeah or nay, is this revisable at some point in the future – as a scientific finding must potentially be, by its very nature as science?

At this point, many of us will begin to raise our hands to the ceiling, and mouth the words “you deal with this”. As in: Even if I did possess nerdish tendencies, do I have the time or inclination to sit with papers from each contending position – or even the pop digests of each in magazines like New Scientist – and make any kind of judgement?

If you’re an activist on either side, you cherry-pick your authorities – there’s usually plenty to choose from – and join the battle. But if you’re an everyday citizen, you would easily be forgiven for watching the headlines stoically, and waiting for the science weather to change again, as it always seems to do.

Red wine bad for me/good for me/prevents cancer/causes cancer... The answer? Glug, glug, glug.

I’m an enemy of this kind of passivity when it comes to politics and economics (and maybe in Scotland we’ve begun to turn that round, in our democratic struggles over the last few years). But our passivity in the face of “scientific experts” seems much more daunting. I want to dwell a bit on my own lifelong struggle towards some level of science literacy, as at least one small measure of the scale of the challenge.

My school memory of science is properly murky. I carried aloft a C in Higher Physics (the same in Higher Maths, for that matter) out of St Ambrose Comprehensive, Coatbridge (it was two A’s in English and History that got me into Uni). I remember staring dully at abstract tests, involving blocks, arrows, spirals and symbols... God knows how I even scraped by.

All of which seems odd, in retrospect. As a youth I devoured science fiction in all its forms – ploughing through Isaac Asimov’s Foundation trilogy, hugging close to Star Trek and 2001: A Space Odyssey and Blade Runner.

And it was the science in science fiction that always engaged me. Some plausible-sounding breakthrough in faster-than-light travel that enabled galactic exploration. Or the “positronic” brains that allowed Asimov to explore robot-human relations.

The slightest whiff of wizardly, mystical magic in anything I picked up was quickly dropped again. I needed my amazing worlds to be in the future (or – but only if the story had cracked time-travel – in the past), and based on some extrapolation of current science.

Computers could calculate much quicker than the mathematical human mind. So what other bits of the human mind could they copy and outreach? The atom was being split, in those grey-blocked nuclear reactors at Torness. So what other energies for space-travel could a penetration of the physical elements of matter unleash?

Yet none of this reverberated in the classroom. Or at least, I personally found no connection between my surging fantasies about ever-greater scientific mastery of the material universe, and the chalk-and-talk, stuff-on-benches experience of O-level Chemistry and Higher Physics.

Have I changed over the years? A little bit. For example, I’ve become completely fascinated by a range of sciences – like affective neuroscience, epigenetics, ethology, primatology and evolutionary theory – because I developed an initially cultural (and political) interest in human play, about 15 years ago. I wrote a book in 2004, The Play Ethic, which was an attempt to provide a rationale for a “creative” society in the age of the Internet.

But what that’s become for me is an all-consuming interest in how to explain even the very presence of play in our existences. How, just like our many hours of sleep and our intense experiences of sex, play is how humans wastefully thumb their noses at the harsh demands of evolution. This feeds all the way back round into my love of art, culture and innovation, in a virtuous and exciting circle.

Now I’m ready for the lab! (Hey, it only took 52 years). Meaning I can now imagine devising small-scale experiments that build on, or try to disprove, the work of others in these fields.

That’s quite a shift from my teenage years. But I have a sense that I am interested in something that is actually there, and that actually matters if it is understood properly. And thus I could now have the patience for the slow, detailed progress of the scientific method.

Map this personal journey onto our current collective distress around GM foods and fracking, and a few unexplored options – other than humbly waiting on the tablets of stone from the appointed experts – may come to mind. We are midway through the Glasgow Science Festival, whose listings are a wonderful jamboree of topics and experiments.

But why does this hands-on, publicly-engaging approach to science only happen once a year? In particular, how might we make a “festival” of the question of fracking or GM foods? We could call it a “questival”.

But what it might involve as an event – spread over a few days, situated in a town or city, perhaps televised live – is a number of the elements that I’ve juggled with in my own path to a modicum of scientific literacy.

In one part, we’d try to be honest, and surface the values and emotional investments we have in either position.

For GM foods, it’s the belief in protecting nature from undue manipulation, versus the belief that we must face up to how much it’s under our control. For fracking, it’s the fear that we are heedlessly subjecting our beautiful land to exploitation – or the desire to unlock an asset that can bring prosperity in a harsh climate.

But we should try to create a zone or forum where these emotional commitments can be calmly facilitated and compared.

In another part of our “questival”, let’s get our hands on some scientific method. Let’s simulate a fracking exercise (and the destabilising consequences it’s said to threaten); a genetic manipulation of a foodstuff (and the “natural” examples they’re said to threaten).

But most importantly, let’s do all these in the best spirit of scientific method, which assumes that any conclusion is only as good as the next experiment that disproves or improves it.

Idealistic? Really? We commit ourselves, our passions and statistical intellects, to days and weeks of public sporting events; we watch the spectacle, and sometimes respond by doing the sports ourselves. Aided by our public service broadcasters, surely we can carve out a few days to engage ourselves – mind and body – in scientific issues which will have society-wide consequences, whatever we decide.

Independence of mind is what we value here, yes? Well, it’s time we developed it in relation to the science in our lives. We should give our new chief of science a much wider tribe to deal with.

The Glasgow Science Festival continues until June 19, see http://www.glasgowsciencefestival.org.uk