A former colleague of mine once remarked that had the Soviet Union survived, we'd already be on Mars, while the scientific trickle-down from superpower one-upmanship would make "the world" (read: the West) far better off than we are now. Instead, he likened the United States to a football team that suddenly finds itself alone on the field: it can score goals with impunity, but there's no longer a challenge, and so motivation sloughs away as the team breaks up to follow individual interests. In some regards he wasn't entirely wrong: after all, state sponsorship during the Second World War brought together the world's foremost nuclear physicists, turning in a little over a decade what had been a largely theoretical discipline into a practical field that produced one of the most horrific weapons yet realized by man.

But implicit in his framing is the idea that politicians have the final say in science, that technological advance is best done when blinkered to a single project with a concrete deadline; that applied science is the only field worth pursuing, that the be-all and end-all of research and inquiry is to produce tangible utility. Policymakers determine science's end goal, are assured their goal is right; the scientists are merely the means to the end. It is the doctrine of technological determinism which, as I have written before, marches in lock-step with dictatorship. Any claim, philosophical or material, of possessing 'absolute' knowledge is to declare the end of scientific inquiry altogether.

Many of the same scientists that were so crucial to the war effort on both sides abhorred not only its final outcome, but precisely that utilitarian mentality that had so gleefully co-opted the scientific community to accelerate the slaughter, quitting their military posts and devoting themselves to biology in an attempt to understand the human proclivity toward violence. One such scientist was Jacob Bronowski: a friend and colleague of Leó Szilárd, he was hired as a mathematician by Allied bomber command to plot sorties, and later served in the British team that studied the aftermath of Hiroshima.

In 1973, Bronowski wrote a thirteen-part documentary for the BBC, The Ascent of Man, chronicling the evolution of humanity through the window of science, described today as a counterpart of sorts to Kenneth Clark's Civilisation. The series is acclaimed for Bronowski's talent of eloquently translating the most complex concepts into easily-understandable terms in long-shot monologues held at a plethora of world locations.

A close friend of mine worked a couple years as a science teacher some decades ago, and made a point of screening Episode 11, "Knowledge or Certainty", to each of his classes. In it, Bronowski argues that if physics has taught us anything, it is that contrary to popular belief, science does not constitute absolute and final truth, but just like the arts, requires interpretation. Expanding the Heisenberg uncertainty principle into the social sphere, he demonstrates how those that claim otherwise beat the path to disaster.

People that cite the episode these days like to jump straight to the end when Bronowski draws his final summary, but I contest that his argument—and what I contend is one of the most powerful conclusions to any motion picture—can only be properly appreciated by viewing it in its entirety.

If you watch at least one episode of the programme, make sure you watch this.