With the media frenzy over the LHC’s ‘first beam’ eventually abating, Slate looks at the failing of science journalists to write coherent and accurate articles on this and other scientific topics of interest to the general public.
No one ever said writing about particle physics was easy—the field of quantum mechanics shares a kind of proverbial inscrutability with rocket science, and nonscientists are understandably reluctant to dig in. But the best way to meet that challenge is to address it head-on, with clear analogies and straightforward language. The puzzles of the subatomic world […] are interesting and entertaining in their own right; dressing them up in florid language only adds another layer of confusion between the author and the reader.
On the whole, the best writing about physics for a general audience seems to come from physicists, not journalists. This isn’t due to the fact that physicists understand the subject matter better—if anything, people who spend all day in the lab are often the worst at explaining the big picture. Rather, they’re better at writing about physics because they don’t try so hard to make you care. They don’t believe their readers must be seduced with colorful wordplay or end-of-the-world melodramas. Journalists writing popular treatments of subatomic physics could take a lesson from the scientists: Tell it straight and have a little faith that the subject matter itself—a major advance in our understanding of the cosmos—can generate its own wonder and excitement.
If you’re new here, you may want to subscribe to my posts by email or through the RSS feed (with a tool like Google Reader). Thanks for visiting!
Author of The New York Times’ Consumed column, Rob Walker, dissects a Weekly Standard article discussing the first presidential debate between Obama and McCain to answer the question: what’s the difference between rhetoric and cognitive dissonance?
Both can result in points of view that are so biased that they have no connection to reality. But one involves communicative sleight of hand to mislead the reader/listener, while the other involves a deeper form of dishonesty: Dishonesty with the self.
It all comes down to: “we tend to bend what we see to fit our existing perceptions and biases — no matter how much dissonance there is between new facts and previously held convictions. […] It is hard to change a mind that is already made up.”
Intelligent Life asks what freedoms have we gained and lost that matter?
Freedom is central to democracy. That fact doesn’t change, but the amount and type of freedom that we have does. And it feels as if it has changed dramatically in the past few years. With the Universal Declaration of Human Rights approaching its 60th birthday, Intelligent Life asked 11 eminent people from different walks of life to look back over their adult lifetime and name the freedom we have gained and lost that means the most to them. They were free to take freedom in any sense, political or cultural, social or technological. What mattered was that it mattered to them.
So far, 10 have been interviewed: Richard Dawkins, Shami Chakrabarti, Neal Ascherson, Charles Moore, Noreena Hertz, Geoffrey Robertson, Tariq Ramadan, Peter Tatchell, Andrew Roberts and Daphne Park.
In order to study the many facets of primate behaviour, scientists have populated a small island near Puerto Rico with a thousand rhesus monkeys. Access to the island—dubbed ‘Monkey Island’—is granted only for research purposes, creating a vast and unusual outdoor lab.
As the researcher interviewed for the National Geographic video on the island says, because the monkeys are wild and are free to populate the island, “the concept here is different: we are in cages, and the monkeys are free.”
via Seed Magazine (that rightly states, “A thousand monkeys isolated on an island and nobody thinks to give them a typewriter?”)
When photographs of an uncontacted and unknown Brazilian tribe were released in May 2008, the world went a bit nutty with the photographs making front pages everywhere.
Now, however, it seems the story was quite different to what was reported.
The photos of grass-roofed shelters and hostile, body-painted Indians brandishing bows and arrows spread like brushfire around the globe. Survival International, an indigenous rights advocacy group, described the group as “uncontacted,” summoning celluloid fantasies of lost savages who had never seen civilization. Reporters began to describe them as “Earth’s last uncontacted tribe” who reacted violently to the “bird god” in the sky. But then the story collapsed. Meirelles stated in an interview that he had been following the group for two decades. The tribe was neither lost nor undiscovered — the outside world had known of them since 1910. It should have been clear from the beginning; the initial Portuguese reports never claimed the group was “uncontacted.” Introduced by sloppy reporting, this error fanned suspicions that the photos were just a hoax.
The crucial issue raised by these photos of a remote group isolated from our society is not whether, in an age of worldwide connectivity, surveillance satellites, and explosive population growth, we might still have undiscovered neighbors on a shrinking globe — we don’t. In fact, one of Meirelles’s friends first noticed the clearing where the tribe was found while browsing Google Earth. In truth, our reactions to and perceptions of these people reveal far more about us than about them. We easily believe that a band of hostile Indians confronting an airplane from a clearing do so out of ignorance and fear. But the likely truth is harder to face: The tribe might have threatened the observers precisely because they had encountered some of the worst aspects of our culture before, and suffered grievously. These images of a people courageously standing against us are not symbols of their ignorance, but of ours.