Articles Tagged with astronomy

How can you tell, if you’re not an expert? (2)

How far can you trust a scientist?

 

Astronomy book and page of equationsOur chief consultant writes: It’s time to take up the question again of how a non-expert can evaluate an expert. In a previous post I introduced paradoxers, people from outside the field who claim to have made some highly important advance. Paradoxers are interesting in several ways and we’ll return to them later. Today we consider the case of some undoubted expert, a renowned or at least established scientist, describing something in his or her field. How much of it can you rely on to be true? How far can you actually trust a scientist?

This subversive-looking question occurred to our astronomer a while back. To try to answer it, he looked into the specific case of astronomy over the period 1833-1944, and wound up writing a well-regarded book with his conclusions. It’s 300 pages long, so I’m not going to try to include the whole thing in this post. His depressing conclusion is that even the best and most conscientious scientists may make statements as known fact, that turn out later to be wrong. His encouraging conclusion is that this is very rare, and for almost all scientists almost all the time, their presentations are reliable. In addition, there are a number of clues that help indicate the reliability, or otherwise, of what you’re being told.

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Big numbers in science communication

table of astronomical numbersOur astronomer writes: In his book Wind, Sand and Stars, Antoine de Saint Exupéry tells the story of a group of Bedouin from the Sahara brought to metropolitan France. This was in the days of the French colonies in North Africa, and the intent was to impress them with the greatness of the civilization of Europe (or at least its power) so they would stop fighting against it. On their return, they said Paris, iron bridges, locomotives, everything was “very big.” They’d learned that Frenchmen seemed to be satisfied by the phrase and used it to buy some peace. In fact they did not comprehend what their guides had tried to show them.

I find that, in explaining astronomy to the public (including students in introductory classes) there is a temptation to play to the “ooh and ahh factor,” to try to impress one’s audience with big numbers to show how different it is from normal experience. (Sometimes there is the unspoken subtext: “Look at me, how good I am to be able to work with huge numbers!”) But if we are not very careful we may, in the end, only leave the vague impression that astronomy is “very big.”

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