Scientists - we are basically rock stars...

In a clarion call to his fellow geeks – Russ Swan implores us to revel in the now; for we have never had it so good…

Enjoy the moment, fellow eggheads, for it will not last. Our star has been in the ascendant, but the signs are now clear and unmistakeable: we have reached peak geek.

I’ve been around the block enough times to remember when it was deeply uncool to be a scientist or engineer, or to admit even a passing interest in anything remotely nerdy. To be in with the crowd, one would affect an interest in football (an activity involving a couple of dozen people being paid a lot of cash to chase a ball around a field, apparently), and other blokey pastimes. Motorbikes, beer, plastering, that sort of thing.

Women of a geekish tendency had it even worse. At least the guys could do mental arithmetic, as long as this was only applied to darts scores or bookmakers’ odds. Women were expected to shrug their shoulders, flutter their eyelashes, and insist at every opportunity that they just couldn’t do sums. Dark days indeed.

The low point probably came in the 1990s, when a large portion of the population seemed obsessed with the imminent but insignificant clicking-over of the odometer to all those zeroes, the non-disaster of the millennium bug, and the inexorable rise of the celebrity non-entity.

The 2000s, though, brought a new dawn for geek chic. The 21st century was always going to be futuristic, everyone knew that. Car manufacturers led the public taste by offering their vehicles in any colour they liked, so long as it was silver. In the 1990s, the most popular colours had been blue, red, green, and white, but by the mid 2000s silver had trounced them all (doubly so if grey cars were lumped in – and frankly it’s often hard to tell the difference).

We might not have the flying space cars that the 20th century promised us, but we could at least have our four-wheelers in shiny sci-fi hues.

A more radical shift came with the new portrayal of the scientist in popular media. 2000 saw the launch of the forensics-based TV blockbuster CSI, spawning a raft of lookey-likey programmes on both sides of the Atlantic and, at a stroke, making the scientist both cool and sexy. This really was a watershed moment; previously nearly all TV and movie scientists were socially awkward, poorly dressed, and with dubious personal hygiene.

I’m sure it’s no coincidence that applications to science courses at universities had fallen to a low during the scientists-are-weird era, and perked up again once the heroes of the small screen were shown wearing fashionable clothes and operating cool-looking technology in their (oh so realistic) on-screen laboratories.

Meanwhile, in the real world, Big Science was in vogue. The Human Genome Project did for biology in 2003 what the Large Hadron Collider would do for physics a decade later.

It’s been a good run, really, and it isn’t quite over yet, but this year is undeniably the highest, fastest, and coolest part of the rollercoaster of scientific acceptability.

The whole thing has been climaxing (or perhaps Imaxing) on cinema screens around the country with sympathetic movie portrayals of Stephen Hawking and Alan Turing, along with the latest blockbuster sci-fi space travel epic. On the small screen, the top rated sitcom portrays a group of scientists who have learned to look beyond the particle accelerator. Some of them even get laid, for heaven’s sake.

Applications to study sciences have increased steadily (in the case of forensic science, rather more rapidly than job opportunities), and fashion-conscious teenage girls last year sported t-shirts emblazoned NERD where, a generation ago, they would have screamed RELAX. One of the top news stories of the last year, out of all news stories, was the unfolding drama of the Philae comet lander.

In short, we are where it’s at, right here, right now. And will still be, for a little while anyway. Next month (March)sees the arrival of the Dawn probe at dwarf planet Ceres, but more excitement can be expected in July when the New Horizons probe makes a fly-by of Pluto. Whether that will generate anything like the excitement of the landing on 67P remains to be seen, but it will certainly be a moment of glory for science.

Fashion is a fickle thing, and the only certainty is that what is on trend today will not be tomorrow. I reckon there is about a 40-year cycle going on here, from the last peak of geek chic in the mid 1970s (think Apollo, Sinclair spectrum, Star Wars) to its nadir in the dull 1990s.

This means, rather depressingly, that we may not see our status this high again until around 2050. Make the most of it now, people, for this is our moment in the limelight. 2015 is peak geek.