Translator: Ellie Wilson Reviewer: Didar Omar
Close your eyes.
Think of someone who has made important scientific discoveries.
Have you got it?
OK. Open your eyes.
How many of you thought of one of them?
Raise your hand.
OK.
But how many of you thought of Einstein?
There you are.
How many of you thought of one of them instead?
A lot less hands.
I’m Corinna.
I’m a scientist.
And I’m not Einstein.
I did my first experiment when I was around eight.
I was suspicious about why Santa’s handwriting
was similar to the Tooth Fairy’s.
So, one day, I decided to figure it out.
I got a piece of paper and wrote:
“Dear Santa, if you exist, this letter won’t be here tomorrow.”
I folded it into quarters and put it in the window.
I went to bed without telling anyone.
The next day I woke up
and, all excited, I ran to the window and opened it...
and the letter was still there.
In the end, I drew conclusions from my experiment
and I was convinced for a while that Santa didn’t exist
but the Tooth Fairy did.
Back then, I spent my days between school and the gym,
where I trained.
I did gymnastics.
When I thought about what I might be,
I was already full of ideas:
Olympic athlete, Olympic gymnast,
circus trapeze artist,
or an astronaut.
As I got older, I thought that I might not get to the Olypics,
let alone space.
But I was still given telescopes.
In the end, I enrolled in Engineering.
A few years later, I had to decide where to do my thesis
and I went for it.
I applied to the CERN,
the biggest laboratory for particle physics.
I was accepted.
So, I left and moved to Geneva.
During my first months, I felt like I was in a whirlwind.
I didn’t speak a word of French,
and I spent my days with scientists from all over the world
with completely different pasts and backgrounds.
I really thought we were doing something important.
It didn’t take me long to fall in love with research,
and I decided to continue by doing a doctorate in Physics,
which led me to work and live between Switzerland and Finland.
In the end, I thought...
that, maybe, I wanted to be a scientist when I was older.
When I tell people what I do,
they are often surprised and don’t expect it.
I mainly get two types of reactions.
The first is more or less like this:
“Physics? My goodness, how nerdy! Couldn’t you do something more girly?”
The second one:
“Physics? Oh God, that’s so hard! I didn’t understand it at all at school!
I won’t ask what you do as I wouldn’t understand it.”
Even I don’t always understand it, but anyway...
And so, I realised that in our world,
science and everyday life seem to be miles apart.
Today, with you, I want to try to understand why
and try to convince you otherwise,
because I think being a bit more inclusive of science,
from the first few years of childhood,
can help us become adults who are more prepared,
more knowledgeable,
and, overall, we can grow as a society.
First of all, when you think about it,
we have all been scientists in our lives.
When we were younger,
when we were taking our first steps in the world
we explored, we wanted to know how things worked
and we asked so many questions.
This curiosity and thirst for knowledge are at the root of science.
Anyway, sometimes children are exposed to deterrents when growing up,
at home or school,
which make this curiosity fade.
The first deterrent affects 50 percent of the population
and it concerns gender.
Boys and girls aren’t encouraged in the same way towards STEM subjects,
subjects including sciences, technology, engineering and math.
The idea that girls are less suited to sciences
is one of the hardest stereotypes to eradicate.
Different studies have shown how this is essentially a problem.
Reportedly, on average,
girls get lower results than boys on math tests.
There are some public figures and scientists, albeit very few,
who have tried to find biological explanations for this gender difference,
but most of the scientific community has tried to show the opposite:
that the differences aren’t due to biological factors
because boys and girls have the same cognitive abilities
or, rather, their brains work the same way when faced with a math problem.
Instead, these differences are due to sociocultural factors.
I’ll give you some examples.
Between the ages of four and seven,
boys have better spatial skills than girls.
But, parents have reported that
they spend more time playing building games with their sons
than they do with their daughters.
And we all know it’s been proven
that these types of games help to develop a variety of skills,
including spatial skills,
problem-solving skills,
or notions of symmetry.
You just need to walk around the games section in the supermarket
to see how girls are already at a disadvantage from the start.
The good news, however,
because there is some good news,
is that in countries with greater gender equality,
the difference in math results is getting smaller,
almost disappearing.
A study conducted by a group of Italian researchers analyzed 40 countries,
and a total of 270,000 15-year-olds,
and it was proven...
They drew up a classification
and it was shown that on the podium, perhaps not surprisingly,
we find the Northern European countries, like Norway and Sweden,
where boys and girls get comparable results.
Iceland dominates,
where girls get higher results.
At the bottom, we find Turkey and South Korea.
What about Italy?
Where do you think Italy is?
In the bottom half of the classification,
which proves how this is still a problem
within our society.
The second deterrent may be slightly more familiar to some of you
and it involves the phobia surrounding some school subjects.
For me, it was Latin,
but often these subjects include sciences.
In fact, they are seen as abstract and impractical subjects,
which are distant from everyday life.
How many times have we asked ourselves:
“How will this be of any use to me?”
If these subjects are taught exclusively through books,
neglecting the experimental side,
the creative and imaginative process is lost.
So we might learn about concepts of optics
but never pick up a camera.
Or we might study chemistry,
but we don’t know how to read the labels on the food we buy.
If we focus exclusively on methodology,
it’s like trying to teach music
but only through theory, without ever playing a note.
Because of this, it’s maybe unsurprising that these subjects seem boring,
difficult,
or scary.
So, as we’ve said, the coexistence of these two deterrents,
on the one hand sociocultural factors,
and on the other the phobia towards some subjects
sometimes makes children lose interest in these subjects.
They put in less effort,
they get lower results,
and then don’t think they can do it and put in even less effort.
And this feeds a loop.
It is a view of yourself and your own abilities
which is difficult to overcome
during adolescence or adulthood.
And so,
only few continue to seek information,
and read scientific articles.
Most people, however, still recovering from school memories,
are terrified and flee at the mere mention of science.
Maybe what I have said sounds familiar to you.
And maybe, after growing up and becoming adults,
you have also felt puzzled
when faced with questions from children.
The same questions you had when you were younger.
Do aliens exist?
How do stars stay in the sky?
Why is the sea blue?
If this is familiar, it might comfort you to know that you’re not alone.
In fact, in the UK, around 2000 parents were interviewed
and it was seen that
two-thirds didn’t know how to answer their children’s questions about science.
Out of these, whilst 25% search the answer online,
another 20%, trying to escape the situation,
say that nobody knows.
Or they make up an answer.
There you go.
Or maybe not.
It’s great that parents don’t know how to answer their children’s questions.
After all, they can find the answers together.
Doing science doesn’t mean knowing the answers to every question.
It just means knowing how to ask the questions in the right way.
How?
With scientific thought.
This involves a series of steps.
Starting from an observation, we come up with a question
that seems interesting to us:
why is the sea blue?
Why do Santa and the Tooth Fairy have the same handwriting?
After this, what our brain does is develop a hypothesis,
and we come up with a theory to answer our question:
OK, one of the two probably doesn’t exist.
But scientists aren’t just happy to stop there.
They want to know if their hypothesis is true or not
and so they make a prediction.
They say: if my hypothesis is true, I’ll also get this result here.
Tomorrow, the letter won’t be there.
They devise an experiment,
collect the data
and draw conclusions.
Sometimes the conclusions show that
our hypothesis is true,
but that’s often not the case... Almost always.
Like in my case.
Anyway, searching for scientific evidence
is an extremely difficult and unnatural activity.
After all, evolution hasn’t shaped us
to research the truth
because belonging to a tribe is much more valuable
where objective accuracy is concerned.
It’s much easier to draw conclusions from personal opinions,
cultural bias,
or from repeating what we’ve heard,
instead of from facts or observations.
But maybe we should all ask ourselves:
is this really what I want?
Practicing scientific thought can help us reverse this trend.
Not being satisfied with developing a hypothesis
but wanting to know if it is true or false
helps us to distinguish between what is true and false.
It increases criticality towards our own ideas.
How good, you will say.
You have convinced me.
But how will this be of any use to me?
Just like integrals we learned at school.
But no.
This isn’t just useful for physicists or engineers,
but it can be useful for everyone in everyday life.
In fact, it can help us detect traps
and guide ourselves among everything we read online.
Think about fake news.
But also about becoming more knowledgeable citizens
and I’ll explain why now.
We live in a society which is frenetic
and constantly evolving.
Scientific and technological knowledge doubles every 15 to 20 years
and this will continue throughout the century.
Think about how life was 20 years ago,
when smartphones didn’t exist,
or social networks,
and we would call each other and hang up to save credit.
We are experiencing enormous scientific and technological breakthroughs.
I’ll name just a few:
think about the problem of global warming,
energy transition,
digitalisation,
but also artificial intelligence,
genomics,
and blockchain.
Like it or not,
technology will become more present in our lives
and this will bring us face to face with a host of ethical and political problems.
In fact, with our choices,
we are called on to decide the fate of our generation
and future ones.
The only thing we can do is make sure we’re ready
and knowledgeable.
How?
By publishing science and being willing to listen to it.
We cannot be unprepared
because the world needs this knowledge.
Tremendously.
Thank you.
(Applause)