Physics, Outreach and the Crisis of Science Denial

Adam Frank, University of Rochester

It took me by surprise. I was an undergraduate physics major at the University of Colorado, Boulder and was attending office hours with one of my favorite professors. I was taking his Math Methods course and had stopped in to ask some questions when the conversation strayed to other topics. He told me of his time at Los Alamos and what life was like for young physicists in the 1950s. Then he asked me how I’d gotten interested in physics. I told him how much Carl Sagan’s writing had influenced me as a teenager.

But the mention of Sagan did not go down well with my professor. “Sagan should be spending his time doing something more important” was his only comment and then the topic was changed.

That was the first time I’d encountered a dismissal of Sagan’s outreach work and I was pretty shocked by it. By the time I was a post-doc though things had changed. After the Cold War, funding for basic science could no longer assumed. Many researchers recognized that doing good physics and communicating its importance were both going to be essential to the health of our field.

But even that change in attitudes towards science outreach and science communication by researchers pales in comparison with the challenge our community faces today. With the rise of science denial, it’s not just adequate resources for the maintence of US excellence in science that we must worry about. Instead, it's the very idea of science’s capacity for delivering independent truth that seems to be under attack.

Given that new reality its’ a good time to think about how we in the science community approach outreach and communication.

Carl Sagan not only inspired me to do science, he also inspired me to write about science. His passion for research and the breadth of his curiosity taught me to think broadly about science and culture. I wanted others to see how extraordinary the ordinary became through the lens of scientific inquiry.

I got my first chance to publish something when a friend showed me a call for articles from the The Exploratorium Quarterly about the nature of language. I wrote a piece asking if mathematical physics could be considered a language. I was lucky that the guest editor for that edition was the renowned science writer KC Cole. When Cole moved to DISCOVER magazine, she gave me the chance to write for much larger audiences and schooled me in the best practices for good science journalism.

Through her and other great writers like Corey Powell, I learned that “narrative drive” in a science story meant just as much as cool new results. Along with facts about new Supernova discoveries, there also had to a story about someone facing obstacles to get that discovery and then a story of obstacles overcome. I will always be grateful that I got these lessons from some of the nation’s best science journalists. It changed my understanding of the gap between how scientists and non-scientists understand the meaning and importance of scientific inquiry. That understanding is, I believe, profoundly important now as we respond to the growing threat of science denial.

Most people do not interpret the world through data but through stories. When you meet a new person, you are unlikely to exchange vital stats about height, weight, blood type and blood pressure. Instead we tell each other stories about where we’re from, what kind of family we grew up in or what kinds of day we just had. The emphasis in stories rather than data is essential in thinking about how we bring the results of research to the world. It also helps explain how science denial got its foothold.

Back in 2011 I co-founded NPR’s 13.7 Cosmos and Culture blog with physicist Marcelo Gleiser. Climate Change was a subject I covered a lot and through the comments page I watched the tide of climate denial rise. At first, I tried to answer a lot of these comments by showing how the writer was getting the science wrong. Soon I saw this didn’t matter. They weren’t interested in the science. They were interested in an alternative story about scientists, “elites” and hoaxes. There was no point in arguing because facts and truth didn’t matter for those who adopted a mantle of denial.

But as physicists we know that nature’s truth always has the last word. From climate to vaccines, you can only be in denial for so long before truth comes back to bite you.

That’s why good science outreach and good science communication matter so much now. As crazy as it may seem, we can no longer expect people to just see the obvious benefits of living in a society that values science as arbiter of truth about the physical world. Nor can we expect people to understand, on their own, how we scientists parse the world into data, theories and their intersection. That is why we must all become Carl Sagan’s to the degree we can. We must learn to tell stories, to anyone who will listen, about the beauty of the world science unveils and the beauty of the very human process that is science.

As scary as science denial is, I’ve seen time and again how my work as an astrophysics researcher can be an effective bridge for my work as a science communicator. The good news is most people are not deniers. Instead they are really interested in what science has to tell us. All they really need to light the spark is just a good story.

afrank@pas.rochester.edu

These contributions have not been peer-refereed. They represent solely the view(s) of the author(s) and not necessarily the view of APS.