Skip to main content

Science without Heroes



Sabine Hossenfelder has a fascinating post in her blog about the role of "heroes" in science writing/popularization.

People writing about the sciences want to tell stories, because they presume that the people reading their stuff like learning stories: and they are likely right because the human mind is structured to take information in that way. So ... here's a simple story. Individual A confronted difficult problem B at a certain moment in A's life, and in a specific context got an inspiration. He tested out the inspiration and -- ta da!  -- it solved the problem, making him/her a hero.  Insert memorable details involving botany or zoology along the way. In this manner a writer/popularizer conveys to his broad not-PhD-holding audience what problem B was, how it was solved, and thus what are the basic scientific ideas involved.

Let's leave Newton's apple out of this. There's a much more recent example that involves pigeon shit. What is now called Cosmic Microwave Background energy, and considered a key bit of evidence in favor of the Big Bang theory of the cosmos, began as annoyingly persistent static coming in to a radio telescope run by two researchers at Bell Labs. Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson weren't trying to solve the then-ongoing debate between Big Bang advocates and Steady-State theorists. They had the slightly less ambitious goal of filtering out Milky Way galaxy noises to see if they could detect radio signals from other galaxies.

They thought the background noise they were hearing represented the effects of pigeon poop on the device pictured above. Yet when they cleaned out the poop and caught and caged the pigeons ... the noise persisted. After some more trials and errors, they did eventually make contact with another group of physicists who had theorized about the background radiation the effects of the Big Bang should still be having. The two groups decided that the theory of the one matched the observations of the other. They published simultaneously, and team Steady State was dealt a deadly blow.

That's the story. Congratulations if this is the first time you've read it.  At any rate, you can see why named human beings and mundane things like bird crap can liven up some otherwise dry history.

Hossenfelder argues that the hero picture of science is part of the problem, though, not part of the solution. Without further fecal matter, here's a link to her post. 
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A Story About Coleridge

This is a quote from a memoir by Dorothy Wordsworth, reflecting on a trip she took with two famous poets, her brother, William Wordsworth, and their similarly gifted companion, Samuel Taylor Coleridge.   We sat upon a bench, placed for the sake of one of these views, whence we looked down upon the waterfall, and over the open country ... A lady and gentleman, more expeditious tourists than ourselves, came to the spot; they left us at the seat, and we found them again at another station above the Falls. Coleridge, who is always good-natured enough to enter into conversation with anybody whom he meets in his way, began to talk with the gentleman, who observed that it was a majestic waterfall. Coleridge was delighted with the accuracy of the epithet, particularly as he had been settling in his own mind the precise meaning of the words grand, majestic, sublime, etc., and had discussed the subject with William at some length the day before. “Yes, sir,” says Coleridge, “it is a maj...
9 comments
Read more

Searle: The Chinese Room

John Searle has become the object of accusations of improper conduct. These accusations even have some people in the world of academic philosophy saying that instructors in that world should try to avoid teaching Searle's views. That is an odd contention, and has given rise to heated exchanges in certain corners of the blogosphere.  At Leiter Reports, I encountered a comment from someone describing himself as "grad student drop out." GSDO said: " This is a side question (and not at all an attempt to answer the question BL posed): How important is John Searle's work? Are people still working on speech act theory or is that just another dead end in the history of 20th century philosophy? My impression is that his reputation is somewhat inflated from all of his speaking engagements and NYRoB reviews. The Chinese room argument is a classic, but is there much more to his work than that?" I took it upon myself to answer that on LR. But here I'll tak...
17 comments
Read more

Recent Controversies Involving Nassim Taleb, Part I

I've written about Nassim Taleb on earlier occasions in this blog. I'll let you do the search yourself, dear reader, for the full background. The short answer to the question "who is Taleb?" is this: he is a 57 year old man born in Lebanon, educated in France, who has been both a hedge fund manager and a derivatives trader. He retired from active participation from the financial world sometime between 2004 and 2006, and has been a full-time writer and provocateur ever since. Taleb's writings for the general public began where one might expect -- in the field where he had made his money -- and he explained certain financial issues to a broad audiences in a very dramatic non-technical way. Since then, he has widened has fields of study, writing about just about everything, applying the intellectual tools he honed in that earlier work. As you might have gather from the above, I respect Taleb, though I have sometimes been critical of him when my own writing ab...
4 comments
Read more