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.