Essay:Popular science

Popular Science
Popularisation of science is often scorned upon by those in a scientific field itself, or worse still, by those Certain Types of People who don’t work in a scientific field themselves but believe that they’re well-read enough to discuss the philosophical ramifications of quantum mechanics without looking like a berk (sadly, it just doesn’t work that way). Often it's seen as a humiliation of science, "dumbing down" the sheer quantity of fact in exchange for drama and something that is made to appear far more "sexed-up" than it really is. The argument against that is that science should be exciting for the sake of it, not because you can drum up some apparently fake excitement with computer graphics and film-score music. An so, scorn is heaped upon the likes of Brian Cox and his absolutely fantastic Wonders... series simply because, for some people, it's not difficult enough. But so what? I may not have learned anything from it personally because sometime between the ages of 8 and 14 I was a keen amateur astronomer, and as such had a ton of books on stars and planets and was setting my sights on an astrophysics degree, but at that age I would have thought Wonders... was The Very Most Awesomest Thing Ever. Perhaps it would have pushed me into physics instead, even though my most recent brush with actual physics left me severely battered and bruised. Anyway, Cox actually wants to give a proper lecture on relativity, without the fancy graphics and music, just him, a blackboard and a piece of chalk and no-holds-barred Proper Fucking Science. There's certainly a place for that alongside Wonders..., although I personally think something like that will only happen when Satan puts on a woolly jumper and has to crank the heating up. Ben Goldacre may be correct in his opinion that science in the media is never treated with the in-depth and accurate analysis of politics and sport, but attacking the great popularisers of science, particularly the likes of Horizon (which has definitely come out of the bizarre phase it had a few years ago) and Wonders... is not the way to address that. Indeed, I want to show that this attitude is plainly hypocritical.

All science that you are taught is, to a degree, popularised. You can tell that this is my key point because in my final revision of this I decided to put it in bold type. What you convey in flagship BBC documentaries like Horizon; what you teach in school; what you teach to college students; what you teach to university students; and eventually what you, as a researcher, will then try and convey to the people giving you money - these are all the same thing. Wait, but isn't pop science something that's just dumbed down for the masses? No. It really isn't. "Pop science" is really just a relative term, when used it's only a special case of science education that just happens to be on books and television rather than in "official" classrooms. While you could separate the audience between "those who have to endure it" (students) and "those who want to endure it" (because who'd buy a science book if they didn't want to?), in terms of content it's a pretty arbitrary distinction, really. You wouldn't call what was taught in GCSE Double-award Science "pop science", but you wouldn't set A Brief History of Time or Gödel, Escher, Bach as required reading at that level. These are all part of a sliding scale of science education that merely consists of "science explained for a non-expert audience" - that is, explained to someone who doesn't know it already. This stands true whether I'm standing on a mountain top staring into the distance while music swells and my voice-over explains something about Saturn's orbit (Cox, I'm looking at you), or whether I'm spending two hours in an office discussing the spin physics of hyperpolarisation in MRI with a medical lecturer who doesn't have a grounding in quantum theory (this is more difficult than it sounds when you have a theoretician in the room with you). Consider the following diagram of an atom as explained at GCSE level in the UK:



Although anyone with a knowledge of atomic structure will understand that this diagram is (to put it bluntly) wrong, we have to very carefully consider Asimov's relativity of wrong here. The diagram is actually very applicable. Electrons are organised into shells of 2 electrons, then 8, then another set of 8 (well, it gets a little fishy here so I'll stop). But for most of the smaller atoms up to around argon it paints a very useful picture. Covalent bonding models can be predicted from it, valency can be predicted from it and reactivity can actually be predicted from it. And that's what a scientific theory is; it predicts and explains evidence. It's only ever "wrong" in a relative sense where it fails to predict accurately. This model would probably eat you alive if you tried to apply it to transition metal complexes and their bonding models. The fact that it fails to explain the paramagnetic properties of oxygen is usually used as an introduction to molecular orbital theory. As studied at A-Level in the UK, you'd get this far:



In this case you can see how they split those shells up into different sub-groups, and letters start appearing. The reason the first shell has only 2 electrons is because it has an s orbital, which holds two electrons. The second shell holds 8 because it as an s orbital and 3 p orbitals which also hold 2 electrons each. There are 5 d orbitals (again, 2 electrons each). The way they fill in fact explains the structure of the periodic table. It's a slight step up from the valence model above, and there are a few things I've missed out, but generally this is a very confusing way of labelling orbitals unless you know what they are. This doesn't explain everything, of course, as it still doesn't explain the shapes of the orbitals, why they're shaped like this, why you'd have 3 p orbitals and 5 d orbitals, and what that means for bonding. Finally, sitting in a lecture and about to fall down the rabbit hole, you might see this:



Suffice to say this model explains things a lot better, but it requires you to get the above two into your head and then start ploughing away at some pretty heft looking mathematics to understand it properly. Otherwise this stuff is actually meaningless - you would simply have no concept of what they are and if I was to start throwing wavefunctions your way you might not be convinced that they were, in fact, real things. Indeed, I think one of the many problems with popularisations of quantum mechanics is the failure to mention this part, leading people to be mesmerized with "spookiness" and "weirdness". This diagram is just the basic layout of the electrons on a hydrogenic atom, though. Remember how the very first model didn't explain transition metal complexes? Well, the shape of the electron clouds help here, but there is an entire world of scientific hurt awaiting anyone who wants to know everything about it in enough detail for it to be right.

To jump straight into a model for accurately representing the bonding characteristics of transition metal compounds you need to dive nuts deep into spherical harmonics, Laplace's equation, the Schroedinger equation, Hamiltonian operators, orbital angular momentum, spin-orbit coupling, molecular orbital theory, group theory, linear combinations (LCAO methodology) and crystal field or ligand-field splitting. And to understand most of those you need to go into quantum mechanics, the many body problem, atomic orbitals and shielding parameters. And while we're at it, you may as well cover selection rules, spectroscopy and the notation for terms and states because if you understand that you're half way there already. Oh, and go on then, throw in harmonic oscillators, electron shielding tensors, DFT, vibronic spectroscopy, and fuck knows what else like the relativistic corrections for core electrons which would be another paragraph just listing the topics. After all, these things all form part of a more accurate theory that explains the world far better than the simplified image above.

It shouldn't take a genius to realise that not everyone in the world has the spare four years hanging around that are needed to learn all this.

So what am I getting at? An accurate model takes time to learn; yes, that much should be blatantly obvious. That not everyone has that much time free; again yes, very obvious. But also that people need an easy way in to learn something. You have to put a spin on it that makes it approachable to someone who doesn't already know it. It needs to be approached at an angle that builds on existing knowledge, not just throwing in brand new concepts and telling people to accept them. If you do just try to dive right in, you merely get "why?" thrown back in your face and you can even miss the more fundamental questions that can lead to a misunderstanding in the first place. You need to build up to these things, explain them on the learner's terms and, as best you can, convey the limitations of the particular model you're going to use. It's not just a case that you don't have the time to spare to give a full explanation, the prior knowledge simply isn't there to accept the full explanation yet. While I'm all for explaining quantum theory at A-Level and earlier instead of saving it until university, I don't think you can get there without getting people to first understand and visualise how the atomic nucleus is the small bit in the middle and the electrons move around it. The jump out of how we visualise and understand the world and into how the quantum world works is just too vast to do at once. Science was built up slowly by using evidence to adjust people's existing knowledge; the atom was modelled as a "plum pudding", and Rutherford's experiment said "well, actually...". The simple fact is that individual people learn in much the same way that science progresses, in baby steps that build up on and adjust existing knowledge - though is this actually surprising given that science is made up of individual people? When you simplify the science for a non-expert audience you are giving them the essential angle that they need to understand the subject. You are not "dumbing down". Thing is, this is a sliding scale and works at all levels.

The odds are that anyone who came to know a scientific theory in great detail came to it not by diving into the current literature and understanding it all first time (try that with a DFT paper, I dare you) but by reading a simplified version designed to build upon their existing knowledge and get across the core concepts first; thus giving them that angle required for the further knowledge to take. So someone that then turns around and says that some forms of science education is "dumbing down" has just clearly missed the point.