Two posts from my
Delicious network within the same hour: An
earnest article from The Scientist about how science urgently
needs better marketing, and blogger
Scott Aaronson's complaint that his quantum mechanics lectures
were plagiarized to sell computer printers.
There's no need to market science at all. Science sells
itself. We have strong evolutionary incentives to be curious
about the facts of this world we live in. Every young kid
I've ever met is interested in science. They may not be interested
in the way it's presented in school, but they're all interested.
My favorite line from Calvin and Hobbes:
Calvin's dad: "You've read just about every dinosaur
book ever written. So why aren't you doing better in school?"
Calvin: "We don't read about dinosaurs."
Little kids should be interested in dinosaurs. For
nearly all of our long evolutionary history, the possibility
of being eaten was a very real one. You mean there used to
be giant reptiles that could eat you? What else is out there?
I will never forget the science class at Fieldston Lower
when we got some pond water and looked at it under the microscope.
There, among the tiny air bubbles and bits of organic crud
were assorted tiny swimming beasties, some with wriggling
tentacles.
The big challenge for science isn't so much the marketing
as it is staying out of the way of the facts. The biggest
distraction from those facts is usually the scientist's emotional
tone. For example, Richard Dawkins' tone communicates two
emotions very strongly. One is his genuine pleasure in his
work, his most attractive quality as a writer. The other emotion
is contemptuous hostility towards people who don't get it,
or who are unwilling to. This hostility is Dawkins' least
attractive quality as a writer. Why do I, the reader, want
to subject myself to it? Even if it's not aimed directly at
me, and even if it's well-motivated, hostility is ugly and
offputting. Karen Armstrong complains that Dawkins is angry,
he hates religion, and that's a short step from hating religious
people. This is not, as Buddha would say, skillful. I would
say that Dawkins has clarity without compassion (as opposed
to gooey New Agers like
Deepak Chopra, who have compassion without clarity.) Evolutionary
theory is threatening to our most basic cultural assumptions,
and the best teachers know that they have to give us time
to deal.
Knowledge is disciplined imagination. Scientists need to
present their ideas using the many techniques developed by
artists over the years. I would say that art is the science
of getting ideas into people's heads (whether those ideas
are true or valid being another story.) Above all, scientists
need to learn how to write. The default prose style for scientists
is: Edwardian. British and German. Lots of subclauses within
subclauses, long rambling parentheticals, jargon, tone-deafness
for prosody. Good writing has rules every bit as rigorous
and inflexible as any other technology. I recommend the rules
put forth by Strunk
and White: Use short, declarative sentences. Prefer plain
language to jargon when possible. Introduce new vocabulary
with clear definitions in plain English. When a word has several
synonyms, choose the shorter and more commonly used one. Don't
say 'clearly' or 'obviously'. If something is really obvious,
you don't need to state it. If you find that you do need to
state it, then it isn't obvious.
I'd add some writing tips of my own. Written language evolved
from spoken language. Spoken
language evolved from music: rhythm, dance, singing. The
musicality of language is not decorative. If you want to convey
information in a way that sticks, you need to be musical.
Repetition is desirable because people build new concepts
through rehearsal and variation. One way to make your prose
more musical is to read it out loud, ideally to another person,
or to your dog, cat, even your plants, whatever. You've had
a lot more practice at talking than at writing. Aside from
a few literary savants, everyone speaks more eloquently than
they write. It's not a bad idea to tape-record yourself reading,
then listen back. Clunky phrasing will leap right out at you
the way it doesn't from the page.
Concepts in the brain consist, at their most fundamental
level, of images of the body's state. In order to be understand
a concept, you need to build a web of bodily metaphors for
it. Einstein famously had the idea for relativity by imagining
himself riding a light beam. Successful teachers of abstract
concepts always use body metaphors. See Steven
Pinker for countless examples. The further into the micro-
and macroscale we go, the harder it is to find bodily metaphors.
It's easy to imagine being the size of, say, a mouse; it's
hard to imagine being the size of, say, a proton. Or is it?
Maybe we just need better metaphors. Video
games are a severely underutilized teaching tool for science.
I can't think of a better way to teach quantum mechanics than
to set a game at the subatomic scale, and have it obey all
the real-world laws as best as we can currently mathematically
model them.
We want to encourage the sense of exploration by reminding
ourselves, aloud and often, that the best and most important
discoveries don't always come about intentionally. The web
browser was invented by Tim Berners-Lee, a particle physicist
at CERN, because he wanted an easier way to share data with
his colleagues at far-flung institutions. The cosmic background
microwave radiation was first detected as an annoying and
mysterious background noise on a sensitive radio antenna.
The term 'Big Bang' was coined derisively by astrophysicist
Fred Hoyle, who didn't think the theory had merit. Science
is often funny and should be presented as such. The collective
works of Douglas Adams are a good start. Also Larry Gonick's
Cartoon
History Of The Universe and Bill Bryson's Short
History Of Nearly Everything.
The term 'physical law' is off-putting and misleading. The
word 'law' triggers associations to human authority, suggesting
that the reason you can't travel faster than light or whatever
is because God says so. The concept of a law unconsciously
mirrors the way that Saudi physics textbooks describe two
atoms forming a covalent bond "by the will of Allah."
The word 'theory' in the scientific sense is a problem, too,
because it's already in common usage, and for most of us it
means something specific: an untested hypothesis, a conjecture.
The word 'theory' in science means almost the opposite: a
mathematical description of a given phenomena, one that makes
quantifiable predictions that agree with observation of the
world.
Another thing that makes science needlessly difficult is
when phenomena get named after the people who discovered them:
the Casimir effect, the Schwarzchild radius, the Higgs field.
I realize that that we have to compensate for the lousy pay
in basic science somehow, and that ego-boosting helps motivate
scientists to hang in there. Unfortunately, it makes it hard
for the rest of us to keep everything straight. It would be
helpful if scientific phenomena and theories had names that
described them. Gluons are extraordinarily well-named: they
glue quarks together,
there's no forgetting it. A neutron star is a star made of
neutrons, again, boom, the name tells you the whole story.
I like Lisa Randall's
book Warped Passages because the book gives evidence of
having been written by a person. I like her pop culture references
and political asides and journalistic observation. I love
her use of attractively rendered and laid-out illustrations.
And I adore her quotes from pop songs at the beginning of
each chapter, with lyrics bearing in some jokey way on that
chapter's contents. For example, her chapter on symmetry begins
with a quote from Simple Minds' Don't You Forget About Me:
"La, la la la la, la la la la..." She also quotes
Metallica and Eminem. I would love to get a look at her iPod.
Jokes and pop songs, like video games, are sorely underused
as a way to access abstract ideas that resist straightforward
description.
Space is a difficult area for marketing. Everybody's interested
in it, until they start to really learn about it. When astronauts
talk about 'the right stuff', they leave the fact that if
you want to go into space, you have to be in the small percentage
of people who are totally immune to motion sickness. Being
in zero gravity seems like it might be fun, but it also makes
a normal person dizzy, disoriented and likely to throw up.
Copiously. Astronauts have to have incredible proprioception
and inner-ear systems, the way basketball players have to
be incredibly fast. Space sickness is measured in Garns, after
Utah senator Jake Garn, who parlayed his position on an appropriations
committee to get a ride on the space shuttle, and, well, I'll
leave the rest to the imagination. Suffice to say, if you
think throwing up is gross, imagine doing it in zero gravity.
And yet. America is a pretty terrible place in some ways,
but we did manage to send sixteen guys far away enough from
the Earth to be able to completely cover it with their gloved
thumb. Once you've learned the news that such a thing is possible,
you can't unlearn it. The idea of universal human rights is
a very recent historical novelty. Such a concept could scarcely
have existed without the trip through the Total
Perspective Vortex that modern science has put us through.
Scientists tend to be secular humanists at heart, from Einstein
on down, and there's a natural
tendency towards healthy Buddhist acceptance that comes from
contemplating the very big and very small and very old and
very new. If scientists want to engage the emotions and
imagination of the general public, they need to play up the
the very genuine inspirational quality of their work.
© ethan hein 2007 | back
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