Hi everyone,

Frequently on this forum I have wondered why basic science is misunderstood, now a couple of Authors have written a book about this problem and how it is wrecking the USA.

New Scientist


Review: Unscientific America by Chris Mooney and Sheril Kirshenbaum

* 08 August 2009 by Jim Giles


* Book information
* Unscientific America: How scientific illiteracy threatens our future by Chris Mooney and Sheril Kirshenbaum
* Published by: Basic Books
* Price: $24

THE rationale for science communication usually goes something like this. In a democracy, the public needs to be informed. Issues like energy policy and healthcare depend on science. Therefore, researchers and communicators need to keep the public engaged with science.

All very reasonable. But why should the public engage with science specifically? I don't mean why in a what-is-science-worth sense. Science is obviously important. But immigration policy and foreign debt are important too, and the public does a good job of not thinking too deeply about either. Why should science be any different?

The question matters because science, as Chris Mooney and Sheril Kirshenbaum describe in Unscientific America, remains on the margins of US culture and politics. Climate change could sink cities and cause mass extinctions, yet only around half of US voters rated the environment an important issue in last year's elections. Roughly the same proportion believe that the Earth was created by God in the last 10,000 years.

Mooney and Kirshenbaum's book surveys such challenges in a concise and entertaining way. The authors do a good job of charting the decline of science's prestige after the cold war, and the career pressures that prevent young researchers from selling the subject to a broader audience today. I particularly liked their warnings about the divisive impact of public figures such as Richard Dawkins and P. Z. Myers, who sometimes appear to be on a mission to offend churchgoers.

But Mooney and Kirshenbaum don't seem to have asked themselves the "why science?" question. The book is infused with a sense that science does not just deserve a place at the top table of politics, it is entitled to one. When discussing the failure of a campaign to get last year's US presidential candidates to attend a debate on science, for example, the authors accuse the media of ignoring a story that was "news by any reasonable standard". I'm not sure that many people outside the world of science would agree. Worthy is not the same as newsworthy.

By looking only at science, Unscientific America misses the big picture. Yes, the latest findings on climate change and other areas of science need to be heard on Capitol Hill and in the media. But so does sound reasoning about America's absurd prison policy or the country's counterproductive efforts to combat drug use. Political and media discussions of many complex issues are, unfortunately, dominated by vested interests and prejudice rather than rational argument. The problem here is not with public engagement in science - it is with public engagement.
The problem here is not with public engagement in science - it is with public engagement

We are far from fixing this much bigger issue, but there are some hopeful trends out there. Grassroots web campaigns have shaken up politics. Organisations like Demos, a London-based think tank, are experimenting with new ways of getting the public involved in policy-making, such as citizen juries. Ben Goldacre's Bad Science column and blog, which often exposes distorted science reporting, has gained an audience that extends well beyond the lab. Somewhere in all this are the ingredients for real change. Perhaps they can be melded into a genuine reform movement. And it's real reform of our public debates, not just more accurate films or media-savvy scientists, that will finally get people engaged with science.

Jim Giles is a correspondent in New Scientist's San Francisco bureau

Cheers

Hi Readers,
This week they are honouring Galileo Galilei so I thought it was appropriate to add this little piece of knowledge to this post.


Galileo, four centuries on
As important as Darwin

Aug 13th 2009
From The Economist print edition
In praise of astronomy, the most revolutionary of sciences

MEPL

FOUR hundred years ago our understanding of the universe changed for ever. On August 25th 1609 an Italian mathematician called Galileo Galilei demonstrated his newly constructed telescope to the merchants of Venice. Shortly afterwards he turned it on the skies. He saw mountains casting shadows on the moon and realised this body was a world, like the Earth, endowed with complicated terrain. He saw the moons of Jupiter—objects that circled another heavenly body in direct disobedience of the church’s teaching. He saw the moonlike phases of Venus, indicating that this planet circled the sun, not the Earth, in even greater disobedience of the priests. He saw sunspots, demonstrating that the sun itself was not the perfect orb demanded by the Greek cosmology that had been adopted by the church. But he also saw something else, a thing that is often now forgotten. He saw that the Milky Way, that cloudy streak across the sky, is made of stars.

That observation was the first hint that, not only is the Earth not the centre of things, but those things are vastly, almost incomprehensibly, bigger than people up until that date had dreamed. And they have been getting bigger, and also older, ever since. Astronomers’ latest estimates put the age of the universe at about 13.7 billion years. That is three times as long as the Earth has existed and about 100,000 times the lifespan of modern humanity as a species. The true size of the universe is still unknown. Its age, and the finite speed of light, means no astronomer can look beyond a distance of 13.7 billion light-years. But it is probably bigger than that.

Nor does reality necessarily end with this universe. Physics, astronomy’s dutiful daughter, suggests that the object that people call the universe, vast though it is, may be just one of an indefinite number of similar structures, governed by slightly different rules from each other, that inhabit what is referred to, for want of a better term, as the multiverse.
Star trek

The shattering of the crystal spheres which Galileo’s contemporaries thought held the planets and the stars, with the sphere containing the stars representing the edge of the universe, is (along with Darwin’s discovery of evolution by natural selection) the biggest revolution in self-knowledge that mankind has undergone. The world that Galileo was born into was of comprehensible compass. The Greeks had a fair idea of the size of the Earth and the distance to the moon, and so did the medievals who read their work. But these were distances that the imagination might, at a stretch, embrace. And it was easier to believe that a human-sized universe was one that might have been brought into being with humanity in mind. It is harder, though, to argue that the modern version of cosmology, let alone any hypothetical one which is multiversal rather than universal, has come about for mankind’s convenience.

Four centuries on, it is difficult to think of Galileo’s intellectual heirs, meeting this week in Rio de Janeiro under the auspices of the International Astronomical Union (see article), as firebrand revolutionaries. Yet their discoveries—from planets around other stars that may support alien life, to dark matter and energy of unknown nature that are the dominant stuff of reality—are no less world-changing than his. Moderns may be more comfortable than medievals with the idea that man’s notion of his place within the universe can suddenly change. That should not blind them to the wonder of it.

Cheers