We can solve this with SCIENCE!

It's fairly common nowadays to hear people complaining about the deteriorating standards of science in our society. We're constantly told that the numbers of students taking science subjects at university are dropping, that society favours people who use their gut feelings rather than evidence (that would be truthiness), and that this is caused by Christianity's dislike of rationality. (Incidentally, if that's true, I'd like to know why scientists vastly outnumbered arts and humanities students in my university's Christian Union.)

Amongst all this doom and gloom, it would be easy to assume that there will be no scientists anywhere in our society in just a few years, and that we'll turn into a society of yokels. This would be a pretty daft thing to assume, however. For a start, numbers of science graduates in the US have actually increased in recent years; moreover, even though students are more likely to be turning away from the traditional sciences now than they were a few years ago (see this BBC article for the figures), the numbers of students going to university at all are constantly and dramatically rising, meaning that we're still going to have considerably more scientists in this country than, say, ten years ago.

Possibly even more importantly, though, the attitude towards science that's seen in the media has been constantly improving recently. I think this can best be shown through the medium of US crime dramas.

(What? I happen to like US crime dramas.)

The example that springs to mind immediately is CSI: Crime Scene Investigation. Whereas crimes were once solved on TV by maverick detectives who threatened suspects, shot their way out of trouble and drove fast cars, CSI has introduced a format in which the slightly nerdy characters back at the lab take centre stage and save the day. Indeed, characters who get too emotionally involved in the case frequently get reprimanded, not because it goes against the usual way of doing things, but because it doesn't help. The show doesn't portray its geeky characters half-heartedly, either - Gil Grissom, the CSI team's figurehead, is a hardcore nerd, into insect life cycles and other bizarrely obscure subject areas.

Grissom is a very likeable character, not only because he gets the job done well, but also because he clearly loves what he does and is very passionate about it. CSI very rarely goes deeply into the personal lives of its characters, mainly because we simply don't need to see them - we see enough of them at work to know what they're like as people, and to make the audience root for them. It's a similar story in more recent series Numb3rs.

I'd like to take this moment to point out quite how much I hate the mixing of letters and digits in the middle of a word. I tend to pronounce Numb3rs as "Numbthrers" in protest. Regardless, the show itself is very entertaining, and this is largely due to Charlie, the central character. Charlie is a mathematician, frequently consulted by the FBI on cases where mathematical analysis is necessary. It's proper maths, too (as much of it as I can recognise, anyway), and as long as the audience can overlook the frankly staggering number of cases that happen to involve mathematical analysis, it's accessible and entertaining.

The rest of the show is good too - Megan, the team's resident psychologist, holds up her end of the science admirably, and the other characters see the use of science as a useful tool, rather than belittling it as nerdy. Charlie and Megan, like Grissom, are passionate and clearly intelligent scientists, who have fully-developed personalities and make their specialities look both useful and - dare I say it - cool.

I can't point to definite figures proving that these shows, and others like them, have increased public appreciation of science, although this article from the BBC certainly suggests that this might well be the case. I think it is likely, though, that science is seen by the average person as having a much higher status than we're sometimes led to believe - and that the predicted collapse of all reason and thought is not going to happen after all.