Dancing about architecture
Elvis Costello said, “Writing about music is like dancing about architecture — it’s a really stupid thing to want to do.” What a great image. While I’m not sure that I agree with him, I do think that a similar thing could be truthfully said about popular science. Writing about science is often just as effective as dancing about architecture, although it’s hardly a stupid thing to want to do well.
I used to enjoy reading, listening to, or watching reports on science for a general audience. That was back when I was still part of the general audience. Once I began to study physics at the university level, I realized how empty most of those reports really are. The conventional wisdom says that they have to be, since most people don’t have enough background knowledge to process most of the content. You can’t talk about Lorentz invariant quantities, since most of your audience thinks a matrix is a place without spoons, and will tell you to just relax if you mention a tensor. Obviously you can’t get that technical.
Still, I really can’t stand seeing all those books that claim to explain some scientific concept “with no equations at all!” or “made simple for everyone” or some similar promise. There are lots of them. Even Einstein wrote one on relativity subtitled “A Clear Explanation that Anyone Can Understand.” Yeah, right. Einstein was a great writer and a clear thinker and all that, but maybe it’s okay to admit that your audience is not really “anyone” and “everyone.” It would be nice if everyone really could understand relativity, but either not everyone can understand it, or you’re not really explaining relativity (you’re just dancing about architecture, as it were).
I’m all for improving science literacy. Don’t get me wrong. I just think that science literacy would be better served by being willing to communicate how complex the scientific process is, rather than smoothing everything over and pretending no math was involved. If all you know about string theory is the animation of a donut and coffee cup morphing into each other (illustrating their topological equivalence), as was shown over and over and over again in that PBS Nova special, it’s hard to imagine why string theory is hard. What are string theorists doing all day? Staring at coffee cups and playing cellos? Of course it’s not worth funding them — being in academia is easy street! …Even if people intellectually acknowledge that math is involved in science, the sugar-coated version of science presented in popular media still downplays the reality of the scientific method: it’s a long process of theory, experiment, data analysis, comparison with theory, and back-to-the-drawing-board. Depicting science as something reducible to sound bites and cute animations ultimately harms science literacy rather than helping it. It also encourages people who have dismissed the entire field of mathematics as not worth their time, since it implies you can understand science while being bad at math.
I don’t blame the science reporters for this. Some of them have almost no science background themselves, and are presenting the analogies and handwaving that felt like an effective explanation when they heard it. Most of the reporters that do have science background have editors who don’t. Nevertheless, in an ideal world I would hope that science writers stop billing their works as math-free, and stop asking Nobel Prize-winners to explain their research in a mere sentence or two. Dumbing down the reporting doesn’t help us appreciate the intelligence behind what’s reported on.
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5 Responses to “Dancing about architecture”
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From Z: …since it implies you can understand science while being bad at math.
I consider the scientific method as the foundation of science, not math. And as such I know a lot of ’scientists’ who rely heavily on the scientific method and who are, in fact, lousy at math. As an archaeologist I was surrounded by social scientists who applied the scientifc method every day in the field, in the lab and in the classroom. But the use of math was limited to making sure an excavation unit was 1 meter by 1 meter. And that we accurately measured the width of a layer of stratigraphy.
Also, my company was heavily involved with ‘public archaeology’ i.e. bringing our profession to the public in the form of public digs where we ‘dumbed down’the rhetoric and actually let them participate. But that also sparks interest and they can pursue more knowledge on their own. It also brings in funding, which is equally important. I don’t see a problem with that.
Okay, I accept your point that archaeology is not all that full of math. You yourself call it a social science. You could have also used the example of political science, or of sociology. Scientific thinking is involved, but math doesn’t have to be. That’s fine. It’s also not really what I was talking about. I wasn’t trying to argue that there’s no aspect of science that isn’t math-intensive, or that there’s no point whatsoever to popular science without math or other concrete details — just that in the difficult balance between accessibility and content in popular science writing, I think people err too often on the side of accessibility and sacrifice some very valuable content. It might not be so bad for society if there was a wider understanding that science does involve some hard thinking. (Maybe people would be less likely to swallow all that pseudoscience that makes no greater attempt at being scientific than using the word “quantum” repeatedly.)
Also, “dumbing down” can bring in funding from some places (if they’re happy to see outreach) but can cut you off from funding from other places (if you dumb down too convincingly and make your work seem easy, or if you get so simplified that you spread misconceptions rather than understanding).
But don’t you think ‘dumbing down’ still gets the knowledge out there? I always think of the example of just an average guy jumping in a time machine and going back a couple hundred years. Being able to describe, at least in basic terms, combustion engines, airplanes, penicillin, the internet, etc.
Even in the process of ‘dumbing down’ science we still have citizens with vastly more basic knowledge than someone living a couple centuries ago.
It gets some knowledge out there, to be sure. It’s better than nothing. I do think we could make huge improvements in that by explicitly acknowledging that there is more to research than what gets shown in the cheesy documentaries.
I’m not so concerned with exactly how much special relativity people understand. The “dumbed down version” is fine. I don’t think we should try to teach everyone linear algebra in order to make sure they really get it. My point is that we shouldn’t pretend there isn’t any linear algebra and make it seem like a cartoon animation is the sum total of a century of scientific progress on the topic. Learning isn’t just about the concepts and facts. It’s also about understanding what a career in the sciences is like, and why we should trust and value the results obtained by scientific experiments.
Recently I have been finding the lack of references in most news stories to be quite infuriating. Even in online articles when the inclusion of a link would be relatively easy. More and more I find I would like get further information, either about the subject or the reliability of the source and have to hope that the information included in the article is enough for me to track it down.
I think if more focus was given to this aspect then people can continue to learn up to their own level without including that material in the original news piece.
If you know of a news outlet that regularly does this let me know, perhaps I’m just not in the right places.