From The Demon-haunted World (Carl Sagan, 1996) pp314-7
Like some editors and television producers, some scientists believe the public is too ignorant or too stupid to understand science, that the enterprise of popularization is fundamentally a lost cause, or even that it’s tantamount to fraternization, if not outright cohabitation, with the enemy. Among the many criticisms that could be made of this judgement – along with its insufferable arrogance and its neglect of a host of examples of highly successful science popularizations – is that it is self-confirming. And also, for the scientists involved, self-defeating.
Large-scale government support for science is fairly new, dating back only to World War Two — although patronage of a few scientists by the rich and powerful is much older. With the end of the Cold War, the national defence trump card that provided support for all sorts of fundamental science became virtually unplayable. Only partly for this reason, most scientists, I think, are now comfortable with the idea of popularizing science. (Since nearly all support for science comes from the public coffers, it would be an odd flirtation with suicide for scientists to oppose competent popularization.) What the public understands and appreciates, it is more likely to support. I don’t mean writing articles for Scientific American, say, that are read by science enthusiasts and scientists in other fields: I’m not just talking about teaching introductory courses for undergraduates. I’m talking about efforts to communicate the substance and approach of science in newspapers, magazines, on radio and television, in lectures for the general public, and in elementary, middle and high school textbooks.
Of course there are judgement calls to be made in popularizing. It‘s important neither to mystify nor to patronize. In attempting to prod public interest, scientists have on occasion gone too far — for example, in drawing unjustified religious conclusions. Astronomer George Smoot described his discovery of small irregularities in the ratio radiation left over from the Big Bang as ‘seeing God face-to-face’. Physics Nobel laureate Leon Lederman described the Higgs boson, a hypothetical building block of matter, as ‘the God particle’, and so titled a book. (In my opinion, they’re all God particles.) If the Higgs boson doesn’t exist, is the God hypothesis disproved? Physicist Frank Tipler proposes that computers in the remote future will prove the existence of God and work our bodily resurrection.
Periodicals and television can strike sparks as they give us a glimpse of science, and this is very important. But — apart from apprenticeship or well-structured classes and seminars — the best way to popularize science is through textbooks, popular books, CD-ROMs and laser discs. You can mull things over, go at your own pace, revisit the hard parts, compare texts, dig deep. It has to be done right, though, and in the schools especially it generally isn’t. There, as the philosopher John Passmore comments, science is often presented
as
“a matter of learning principles and applying them by routine procedures. It is learned from textbooks, not by reading the works of great scientists or even the day-to-day contributions to the scientific literature . . . The beginning scientist, unlike the beginning humanist, does not have an immediate contact with genius. Indeed . . . school courses can attract quite the wrong sort of person into science — unimaginative boys and girls who like routine.”
I hold that popularization of science is successful if, at first, it does no more than spark the sense of wonder. To do that, it is sufficient to provide a glimpse of the findings of science without thoroughly a explaining how those findings were achieved. It is easier to portray the destination than the journey. But, where possible, popularizers should try to chronicle some of the mistakes, false starts, dead ends and apparently hopeless confusion along the way. At least every now and then, we should provide the evidence and let the reader draw his or her own conclusion. This converts obedient assimilation of new knowledge into personal discovery. When you make the finding yourself — even if you’re the last person on Earth to see the light — you never forget it.
As a youngster, I was inspired by the popular science books and articles of George Gamow, James Jeans, Arthur Eddington, J .B.S. Haldane, Julian Huxley, Rachel Carson and Arthur C. Clarke — all of them trained in, and most of them leading practitioners of science. The popularity of well-written, well- explained, deeply imaginative books on science that touch our hearts as well as our minds seems greater in the last twenty years than ever before, and the number and disciplinary diversity of scientists writing these books is likewise unprecedented. Among the best contemporary scientist—popularizers, I think of Stephen Jay Gould, E.O. Wilson, Lewis Thomas and Richard Dawkins in biology; Steven Weinberg, Alan Lightman and Kip Thorne in physics; Roald Hoffmann in chemistry; and the early works of Fred Hoyle in astronomy. Isaac Asimov wrote capably on everything. (And while requiring calculus, the most consistently exciting, provocative and inspiring science popularization of the last few decades seems to me to be Volume I of Richard Feynman’s Introductory Lectures on Physics.) Nevertheless, current efforts are clearly nowhere near commensurate with the public good. And, of course, if we can’t read, we can’t benefit from such works, no matter how inspiring they are.
I want us to rescue Mr ‘Buckley’ and the millions like him. I also want us to stop turning out leaden, incurious, uncritical and unimaginative high school seniors. Our species needs, and deserves, a citizenry with minds wide. awake and a basic understanding of how the world works.
Science, I maintain, is an absolutely essential tool for any society with a hope of surviving well into the next century with its fundamental values intact — not just science as engaged in by its practitioners, but science understood and embraced by the entire human community. And if the scientists will not bring this about, who will?
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