ABOUT THIS SPECIAL ISSUE—SOME THOUGHTS ON THE CRAFT OF SCIENCE COMMUNICATION

By Heidi Aspaturian
Editor, Caltech News

Some years back, I was finishing up an article for a Caltech publication when the scientist whose work I was writing about phoned me. My story was about what awaited Voyager after its Neptune encounter; and I won’t mention the scientist’s name, partly out of respect for his privacy, and partly because most of you will have already figured out who he is. In line with our usual policy in the Caltech public relations office, I had given him the article to review, and in line with my usual experience with Caltech scientists, he had approached the task with the zeal of a professor grading a not-too-bright student’s paper. We had wrapped up most of the scientific points—his comments were as always thoughtful, helpful, and to the point—when he brought up the metaphorical flourish I had concocted to kick off the piece. I was not too surprised by this. Although they are much beloved of science writers, metaphors and their close cousins, witty catch phrases, do not necessarily turn heads among scientists. Some of them find it disconcerting if not downright repellent to see how facilely years of research into, say, the dynamics of asymptotic freedom in quark confinement can be compacted into fortune-cookie doggerel like “absence makes the quark grow fonder.” (Once I actually thought I had coined this, but it turns out it’s obvious enough to have been invented by a bunch of other people too.)

On this occasion, however, the scientist was not objecting to my language. But he did say—and this was quite a turnabout, since I was usually the one who emerged from these encounters in a state of befuddlement—that he was not sure he understood it all. How will we know when Voyager nears interstellar space, I had asked, before noting—with a rhetorical nod to the sixties—that the answer was “blowing in the wind, in this case, the solar wind.”

“I got the impression, Heidi,” my caller said, “that this sentence about the wind has some kind of special meaning. Am I correct? Can you explain that to me?” So I explained, once I picked my jaw off the floor, how I thought a famous protest song could be employed to say something useful about Voyager’s pending exit from the solar system. “Oh, I see,” he said, adding politely, “That’s clever. Very clever.” A pause. “I’m sorry,” he said, “I’m not familiar with that song, or that singer.”

We talked a bit longer. He thanked me for writing the piece and for telling him something new, and I thanked him for making sure that I had my facts straight and for helping me prune my descriptive thicket on the dynamics of cosmic rays. Then the call ended; and I was left wondering if Bob Dylan had ever heard of the heliopause.

Sometimes when I am asked what it’s like to work at Caltech, I tell that story. Some people like it because it confirms their most sinister notions about how “out there” the scientific community is. Others immediately grasp the value of being out there if it takes you to the edge of the solar system. I like it because, while it does point up the gap that can exist between those who practice science and those who don’t, it also helps to close that gap by conveying something meaningful about a life in science. “Only connect,” as the novelist E. M. Forster famously put it.

That said, it must be acknowledged that a certain tension does exist between the art, or act, of doing science and the act, or art, of reporting on it. The scientist wants to get at the facts; the journalist, at the most basic level, wants to tell a story. The scientist is trying to extract information from nature; the journalist is trying to cram information into the rest of us. The scientist may have devoted his or her entire adult life to a particular piece of research; the journalist is trying to make everyone else pay attention to it for at least five minutes.

In this issue of Caltech News, we examine some of the ways in which members of the Caltech community have established and are continuing to work to establish bridges to the nonscientific public. There are many forms of science communication, and we have tried to illuminate a spectrum of them, from the book and newspaper writers, to the TV and radio commentators, to the professor whose moonlighting for the NFL gives new meaning to the term science jock. We report on a new initiative centering on science outreach through art that Caltech has undertaken in conjunction with the Pasadena Art Center College of Design. And in his opinion piece on page 5, Caltech’s vice provost David Goodstein writes about why he thinks scientists often have difficulty getting their message across, and what might be done to remedy the situation.

Although I would never have the nerve to raise it myself, Goodstein does bring up the interesting point that in the attempt to move science toward greater accessibility, one does run up against that not always movable object, the scientist. Those of us who do science writing at Caltech have learned that this phenomenon can operate on different levels or, as those of us from liberal arts backgrounds might say, in several circles of hell. The scientist may find nothing technically wrong with the way you are reporting his or her work, but will point out that the style hardly suits the subject matter. “It’s all rather poetic, isn’t it?” sniffed a Caltech physicist about a write-up I once did on superstring theory, into which I had shoehorned a reference to “the music of the spheres.” “Well, I suppose”—this with a look of profound skepticism—“you must know what you’re doing.”

In the next, much lower circle, the reporter comes face to face with the awful realization—preferably, before publication—that his or her carefully crafted prose bears but a dim-witted relationship to the facts. (“This is colorful stuff,” a geologist once drawled to me, holding my draft at arms length like a specimen. “It’s very nicely written. Of course, most of it’s wrong.”)

In the lowest circle, one confronts the bottom-feeding difficulty of simply extracting information in the first place. Mike Rogers, who wrote this issue’s lead story on Caltech alumni journalists and has done quite a bit of science writing for both Caltech News and various researchers across campus, recalls the time he fell back on a tried-and-true journalistic method of prying information out of his inscrutable source. “Look,” he offered to the scientist whose work he was trying, and failing, to fathom. “Tell me about your research the way you’d tell your mother about it.” His interview subject stared at him. “I don’t,” he said sternly, “talk about these things with my mother.”

How are such issues to be, in the most literal sense of the word, resolved? Resolution is a term whose precise scientific meaning baffled me when I first came to the Institute, although once I did get it, I started using it all the time, occasionally in contexts in which it is actually relevant. Goodstein in his article highlights its pertinence here, although as a card-carrying scientist, he feels no need to wave the jargon around like a spatula, and speaks simply of levels of detail. But he makes the point: it helps if scientists are willing to accept some loss of resolution in how their work is depicted in the interest of presenting a reasonably clear and fairly vivid picture of it to the less-tutored public. It then becomes the journalists’ responsibility to make sure that this picture is not so clouded by special effects that the science becomes all but unrecognizable.

I couldn’t leave this topic without mentioning my colleague Doug Smith, the managing editor of Caltech’s research magazine, Engineering & Science. Doug was a graduate student in chemistry at MIT when he realized, like several of Caltech’s alumni science journalists, that his real interest lay in science writing. He enrolled in UC Santa Cruz’s science-writing program, and that move ultimately brought him to E&S, where he has now worked for more than a decade.

Doug likes to tell everyone who asks (and more often than not, those who don’t) that he functions in his job as “half professional idiot, half professional wise guy.” Idiot, because you can’t be afraid to ask the “dumb” questions (“It’s high-school physics, for [heaven’s] sakes!” snapped an exasperated physicist when Doug squinted a little too long at some equations the professor was hurling onto the white board.) Wise guy because, well, among other things it worked for Richard Feynman, who sold a few popular physics books in his time.

About a year ago, Doug wrote a piece for E&S about some faculty research in materials science that he entitled “Hot and Cold Running Neutrons.” The professor, after sharing with Doug his reservations about the title and general lack of gravitas in the prose style, took the article home for his wife and son to look at. Shortly afterward, back came the verdict. “My wife liked the title—she thought it was whimsical,” reported the professor, whom we shall call Brent Fultz, because that’s his name. “And it’s the first time my son’s shown any interest in what I do.”

So the article came out substantially as Doug had written it and then it went up on the professor’s website with this disclaimer: “Here is a general interest news report about [our work] which appeared in the January 2002 issue of Engineering & Science. It was written by Doug Smith of Caltech, who has a unique sense of humor. Nevertheless, there is no such thing as bad publicity.”

Only connect.