Pseudoscience Vs. Popularizing Science

I’ve encountered on a number of occasions the complaint lodged by scientists and self-proclaimed skeptics that the popular media is oversaturated with pseudoscience and the paranormal. I tend to agree with this viewpoint, especially when I watch a channel such as The History Channel or The Biography Channel and get shows about ghosts, dubious legendary monsters, and “eyewitness” accounts of space alien encounters. I scanned my very large selection of cable-provided stations and couldn’t find one that was honest about devoting their programming to this sort of popular fantasy material. Instead, supposedly reputable channels lower their standards (and probably raise their ratings and advertising income) by showing this drivel. And driving out the treasure of programs that they could have been showing and which would have been truly educational. So in this regard, I’m standing right up there in agreement alongside the scientists and skeptics.

But some of these folks who want to defend the integrity of science and honest reality sometimes go a bit over the line with their criticisms of others. I’ve read criticisms of physicists Michio Kaku and Stephen Hawking for their assiduous attempts at making science interesting and available to the general public. Since mathematics, much of it very intricate, underlies hard science, Kaku and Hawking had to develop language that more or less summarized in more general terms what was going on in their fields. And also discussed topics that they knew would capture the public’s imagination (e.g. wormholes). To some, this was a “bad” thing to do.

I’ve seen a similar process happen in art and music. There will be a circle of artists who consider themselves pure to the art. When one of them decides to produce art that resonates with the public at-large, the rest of the circle often accuses him/her of selling out. Much of the criticism aimed at Kaku and Hawking within the scientific community may be partially motivated by the feeling that these two are reaping fame and reward out of proportion to their true contributions to their fields and have thus “sold out”. But their popular works are stimulating true interest in real science and moving (some, but not enough) people to abandon pseudoscience.

Scientists need to remember that they need to promote their fields to others on the outside in order to obtain the needed funds to sustain their own research and careers. Those who work directly for businesses may or may not have to engage in the tedious activity of trying to get grants from government and businesses to be able to do a research project. But for those who do, these scientists need to be able to explain their scientific aims in a plain language that strikes an appropriate balance between its simplicity and the technical nature of the subject matter. And in a more general sense, scientists need to become, like Kaku and Hawking, more engaged with the public in order to ensure that government funding of scientific research will continue to be politically popular.