My colleagues, especially the academic ones, are often rather critical of ‘popular’ science writings. On the one hand they all espouse the current politically correct fad that more and better writing about science is needed to illuminate the ever increasing fraction of the population that is ignorant of science. On the other hand they are very critical, fearful in some cases, of the wranglings of journalists and mediasts in their presentation of science. And on the third hand, as Pournelle has given us, is criticism that the popular science writings in their own and related disciplines are inaccurate and inadequate.
The third hand is patently lesser and can be ameliorated by noting that when one has a reasonable approximation of mastery of a discipline or field, then popular writings will be inadequate and inaccurate just because they cannot be too overwhelming. Aside from the obvious hypocrisy of these good people, few ever attempt to write for the non-specialist, much less learn how to do so; most write some paragraphs, which are simplified only in the theaters of their own minds, and then hand the paragraphs over to the public affairs people and then bitch and groan at how their incomprehensible maunderings were polluted and distorted. But more crucially, they quite miss or dismiss the idea that no amount of writing or speaking is going to have any benefit or effect if the communication is not closed. In effect, the bottleneck in expounding science to the great ‘unwashed’ masses is that the latter have to have an interest: they have to question; they have to listen; they have to cogitate. Otherwise we are little better than tourists shouting into an echo canyon and no more constructive.
I was reminded of this rather pleasantly yesterday. One of my family’s new traditions is a Post Dinosaur Day breakfast at a rustic location – a decidedly not-chain-restaurant where food is still food and not just manufactured goods. Such places are not as common as they were in my youth, sadly, and so we had to venture out into the boonies where parking lots are dignified with gravel but not concrete or asphalt and roads are poorly mis-maintained by venial county governments. The saving grace of these is that the decor to deliciousness ratio is about 0.1 as compared to 10 at a chain restaurant and the tenor is survival rather than convenience.
Following this overabundant, both in quality and quantity, repast, happily so intense that familial conversational blather guttered out and never returned, FD SCP drug me off to Scottsborough for a bit of Schwartz Freitag at the unclaimed baggage emporium and then the Hammers, one of the few remaining of authentic junkiness. As I was queued up to exchange portraiture of dead caucasian politicians for other peoples’ lost items, I came to have one of those spontaneous queue conversations with people who were most obviously a military family: the husband had the stoic steady grace of a centurion; the wife the enduring independence of a deployment widow; the children, somewhat too young for the couple had that strange childish perfection of disciplined manners peppered with occasional endearing bursts of boisterousness.
The conversation developed and continued through several meandering scatterings until I was asked the question “Since you are a rocket science, what is it?” I was immediately stunned with the epiphany of the responsibility of explaining matters scientifical to others and awed with the difficulty. Laboriously, not very glibly, I tried to explain that rocket science is not about understanding alone but also doing. That there are two types of understanding, the things you understand can be done or are by reading or other information exchange, and those things you understand from inside your head and thereby understand that something can be done that has not been done before. That latter is what rocket science is all about, doing something that has not been done before based on your own understanding of reality.
My fumbling attempts at communications amidst swirling thongs (for Scottsborough) of pactiophilic [1] shoppers evidently was successful. A couple of derivative questions, indicative of concept grasp, followed and then both content with the interchange we returned to our consumerist pursuits. My insights on the necessity of the question being asked before it can be answered for communicating science to non-scientists were validated. Indeed, in a sense this was rocket science for not only had I understood that I could communicate with a new human, one I had not communicated with before, but the communication was accomplished. And we were enriched by it, the two of us and any other humans we may later communicate with.
That breakfast looks like a good new tradition after all.
[1] pactiophilic – bargain loving
Simple Country Physicist 