Scientists have got to find more effective ways of sharing
their work with the public, says Goodstein.

REMEMBER YOUR UNTRANSFORMED SELF:
A NOTED PRACTITIONER OF THE CRAFT OFFERS
HIS THOUGHTS ON COMMUNICATING SCIENCE

By David Goodstein

Communicating with the public has been a big problem right from the beginning of modern science. Modern science was more or less invented by Galileo Galilei, who turned out to be not only one of history’s greatest scientists, but also one of its greatest science communicators. One of his books, The Dialogue of the Two World Systems, compared the old Earth-centered theory of the universe favored by the Catholic Church to the new Sun-centered one favored by him. He wrote the book in Italian so anyone could read it, rather than Latin, a language that could have been read only by a handful of scholars and clerics. And he wrote it with such style and verve that his enemies in the Church could not ignore it. The resulting furor has echoed down through the centuries.

Speaking of Italian, the Italian word for communicating science to the public is divulgazione. When I first heard it I thought it meant vulgarization, but it really means to divulge, and it’s a better word than the one we use in English, to popularize. Science may never be popular, but it shouldn’t be a secret either.

So how can we let the secret out? In fact, why is it a secret in the first place when everything we think of as science is freely and openly published? The answer is that we scientists write in a language that is even worse than a modern-day equivalent of Latin. Scientific papers are written in a language that has many mutually incomprehensible dialects, one for each sub-field of each science. Even other scientists have no idea what we’re talking about.

That’s a big headache for science writers—science journalists and others who write about science professionally. But, in a sense, it’s an even bigger headache for those scientists who are willing to make a serious attempt to communicate our subject. We just aren’t used to speaking about it in ordinary language. And even if we’re willing and able to give up our beloved jargon, we’re accustomed not only to telling the truth, but to telling the whole truth. That’s a good thing to do in a scientific paper, but it sure gets in the way of getting a clear idea across to a nonscientific audience. We are tempted to tell (or to show off) everything we know about a subject. But for effective communication it’s much better to strip away everything that isn’t essential in order to make the point as clearly as possible.

For journalists and science writers, the challenge is to master the subject matter well enough to recount it to the reader. Scientists have almost exactly the opposite problem. I’ve always thought that the essential trick for good science writing is the same as the one for good science teaching: it is to remember what it was like not to understand the thing you are trying to explain. That’s very difficult to do. Every time you come to understand something new, you are transformed into a different person. The trick is to remember your untransformed self, and especially how the transformation took place. If you can do that, then I think you can write—or teach—just about anything.

In the 1980s, I directed the making of an educational television series, The Mechanical Universe. I can only hope my intended audience learned some physics from all those programs. I know that I learned a lot about many things from making them. Just one thing I learned was how to write television scripts. One of the biggest problems the project had was the almost eerie nonexistence of experienced scriptwriters who knew anything at all about science. It was easier for me to learn scriptwriting than for them to learn science. Fortunately, my incompetence at that craft was masked by the fact that each script went through many drafts before it was ready for prime time. The production team for the series had its offices in Hollywood, naturally. Framed on the wall of the Hollywood office was the statement: “The most basic human urge is not food or sex. It is the need to edit someone else’s copy.” That’s how my scriptwriting got rescued.

And that brings up my final point. If you’re going to write about science, be sure to have a very good editor who knows no more science than your intended audience. Never make the mistake, if you can possibly avoid it, of thinking you can judge for yourself whether you have succeeded in divulging the secret.

David Goodstein, Caltech’s vice provost, professor of physics and applied physics, and the Gilloon Distinguished Teaching and Service Professor, has written frequently on science and science policy issues for the scientific community and lay public alike. His latest book, Out of Gas: The End of the Age of Oil, will be published next year by W. W. Norton.