Alternative approaches

What is the best way to do popular science?

Our astronomer recently read a popular-science book written by a particle physicist.  In part this is because he is, like the rest of us, in the business of communicating science to the public, and it’s always useful to see someone else’s approach.  Also, he has done only a very little particle physics and he was curious to learn more about it, if possible.

The author seemed to be motivated mostly by an analogy, or story, or explanation-without-mathematics concerning the Higgs field.  He thought it was so inaccurate and misleading that it needed correcting, and spent most of the book leading up to and doing just that.  His approach in general was to identify misconceptions and correct them, at one point extending himself to cosmology.

This is a valid approach to popular science.  Indeed there are many resources online and elsewhere dedicated to righting conceptual wrongs.  It’s understandable that any scientist, confronted with a mistaken idea, would want to correct it; that’s what science is all about.  It is definitely more difficult when the idea-holder has a limited grasp of mathematics or science, but that’s the challenge.  And so, like any other aspect of popular science, it can be done well or not so well.

We try to follow a different approach, for a number of reasons.  One of them is brought out by this book.  We had never heard the description of the Higgs field that the author disliked, at least in the form he thought so misleading.  Perhaps it is more common in and near particle-physics circles.  The mistaken idea in cosmology (a field we have more contact with) that he was at pains to correct is held by no one we know of, scientist or otherwise.  A correction of a mistaken belief is not very useful for someone who does not hold it.

There is also the very human reaction to an attack on one’s ideas.  We have seen research in which confronting a misconception results in the audience more firmly remembering the misconception and mostly forgetting why (or that) it’s wrong.  Yes, people are irrational.

In our work supporting science-fiction authors we try very hard not to be seen as correcting errors, not producing a string of “You can’t do that” statements hobbling the plot.  Not only is a negative environment bad for creative work, discouraging for everyone; it misrepresents the genre.  We think science fiction is all about possibilities, exploring things that are different and following ideas to their (sometimes very strange) conclusions.  Science should motivate authors, not shut them down.

We try to present a particular segment of science (of planet orbits, of spacecraft propulsion, of Special Relativity) as a unified and systematic whole, something to work with.  As far as we can, we’ll let misconceptions fall by the wayside by themselves.

But if you insist on asking us directly, we may wind up saying, “No, you can’t do that.”