Professor Brian Cox has called for the UK science budget to be doubled, describing increased investment as a "sensible gamble" that could transform the economy. Speaking at the British Science Festival in Aberdeen, the physicist argued that boosting public funding for research would yield huge benefits and make the UK the best place in the world to do science.
The Manchester University researcher noted that the current science budget stands at around £5.5bn per year, a fraction of overall government spending of over £600bn. He said this was below most global averages, including the OECD's. Even in the current economic climate, he insisted that increased investment in science and engineering would reap dividends, adding that the worst-case scenario of doubling the budget would be adding £5bn to the deficit, which he described as "a drop in the ocean".
Professor Cox highlighted that 44-45% of GDP comes from knowledge-intensive services, meaning nearly half of national wealth is generated in that sector. If the science budget were doubled, he argued, the potential upside would be an economic transformation, making the UK a global leader in research and innovation.
He also stressed the importance of public engagement with science, saying that because research is taxpayer-funded, people need to understand what it is achieving and what could happen if it stops. "Science festivals, science in the media, science on television are important because you are building public support, and this is self-evidently sensible," he said.
Professor Cox was in Aberdeen to unveil a plaque honouring Nobel Prize winner Sir George Paget Thomson, whose experimental work on electron diffraction proved the theory of wave-particle duality. He praised the skill of Charles Fraser, also honoured on the plaque, whose ultra-thin gold foils made the pioneering experiment possible.
