Do working physicists understand science communication?

By Brian Clegg

A couple of weeks ago I was part of a panel at Waterstones Trafalgar Square, discussing physics in popular science – we had all written books in this area. One of my fellow panelists was Cambridge physicist Frank Verstraete. He said to me that physicists were terrible at science communication. When I said some were excellent, he asked me to name examples, which put me on the spot as I’m terrible at remembering names. But I’d still say that some are good at it – if you look at the physics reviews on popularscience.co.uk you will find some five star books by physics professionals.

Even so, I do also think it’s fair to say that many working scientists don’t understand how to communicate with the public. I have often used an example relating to the general theory of relativity. When I was writing about it for my book Gravity, I wanted to get to the bottom of problem with the way the theory is often presented in popular science texts by imagining a bowling ball on a rubber sheet. The ball distorts the sheet so straight lines are now curved. But what this analogy does not do is explain why something that isn’t moving with respect to, say, the Earth’s surface (a ball in my hand, for instance), starts moving when released.

I hadn’t a clue so I asked a whole pile of physicists. Around ten came back with answers – and only one of them was fully comprehensible to me, with an (ancient) degree in physics. What brought me back to the topic of academics and science communication was a paper on ArXiv called Relativity for Retired Engineers. In it, the author physicist David Garfinkle moans about receiving emails, often from retired engineers who don’t understand the special theory of relativity and try to argue about it using their own pet theories. While I can sympathise about the emails and letters (I still treasure a seven page one genuinely written in green ink), I think one thing Garfinkle says misses the point with the following suggestion:

Thus there may be room for improvement in the way that special relativity is often presented, not only for the sake of retired engineers but also for the sake of physics students.

How then should one present this subject? Oddly enough it seems to me that the best method is to get them out of their comfort zone right away in the following sense: (1) Introduce as soon as possible the notions of spacetime, spacetime diagrams, the spacetime interval, four-vectors, proper time, and invariant quantities. (2) Insist that for clarity all questions be formulated in terms of invariant quantities, and when needed accompanied by a spacetime diagram. (3) Present special relativity on its own terms and do some physics with it first. (4) Then (and only then) present the “paradoxes” of special relativity, but with the attitude that they are not paradoxical at all and simply result from trying to do new physics entirely in the language and frame of mind of the old physics.

I totally disagree with this. The items in his (1) list are too complex for many readers (I can’t comment on retired engineers). And his suggested approach takes the joy and fascination out of those paradoxes. I instead celebrate the paradoxes, and get readers over their resistance by offering a simple calculation using a light clock to demonstrate time dilation. The maths for this is GCSE level (usually taken by 15 to 16 year olds), something most popular science readers can cope with. (I usually put it in an appendix, because not everyone wants to go through any maths in a popular science book, but it is very straightforward.)

This paper then is, I’m afraid, another bit of evidence of the lack of understanding of ordinary readers shared by many in the science community, and why, despite the fact we irritate some scientists, there is still a need for us science writers.

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Now Appearing is the blog of science writer Brian Clegg (www.brianclegg.net), author of Inflight Science, Before the Big Bang and The God Effect.