Barack Obama may have an impossible burden of expectation on his shoulders, but one fervent wish of many US scientists should be easy enough to fulfil: simply lead the nation back into the “reality-based community”.
That phrase, famously used by a senior adviser to George W. Bush in a 2002 conversation with the journalist Ron Suskind, epitomised the Bush administration’s contempt for those who “believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality”: that is from observation rather than ideology.
Instead, the Bush White House boasted of creating its own reality, and had little time for research…
