An evening with Stephen Fry and Venki Ramakrishnan | The Royal Society

Stephen Fry joins Nobel Prize-winning biologist Venki Ramakrishnan to discuss one of the most crucial topics in the modern world.

The very nature of science is to establish truth about the world around us, from groundbreaking new discoveries, like the Higgs boson, gravitational waves or the potential for life in the clouds of Venus, to issues with major social implications like climate change and biodiversity loss.

While the growth of the internet and social media makes it easier than ever before to obtain information, the free-for-all nature of the internet also makes it difficult for the average citizen to distinguish fact from fiction, truth from mistruth, and legitimate sources from fake news. The onslaught against evidence-based facts is a growing problem.

As an army of scientists continue to find themselves on the frontline of scientific discovery as they battle Covid-19, the role of scientific evidence and rational thought in an internet age of superstitions, rumours and pseudoscience has never been more apparent.

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