Curse the Darkness
or Post a Web Site
by Herb Brody
(Posted July 11, 1997 ? Issue 12; archived July 25, 1997)
I was studying physics at a large public university in New England in the twilight years of the Slide Rule Epoch. Disco music plagued the airwaves. Vietnam and Watergate were fresh wounds in the national consciousness. Computers inhabited large air-conditioned rooms and were programmed in Fortran through teletype terminals.
I had entered physics because it seemed so fundamental - chemistry couldn't get to first base without physics, and biology was really just a special case of chemistry, so physics explained the world. So I jumped the hurdles placed before me: freshman physics and calculus; sophomore electricity and magnetism, and more calculus; junior quantum mechanics and thermodynamics, and more calculus. I solved Schrodinger equations in my dreams. I collected grad school brochures.
Then it began to dawn on me that an advanced degree might be more limiting than liberating. I pictured myself carving out a tiny niche of physics to call my very own. I'd delve deeper and deeper into this sub-sub-subdiscipline until I became the world's foremost expert in the world's most narrow field. This prospect didn't have much appeal, so I stepped off the graduate-school track and broadened my education with courses in history, literature, economics, and journalism. I collected enough physics credits to get my bachelor's degree but gave up the idea of slogging through to a doctorate and entry into the community of physicists.
I have since found contentment as a writer and editor covering a wide range of science and technology. Every article I write requires me to go back to school -- I talk to the experts and read their papers and talk to more experts until I assemble in my mind a story. I know a little about a lot rather than a lot about a little.
The choice that I faced in the 1970s no longer confronts today's science students quite so starkly - thanks in large part to the Internet. It is now possible for scientists to live both lives: They can be researchers who accumulate knowledge in a tiny subspecialty, and simultaneously they can reach out to a broader audience by publishing a Web page, moderating a newsgroup, or maintaining an e-mail list. And just as professors draw continual inspiration from students, so can scientists feed off the energy of an inquisitive and often challenging online public. Rather than a cloistered and insular priesthood of researchers who talk only to each other, the net makes possible - even forces - more diverse interactions.
Some scientists doubtless consider increased contact with the public one of the net's great disadvantages. Barriers to entering the net's forums of communications are so low as to be practically nonexistent. For a professional scientist, the medium can be more annoying than fulfilling: All those naive, uninformed questions from noncredentialed people; all that malarkey on newsgroups posing as scholarship; all the meaningless (but oh so time-consuming) graphical gimmickry.
True enough. But rubbing electronic elbows with the hoi polloi has its advantages. The more that scientists get involved in a medium that demands their interaction with an audience of ordinary people, the sharper will be their ability to convey ideas. They will learn to simplify without being simplistic, to indulge in the kind of responsible speculation that is rooted in solid knowledge of a field while shunning the overblown promises that have turned so many people into cynics.
Many scientists that I encounter still regard any effort to make their ideas accessible to the general populace as "dumbing down." One physicist had written an article about symmetry. It was obviously a topic that ignited his professional passions, but the manuscript was inscrutable. When I called to tell him we couldn't use the piece, he asked if that meant our readers "aren't smart enough" for the material. No, I insisted, our readers are plenty smart (half of them are graduates of MIT). But the readers don't, for the most part, have Ph.D.s in physics. We parted amicably; the article was never published in my magazine, but the conversation stuck with me.
The Internet can put scientists on the witness stand, forcing them to defend their ideas in terms that laypeople can grasp. It can happen in newsgroups, on Web pages, and on mailing lists. Many researchers shun such interactions, asserting that (in a favorite phrase) the signal-to-noise ratio of the digital milieu approaches zero. I think this is a convenient exaggeration, providing a rationale for staying out of the fray. Sure, there are nuts online who see the scientific enterprise as a conspiracy of deception rather than an alliance of truth seekers. But there are also plenty of innocents who wander through cyberspace looking for the intellectual riches that they have been promised.
Scientists are some of the smartest people in the world.
They dream up new worlds, then explore them. They divine the
principles with which their engineering brethren create
fabulous machines that free humans from toil. They think out
of the box. They are twenty-first-century people. But with
some glorious exceptions, they are abject failures at
explaining what they do, and why it is significant, to the
public. This chronic disability undermines scientists'
standing with the people who elect the people who foot the
bill. The country is run by people whose physics education
got about as far as Newton's third law and maybe
This is serious business. Research funding is waning on all fronts, from shrinking corporate labs to disappearing federal line items. With budgets in constant jeopardy the race will go to the lucid. Scientists should use the roar of the Internet the way Demosthenes used the roar of the ocean: not as an impediment to communication but as an inducement to express themselves with greater clarity and vigor.
Herb Brody is Senior Editor at MIT's Technology Review magazine, where he specializes in the impact of the Internet on business, science, and society.
Endlinks
Technology Review - includes articles by Herb Brody such as "Clicking onto Webzines" and "Wired Science".
Past Pressbox columns have addressed the accessibility of science. See Robert Finn's "Scientists and the News Media" articles: "Part I: Why It's Good to Talk" and "Part II: How to Work With Reporters".
