The Politics of Gravity

Not a classic helping of I'm Sorry I Haven't A Clue last night, but worth it if only for Jeremy Hardy singing the words from Radiohead's Creep to the tune of Grandma We Love You, and Tim Brooke-Taylor's alternative opening sentence for the Da Vinci Code: "Leonardo awoke with a sneeze, and realised he had a code."

I was reminded last week that it's now four years since Research Councils UK, the "strategic partnership" of the UK’s seven Research Councils, announced that the Councils intended to solve, within a few years, the problem of "What is gravity?"

The Save British Science campaign group said, in evidence to the Select Committee scrutinising the activities of RCUK: "It is absurd to propose that officials in Swindon can dictate that where Newton and Einstein reached the barrier of their genius, the Research Councils will nevertheless "solve" the question "What is gravity?" within the next few years. Whatever theoretical and experimental breakthroughs are taking place at the moment, it remains an extraordinary claim."

Not that being situated in Swindon is a bar to greatness (although Swindon's website only lists Billie Piper, Diana Dors and Melinda Messenger as being famous people from that town). But a little modesty would have been appropriate. Isaac Newton himself wrote: "I do not know what I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only a boy playing on the sea-shore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me."

Anyway, I'm wondering how the Research Councils are getting on. I've just checked the website, and there's no indication there that an answer is imminent. I think we should be told, though; gravity is a weighty matter.