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10.05.07
Imagine a daily biochemistry report on your local news. "Local University scientists published a paper on Structures of the CCR5 N Terminus and of a Tyrosine-Sulfated Antibody this week! For more, here's Tiffany Hairspray reporting live from the Biochemistry Department!" "Thanks Charlie! Yes, the Tyrosine aspect certainly took the glycoprotein research community by storm this week..." Most people would be reaching for the remote.
Yet, science impacts your life every day, and WIRED Science has plenty to talk about. Why is this?
As a participant in science, I think I speak for most of us when I say that our work often feels painfully slow. We are a relatively small community, sometimes with limited resources. We serve, like our predecessors hundreds of years ago, at the sometimes fickle will of the sovereign. Our success is measured in tiny steps, obscure papers, out of the way conferences, polite but strained cross-cultural interactions.
In commerce, huge changes occur daily. The stock market regularly changes the entire valuation of the world's corporations by more than one per cent in a day! We will never have a day in which the value of science changes by one per cent. In politics, alliances are formed and broken, careers are made and broken, important laws are proposed or overturned in a day. Careers in sports and entertainment explode into view with a great success or collapse with a visible failure instantly. The names of the key players in all these fields are on everybody's lips every day. The "news junkie" waits every day to hear whose fortunes have risen or fallen.
Yet, look at your life compared to the life of someone a century ago. Which has had more impact on the difference between your day and that of your great grandparent? Politics? Sports? Finance? No, certainly it is science and the engineering that builds on science that dominates the changes in our lives in the long run.
Why? Isn't it strange? No, there's a simple reason. It's because science doesn't go backwards.
Treaties get violated, alliances fray, laws get repealed or overturned, and plans go astray, cultures and societies advance and decay, but once a fact is established, it doesn't get unestablished. The scientific community absorbs, remembers and uses every new piece of insight. Progress in science while slow, is steady. Questions emerge. Answers emerge. Much is learned. Little is forgotten. What we do every day is influenced by Galileo, Newto, Pascal and other great minds of the distant past. So science journalism also refers to them, at least implicitly. What was once news in science stays news.
In the long run the power of scientific and technical knowledge grows a little bit every day, and in this power is still the hope of the world. Slow and steady wins the race.
Tortoise vs. Hare
Politics, business, culture, and sports can be relied upon to provide some fodder for the news media every day, yet there's not that much sense of long-term improvement. Day to day changes in science are very small, and rarely newsworthy. We science writers have a lot to write about, but it's not usually about current events.
by Imagine a daily biochemistry report on your local news. "Local University scientists published a paper on Structures of the CCR5 N Terminus and of a Tyrosine-Sulfated Antibody this week! For more, here's Tiffany Hairspray reporting live from the Biochemistry Department!" "Thanks Charlie! Yes, the Tyrosine aspect certainly took the glycoprotein research community by storm this week..." Most people would be reaching for the remote.
Yet, science impacts your life every day, and WIRED Science has plenty to talk about. Why is this?
As a participant in science, I think I speak for most of us when I say that our work often feels painfully slow. We are a relatively small community, sometimes with limited resources. We serve, like our predecessors hundreds of years ago, at the sometimes fickle will of the sovereign. Our success is measured in tiny steps, obscure papers, out of the way conferences, polite but strained cross-cultural interactions.
In commerce, huge changes occur daily. The stock market regularly changes the entire valuation of the world's corporations by more than one per cent in a day! We will never have a day in which the value of science changes by one per cent. In politics, alliances are formed and broken, careers are made and broken, important laws are proposed or overturned in a day. Careers in sports and entertainment explode into view with a great success or collapse with a visible failure instantly. The names of the key players in all these fields are on everybody's lips every day. The "news junkie" waits every day to hear whose fortunes have risen or fallen.
Yet, look at your life compared to the life of someone a century ago. Which has had more impact on the difference between your day and that of your great grandparent? Politics? Sports? Finance? No, certainly it is science and the engineering that builds on science that dominates the changes in our lives in the long run.
Why? Isn't it strange? No, there's a simple reason. It's because science doesn't go backwards.
Treaties get violated, alliances fray, laws get repealed or overturned, and plans go astray, cultures and societies advance and decay, but once a fact is established, it doesn't get unestablished. The scientific community absorbs, remembers and uses every new piece of insight. Progress in science while slow, is steady. Questions emerge. Answers emerge. Much is learned. Little is forgotten. What we do every day is influenced by Galileo, Newto, Pascal and other great minds of the distant past. So science journalism also refers to them, at least implicitly. What was once news in science stays news.
In the long run the power of scientific and technical knowledge grows a little bit every day, and in this power is still the hope of the world. Slow and steady wins the race.
Tags: science writing
6 Comments
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October 5, 2007 12:56 PM
William Connolley
Is "Newto" an attempt to sound cool and hip? If so, I think you should have continued with "Pasco" :-)
October 5, 2007 2:09 PM
Somnolent Aphid
I think culture today is so much more focused on sports and celebrity than on technological or scientific breakthroughs. That’s one reason I hope this show, not to mention this blog, is a huge success. We need to raise awareness of science once again in this country.
50 years ago this week the Soviets launched the first man made satellite and it not only made the news, the entire nation stopped in its tracks and looked to the heavens. Yes, science moves slowly, but every so often all those little steps add up to something big. 50 years from now will anyone care if K-Fed got custody of the babies?
What makes me stop and look today are things like the dramatic melting arctic ice cap that occurred this year, and how something so seemingly significant and controversial can be so underreported.
October 5, 2007 5:05 PM
Harry Abernathy
Good post, Michael. Watch yourself on the "Science doesn't go backwards" though. Remember the middle ages? They had to rediscover a lot of what was known in the days of Rome (thank God some people remembered how to read Latin). And if Creationists were to ever get their way here in America...
While such a horrendous step backward may not reoccur, one never knows. Imagine what would happen if all forms of digital media (hard drives, flash drives, CDs, DVDs, etc.) suddenly decomposed (or became demagnetized) for some odd reason.
October 10, 2007 9:39 PM
Michael Blix
Science is grand to be sure, are world is fully imbued with it, at least besides the public sphere. Science need a lot of marketing help. Could not the pace of science itself be radically changed by a major shift in the view and involvement of many people? There's work to be done.
October 11, 2007 8:20 AM
definedfury
science to say the least is an underground movement of ideas flowing with a beauty only the educated can grasp
as much as 6.2 billion people know about the fundamentals of science so few can wholy grasp the entire sphere of it or be intrigued if every home had a newsletter or magazine or daily/hourly tv program to tell them about the newest ideas presented by those effiecient writers known as scientific journalists
well in the limited sphere of things not even i have enough time to read the whole newspaper every day watch the best segments of educational programming and listen to music, perform music, or write within a 24 hour period
thus leaving each day or week to a small fragment of the total mass of aquired knowledge left open still to our current generations
book burning, record burning, trash, government crackdowns, blacklists, and violence/destruction have caused many things to be lost to the unattainable handhold of those times we leave to the past and regrettably unforsee towards the future
and what with today's science media it has become rather difficult to sift through the nonsensical dumbed down information half jokingly played towards the general uneducated public dealing with hard thought information packaged into 3 paragraph articles relating mostly with the writer's prose for having done a good job
less people find it realistic to read a 5 volume 3000 pages into a book to find out what they can browse through with 100 words on matte paper and toss it aside to revel in their own excellence on what that current celebrity has under their sleeve
honestly, society is to blame, not the scientists and writers
January 29, 2008 1:56 PM
heartsha
Hi all !!!
End ^) See you
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