When people get annoyed with the sciences, you often hear people complaining that research-based academics should come out of their ivory towers and answer the public's questions.
When Helmut Schmidt was still a chain-smoking chancellor, he was fond of blowing this horn and also burdening scientists with an additional obligation to the public. I think it would be better to call for the opposite, for the public to be made to pay, on the one hand, and for an increase in ivory towers, on the other. This is precisely the advice with which father-son author duo Gareth and Rhodri Ivor Leng conclude their book entitled "The Matter of Facts", which deals with skepticism, persuasion and evidence in the sciences. The quality of research - according to the two members of the University of Edinburgh - suffers from too much market clamor and publi-cation addiction, and it could be that science will become better and more reliable again if it actually moves into an ivory tower and isolates itself. When the term was first used, it served as a symbol for the self-imposed isolation of an artist or scientist "who lives in his own world (only his work) without worrying about society and the problems of the day", as can be read in the Brockhaus.
This "ivory tower" is an invention of the 19th century and goes back to the literary critic Sainte-Beuve, who was referring specifically to the work of the poet Alfred Comte des Vigny. In his texts, exceptional characters appear who find no place in an uncomprehending society and therefore distance themselves from it. They retreat into an ivory tower, a word Sainte-Beuve used approvingly, as it should be. There have been ivory towers of this kind in the recent history of science, in Copenhagen, Göttingen and Princeton (New Jersey). Anyone who looks at them will recognize that ivory towers are necessary for the development of science and that the researchers working here are needed to solve problems. For example, the question of energy storage or the question of what to put in place of growth in order to achieve a sustainable economy.
