Losing the message in the medium
John Eades, Tokyo
University
Address: CERN, 1211
Geneva 23; John.Eades@cern.ch
Abstract
I here examine the mystifying way that science
stories have sometimes been covered by the media over the last several years.
In doing this, I am drawing largely from personal experience with newspapers,
radio and TV channels in the UK, the US, Switzerland, France, Canada, the US
and Japan, and as a consumer of science reporting as well as an occasional
media interviewee. I conclude that we only have ourselves to blame for the
consequences of this.
Introduction
A few years ago, I bought a CD of
Sibelius' 5th symphony. This is one of his best known works, but the version I
bought was the original 1915 one rather than the revised version of 1919 (which
until about ten years ago was the only version ever played.) What I expected
were minor changes in orchestration, maybe with a few passages cut out here and
there, or reduced in length. What I got was the kind of shock you might feel if
you met someone in the street you had known all your life, and found that he
was 20 cm taller than he was three weeks last Tuesday, and that his hair had
turned blue. Although it was recognizably the same work, based on the same
thematic material, it was also an entirely different work.
I often get much the same feeling when
I look at media coverage of science topics I am familiar with. Communicating
clearly about science is extremely difficult and requires talents rarely found
among professional scientists, so it is not my intention here to indulge in
gratuitous media bashing. What I do want to suggest is that somewhere in
science reporting, many of the most important basic ideas about science and the
things we learn from it are being lost, that this phenomenon is not infrequent,
and that the so-called serious, responsible media channels are by no means free
of it. Questions such as - what constitutes an experiment, what is the purpose
of research, what are its methods, what is not science, and why in fact
we need to do research at all, are hardly ever addressed. In other words the
baby is (inadvertently for sure) being thrown out with the bathwater. Everyone
loses. What is to be done?
Some media views of
Science
To explain what I mean, I begin with
several examples of media coverage of news items which, it is claimed, concern
physical science.
TV documentary about
Cold Fusion circa 1997:
In the first scene, a garage door opens
and a car emerges .... Voice over: 'This car runs on water...'. The
camera pans out and it becomes evident that the car was being pushed. Much
later, very near the end, a viewer with a good memory, a sharp ear and a
critical frame of mind could conclude from an aside, that in fact the car had
never yet run on water.
A Teletext item
(2001), NOT about cold fusion (in full):
'Scientists in the US have produced a
car that runs on water. It gets 300 km to a gallon and works by burning the hydrogen
found in water.'
Both these examples came from BBC World
Service TV. I could have chosen many more examples that have mystified and
irritated me because they seem to miss the whole point of science. Why, for
example were no explanations or apologies given in the TV documentary for
leading the viewer astray, why were no penetrating questions asked, and why
were the doubters carefully edited to appear closed-minded, out-of touch and
even rather silly? Concerning the Teletext item my reaction was - yes, it has
indeed been known for a very long time that water is H2O, and
that hydrogen burns with Oxygen to produce it, and that energy in the form of
heat comes out when you do this. How simple to start with water, separate it
into hydrogen and oxygen, then burn these gases back to water. If it's this
simple, how come no one ever wised up to this possibility before?
When I look at the results of
newspaper/radio interviews given by myself, I am equally mystified but I don't
feel quite so superior any more:
BBC radio, circa
1998:
JE: 'No, there is no conceivable way in
which our research on antihydrogen can ever lead to new sources of energy ...'
Interviewer: 'Why are you doing it
then?'
JE flounders around
helplessly at this totally unexpected turn of events. Luckily this exchange
took place before the interview started, and I was able to remind the
interviewer that physics does not concern itself exclusively with the search
for new energy sources. He immediately recognized his mistake.
BBC radio, 2000
JE: 'Well It's not easy to explain to
people having breakfast in the kitchen why we are so interested in
antiparticles and antimatter, but try and think of it this way. If you replace
your toaster or refrigerator by one constructed like its mirror image, the new
one will work fine. But this couldn't always be guaranteed if the appliance
involved radioactive substances unless you also made the new one out of
antimatter. We think nature is maybe trying to tell us something important here
about the way she has organized the world....'
Interviewer: '... but I can see
refrigerators....'
Completely floored,
JE turns in a truly appalling performance trying to recover from this...
Interviewer interrupts:' ... I have
heard that entire cities can be powered by antimatter ....'
JE Gives up trying to
explain - spends the rest of the interview trying to lay this idea to rest, all
the while regretting not having heeded the CERN public relation department's
advice - ' Just answer the
questions, never, ever, try to explain anything'.
Sunday Times, 1997
The subject is the Antiproton
Decelerator constructed at CERN to slow antiprotons, which we can only
create in the laboratory at very high speeds, down to speeds at which they can be
captured and examined. At the end, I am quoted as saying:
'Once we have captured anti-atoms, we
could learn to employ them in a number of ways. The use of antimatter as a fuel
would be a horrendously expensive per kilowatt-hour, but it may represent a
practical solution to some otherwise unsolvable fuel problem.'
I read this in total
astonishment. What I said was something like the following: a) one or
two people marginally connected with physics, but not known for the sharpness
of their critical faculties, have claimed something like that b) no-one
takes it seriously and c) that it looks to me like an excellent
investment for people who really enjoy losing money, because even if it worked
the cost per kWh would make nonsense of the whole endeavor.
What goes wrong?
Now I have to back off a bit here, and
make it clear that I do not wish, and have no right, to complain that Science
was not being given a fair shake in any of these presentations - indeed every
one of them was extremely positive about science. What it seems to me that all
these examples have in common is that different people or groups of people were
looking at representations of the same thing but seeing different things, with
none of them understanding what it was they saw. I suppose that what brought
this most clearly into focus for me was the news item paraphrased below:
BBC World Service TV
Evening News item, early 2000:
... In California, a
new particle accelerator of some kind is coming into operation, tunnels are
shown, computers, flashing lights and talking heads appear, much discussion
takes place about the mystery of antimatter and the secrets of the universe.
At the end, the newsreader (Stephen
Cole) reappears and says: Well, I didn't understand a word of that!
Neither did I. I wondered how such a
thing could have come into existence without me knowing about it, until the
name of the project (BaBar, at Stanford University, California) was revealed at
the very end. Only then did everything fall into some kind of context although
the connection between the report and what I know continues to mystify me years
later.
The point I want to
make here is that if neither physicist nor layman understood a word of it,
what purpose was being served? The same impression was reinforced by the
following:
BBC ‘Horizon’
documentary, January 2005, repeated February 2006:
This programme
concerned a phenomenon called global dimming and began by warning us
that this '... deadly new phenomenon
... may already have led to the starvation of millions.' There followed some twenty minutes of
elaborate computer graphics and dramatic imagery, interspersed with sound bites
from worried-looking climate scientists and accompanied by screechingly
dissonant soundtrack chords. The point being made seemed to be that the water
in your garden birdbath evaporates faster when the sun is shining. By
the end of the programme I was with difficulty able to decode the wider message
that a) atmospheric pollution reflects part of the sunlight entering the
atmosphere so that less of it reaches the earth's surface b) this
cooling effect may to some extent be canceling out the warming effect from
increased atmospheric CO2 (and also be changing rainfall patterns) c)
cleaning up atmospheric pollution is therefore likely to make global warming
worse. This is an important message, and Horizon is to be congratulated
for bringing it to general attention. But why did I, a working scientist, have
to peel away so many layers of media embellishment to get it? And why didn't my wife get it at all? And
how was it that the programme summary[1]
managed, in one page, to get that message across clearly, while an hour of TV
programming nearly lost it for both of us?
It seemed to me that in both these
examples the medium had been allowed to hijack the message, that in the attempt
to decode the mystique of real science for general public consumption, it had
been re-coded in the form of a new mystique - entertainment.
Is this objection
important anyway?
It is easy to say that this discrepancy
between the scientist's view of science and the image of it presented in the
media does not matter and that I am being unrealistic. After all, I am
sometimes told, the general public can't be expected to follow explanations,
only stories, and if these are presented in a colorful, entertaining way, the
funding will continue to roll in, so what harm is done?
Leaving aside the
questionable ethics of such an approach, the proof of this pudding must surely
be in the eating. What is the result of this (sympathetic, I repeat) science
coverage in terms of the way science is perceived by non-scientists? Here is
how one person sees particle physics research:
'Despite their access to copious
research funds, today's scientists have yet to prove that a quark is worth a
bag of beans. The quarks are coming! The quarks are coming! Run for your lives
. . .! Yes, I know I shouldn't jeer at science, noble science, which, after
all, gave us mobile telephones, collapsible umbrellas and multi-striped
toothpaste, but science really does ask for it . . . Now I must be serious. Can
you eat quarks? Can you spread them on your bed when the cold weather comes?'
No this was not John Cleese raving away
in an episode of Monty Python, but a 1996 article by Bernard Levin in The
Times. Yes - The Times - the world pinnacle (as it calls itself) of
serious, responsible journalism. In a letter a few days later it was pointed
out that in fact B. Levin, who was a constant contributor to most of the
influential, serious magazines and newspapers in the UK, ate a very large
number of quarks every day and would die if he didn't. He did in fact die in
2004, missed by friends and foes alike, although not of quark starvation.
Here is how another
person sees celestial mechanics:
'P.R. a publié .... le
livre-catastrophe qui porte ce titre ... le feu du ciel -, dans lequel
(l'auteur) 'voit' à l'avance les Parisiens, transformés en torches vivantes, se
jeter par milliers dans la Seine, tandis que les éléphants du zoo de Vincennes
défoncent les grilles du parc et se précipitent dans le lac Daumesnil.... ...
Notre-Dame et le Louvre ne seront bientôt plus que des 'amas indistincts.'
No, this is not a description of mass
panic in the Middle Ages at the sight of a comet, nor a story from the National
Enquirer or France Dimanche. It is a review in Le Monde
Interactif of a book by a famous fashion designer, Paco Rabanne. Rabanne
describes there the likely (to him) consequences of the eclipse of 1999, which
he thought would somehow cause the MIR space station to fall on Paris. He was
deadly serious to the extent that he shut the shop and ran away from Paris on
the eclipse day because he really believed that the sky was going to fall on
his head.
Finally:
'I find myself at a loss to understand
the relationship between its current and potential benefits to ordinary people
and the billions of pounds of taxpayer's money that go into.. the facility... A
project that only the most dedicated physicist seems able to ...appreciate...
seems absurd unless there is significant payback and spin-off in commercial
terms.... With half the investment ...[in the internet] we could have created a
superhighway of business opportunities... in contrast to the academic nonsense
of fleeting quarks [and] protons that might have been there for a billionth of
a second.'
No prizes for
guessing which organization Christopher Lloyd (Sunday Times June 9 1996) is
referring to. Particularly noteworthy here is the neat way the internet (a
spin-off from basic research if there ever was one) is used as an argument for
reducing funding of the very basic research of which it was a spin-off! I'm
still trying to figure that one out.
Vast though the ignorance of many such
prominent people may be, opinions like these determine to a large extent
everyone else's perception of many things, including science. Of course I can't
show that they are causally related to specific examples of media coverage of
science like those I gave earlier. However, no-one's ideas arise spontaneously
out of the vacuum. Someone, somewhere, has given Levin the impression that the
purpose of science is to produce consumer gimmicks, Lloyd that it is commercial
exploitation for profit and that protons have a lifetime of one nanosecond (why
is he still around to say so?), and Rabanne that Newton's law of gravitation is
some kind of optional extra.
Who can this someone be but us? And how
did we do it? I think by failing to insist that the media present science, as
it is, and not as an unrecognizable package of easily saleable images, or as a
collection of promises for things we cannot possibly deliver.
Some lost messages
My argument should, I hope, now be
clear: We tell certain things about science to the media. Even when they report
on these stories sympathetically (which is usually the case) the result is
often incomprehensible, both to us and to the people it is aimed at! So
the real message is somehow getting lost. As a result, many loud and
influential voices are raised against science, especially basic science, which
has now been in serious financial trouble in the US for many years, and is
becoming more so in Europe (although not yet, it seems, in Japan). In this section
I present a personal view of some of the messages that I think get lost in the
media.
Science does not
equal technology.
Most of the items on the BBC TV world
service programme 'Science News' seem to be about technology, and even the name
of this workshop contributes to the conflation of these two quite different
things in peoples' minds. Yet, as the presence today of numerous age-old
engineering works testifies, technology predated science by thousands of years.
Technology is easier to talk about, and no one needs to stress that in the last
few hundred years it has made extensive use of science, but that doesn't make
them the same thing.
Practical
applications are not guaranteed.
The idea now seems universally accepted
that a successful scientific discovery is one that results in someone making
money by applying it to daily life. I am invariably asked about this, and I
usually try to reply as follows. In the mid-nineteenth century Maxwell, Faraday
and others were doing research on two mysterious phenomena - magnetism and
electricity. This was basic science - so basic that only the most dedicated
physicist seemed able to appreciate it as Lloyd might have said. Today, not a
single moment of our waking or sleeping hours remains untouched by what they
did, which was to understand these phenomena and the relationship between them.
But their agenda was to understand nature's rules, not to prepare for the
technological revolution which did in fact come about later. It is said that
Faraday foresaw this when, in reply to Mr. Gladstone's question
'But what is its
usefulness Mr Faraday? He replied 'Why, sir, there is every
possibility that you may soon tax it '.
The hard truth is, however, that this kind of revolution was almost
unique in human history. Very little fundamental research will ever result in
commercial applications, and we should not let the pervasiveness of
electromagnetic technology be taken by the general public as an indication that
it will. When it has happened, we always had to consult nature first. This
brings me to my next point.
Nature is in charge.
When we do succeed to discover nature's
laws, we are obliged to abide by them. More often than not, they are
inconvenient for us, because in framing them she takes no account whatever of human
wishes and desires. This message does not seem to get through in the media,
which often imply that by waiting a while and letting human ingenuity and
know-how get to work, we will find some way of fooling her. No amount of
ingenuity and know-how is, however, going to allow you to get a net output of
energy by taking water molecules apart and then putting them back together
again. You will always lose some, simply because nature has decided that that
is the way things are. Dennis Overbye,
a science correspondent for the New York Times once put all this rather
neatly in his statement of the three laws of thermodynamics as: 1) You can't win 2) You can't break even
3) You can't get out of the game. Such uncomfortable truths are difficult
to sell, but that is no reason for telling people the opposite.
Everyone is a
scientist.
If we are going to insist that science
does not equal technology, or profit, we must be careful not to imply that it is
some kind of mysterious cabalistic ritual without any relevance at all to
everyday life. Just the opposite is true - while science is largely a
collection of tools and ways of thinking, even the most refined of these are of
the kind that everyone uses and encounters all the time, without a second
thought. I don't think we use daily life nearly enough when presenting
scientific ideas. Here are a few examples; I could think of many others:
Fields: If I were to start
talking about representations of scalar and vector fields to an interviewer he
would quickly and very properly shunt me onto another topic. Yet millions of
people watch them on TV every night without getting indigestion, except that
they call them the weather forecast. Every temperature chart is in fact a
representation of a scalar field, and every wind speed chart a representation
of a vector field (sometimes the vector fields are even shown dynamically
propagating in space and time). Here we have one of the extremely complicated
concepts of modern physics making a daily appearance in everyone's living room.
Doubt: 'The skeptic doth neither affirm nor deny
any position', Walter Raleigh once said, 'but doubteth of it, and
applyeth his Reason against that which is affirmed, or denied, to justify his
non-consenting’. Much later, Karl Popper pointed out that doubt is one of
the most valuable ingredients of the scientific method. When the cold fusion
argument arose, the scientific world received it with the same doubt they
reserve for every new claim. We are told that the general public is, on the
other hand, simply not used to skeptical thinking, or to examining all claims
critically. Maybe. People do, however, buy used cars, they know that they have
to use their critical faculties when doing so, and the media sensibly encourage
them in this. What is different when someone offers a car that runs on water?
Or unlimited, cheap, non-polluting energy? Or, for that matter, suggests that
the Internet is going to make everyone rich and happy overnight?
Number vs. Quantity: Shortly
after Chernobyl, it was announced on the Swiss TV evening news that we could
all relax - the radioactivity of meat had now fallen below 10 Curies per Kg. Of
course, I would not go within several km of any butcher's shop whose meat was
even one millionth as radioactive as that. The announcer probably meant
nanoCuries (billionths of a Curie), but we scientists cannot blame him if we
never told him that a small number (10) can be a very large quantity, or a
large one a small quantity. A daily fact of life for many commuters in Geneva
is that it is some 50 km from here to Lausanne. It is also 50,000,000 mm and
0.000 000 000 000 19 light years. It ought not to be too difficult to get
across the idea that we choose the most convenient number for a given quantity,
with, for example, a convenient, relevant, and understandable unit for the
radioactivity of meat being the activity per Kg of the average human being
(yes, we are all slightly radioactive).
Science and Culture.
What I have tried to say above is that
what is often presented as science is nothing of the kind and while it is
tempting to blame this obfuscation on the media, the fault usually lies in us.
Although I stressed the importance of scientific thinking in everyday life, I
still have not replaced the striped toothpaste and collapsible umbrellas with
excitement and adventure. I started off by talking about a Sibelius symphony
and I want to finish on a similar cultural note. We never seem to insist when
talking to the media that science is part of human culture, and to me this is
perhaps the most egregious deficiency in the story we do tell. Far more
eloquent voices than mine have placed science in its proper cultural context,
so I will let them do the talking:
I begin with Democritus on atoms:
'The only existing things are atoms and
empty space - all else is mere opinion. The atoms are infinite in number and
infinitely various in form; they strike together and the lateral motions and
whirlings which then arise are the beginnings of worlds...The soul consists of
fine, smooth, round atoms like those of fire. These are the most mobile of all.
They interpenetrate the whole body, and in their motions, the phenomenon of
life arises.'
Much, but not all of
this would be accepted as valid today, but even when he is wrong, there is a
breadth and nobility of vision here which few people would fail to accept as a
contribution to our cultural life.
Newton, 2100 years later, talking about
the real business of particle physics before its time, put it this way:
'There are therefore Agents in Nature
able to make particles of Bodies ftick together by very ftrong attractions. And
it is the businefs of experimental philofophy to find them out.'
Levin and Lloyd
please note, there is no mention whatever here of striped toothpaste or
commercial profit.
Bertrand Russell, saying much more
eloquently what I said above about nature taking no heed of our convenience or
comfort in deciding the way things will be:
'[T]hat all the labours of the ages,
all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human
genius, are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system, and
that the whole temple of Man's achievement must inevitably be buried beneath
the debris of a universe in ruins - all these things, if not quite beyond
dispute, are yet so nearly certain, that no philosophy which rejects them can
hope to stand.'
My final quotation is by Ramamurti
Shankar, who is talking about the role of symmetry principles in physics:
'Should we at times be despondent over the fact that we know so few of nature's laws, let us find solace in these symmetry principles, which tell us that what little we know is universal and eternal. From the lonely hydrogen atom in intergalactic space which emits its 21 centimetre radiation as predicted by quantum theory, to giant galaxies that gyrate to the tune of Newton's laws, every step in the cosmic dance that follows the beat we discovered bears witness to our achievements, and will continue to do so aeons from now, even if in the meantime the last human mind has been stilled.'
I think you will not
have guessed that this comes from a textbook on Quantum Mechanics. I left it to
the end, because here, it seems to me, is the real answer to everyone who sees
in science only what he wishes to see.
An earlier version of
this article was presented at the 6th International Conference on Public
Communication of Science and Technology PCST-6, CERN, Geneva, 1-3 Feb 2001.
[1] Still available at http://www.bbc.co.uk/sn/tvradio/programmes/horizon/dimming_prog_summary.shtml