What is a good scientific popularization?

Isaac Asimov

This news was published on November 20, 2007 in the Spanish major newspaper ABC:

Jugene, the most powerful and ecological civilian computer in the world, is German. [In the] Rhinelandic town of Jülich [was installed] Jugene (Jülicher Blue Gene), whose 167,000 million basic operations (teraflops) per second make it the world's first computer for civilian use...

Actually, the most powerful computers at the time could run at a few hundred teraflops. This news exaggerated the speed of the computer by nine orders of magnitude. This error has not been corrected. It’s still in the web.

Heard on a Radio broadcast on May 30, 2008: Fishermen complain about the rising price of diesel. Five years ago it cost them 320% less. In other words, five years ago they were paid to fill the tank.

Let's look at another example of a wrong headline published on 2/18/2020. The headline says: New green technology generates electricity "out of thin air." The text clarifies that it is generated from the humidity of the air acting on a protein.

These errors, so frequent in the media (I could contribute many more), have led me to formulate the following golden rule of scientific popularization:

Any statement you assert must be correct and contrastable.

Everything one says must be carefully checked to ensure that it is not a mistake, hasty or misrepresented news, or in the worst case, fake news.

Another typical error of scientific popularization in the media is showing as already done news that are really nothing but predictions about the future. This usually happens in headlines, which are usually reduced to the minimum, while keeping maximum impact. For instance, in a recent news published on 2/12/2020, the headline is: Mars was also beaten and for a long time. The text, however, is much less conclusive. What the headline gives as certain, becomes just possible: The red planet could have formed in a longer time scale than previously thought.

Statistics are prone to many manipulations, sometimes with unexpected consequences:

In 1995, one study showed that the contraceptive pill increases the risk of thrombus embolism by 100%. The press published it with great headlines. Thousands of women stopped taking the pill. It is estimated that, as a result, 10,000 more abortions took place, only in Great Britain.

What had really happened? What did that study discover?

Risk of thrombo-embolism in women who do not take the pill: 1 in 14,000. Risk of thrombus embolism in women taking the pill: 2 in 14,000.

In this case, the news was not incorrect. What was wrong was the way of making it public. It’s true, the risk increased by 100% (from 0.00007 to 0.00014). But expressed in that way, it could cause a panic, and it did.

I have given more examples in two old posts in this blog: this one and this one.

This is a list of 24 famous popularizers:

Michael Faraday

Galileo Galilei, Michael Faraday, Jean Martin Charcot, Camille Flammarion, Santiago Ramón y Cajal, Josep Comas and Solà, Gregorio Marañón, George Gamow, Willy Ley, Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, Konrad Lorenz, Stephen Jay Gould, Martin Gardner, Félix Rodríguez de la Fuente, Douglas Hofstadter, Ian Stewart, Raymond Smullyan, Steven Weinberg, Richard Feynman, Carl Sagan, Stephen Hawking, Roger Penrose and Paul Davies.

Santiago Ramón y Cajal

Most of them were scientists, distributed among the following fields: 3 mathematicians; 12 physicists, chemists and astronomers; 3 biologists; 4 doctors in medicine; and an engineer. The exception is Martin Gardner, who graduated in philosophy, although he later specialized in philosophy of mathematics. Some of them worked on several disciplines, or kept up to date with them, at least from the informative point of view.

Many of the popularizers mentioned above also addressed the other way of popularizing science: by means of fiction. Some of the names indicated are also famous as authors of science fiction novels, or just fiction, with some scientific stroke: Asimov, Clarke, Gamow, Sagan, Davies, Ramón y Cajal, and Marañón wrote novels, some of which are considered among the best in the genre.

Are popularizers born or made? Surely both things at once. The best definition of a popularizer was given by Willy Ley, when one of his teachers asked the students to write a composition developing the following question: which profession do I want to practice when I’ll be grown up, and why? Willy Ley replied: I want to be an explorer. The teacher did not like the answer, and said there was nothing left to explore. Obviously, the teacher was wrong.

The same post in Spanish
Thematic Thread on Popularization of Science: Previous Next

Manuel Alfonseca
Happy summer holidays. See you by mid-August

Proposals for a reform of the calendar

As we saw in the previous post in these threads, the Gregorian calendar is practically perfect in terms of the duration of the year, since its error is about three days every ten thousand years, so we won’t have to worry about introducing new corrections until about the year 3500.

However, the calendar also affects the distribution of the year in months, weeks and days; and there, our calendar has some drawbacks: first, the months have variable durations; second, the week and the year do not keep pace: an ordinary year of 365 days contains 52 weeks and one day; a leap year, 52 weeks and two days. Therefore, the position in the week of every day of the month varies from year to year. For instance, July 1st 2020 was a Wednesday; the same date in 2021 will be a Thursday; in 2022, a Friday; in 2023, a Saturday; and in 2024, a Monday. The leap is one day in normal years and two days in leap years for all days after February 29th, and in the following year for days before that date. That is the reason for the English name leap year, for the succession of the days of the week for a given date leaps in those years.

The main consequence is this: we cannot have a unique calendar, valid for every year. The cycle of the days of the week is repeated with a periodicity of 28 years (the product of the seven days of the week by the four leap year cycle), but in fact there are just fourteen different calendars: seven for normal years, seven for leap years. In addition, it’s difficult to know, without consulting a calendar, on which day of the week falls a certain date. This is annoying, especially in a world as copious in commercial and administrative activities as ours. Wouldn't it be possible to avoid it?

Modern attempts to reform the calendar go in that direction. In 1954, the UN adopted a resolution, at the proposal of the Indian Union, in which all member countries were asked to study the possibility of reaching an agreement to universally adopt a calendar reform that would affect the division of the year in months and weeks. Two proposals received the attention of the international organization. The first, the international fixed calendar, divides the year into thirteen months of 28 days, plus a supernumerary day (two, in the case of leap years), which would not occupy a place in the week. The names of the months would be the same as now, except for the additional month, called sol, which would be located between June and July. All months would be identical, for they’d cover four exact weeks, and all would start on Sunday. We would have a unique calendar, valid for every month and every year: the one in the following table. The extra day, the year end day, would be placed between Saturday, December 28th and Sunday, January 1st of the following year. The other extra day in leap years would be located between Saturday June 28th and Sunday Sun 1th. This calendar has a drawback: the thirteen months of the year don’t distribute well between the four seasons: each season would last three months and one week.

S	M	T	W	T	F	S
1	2	3	4	5	6	7
8	9	10	11	12	13	14
15	16	17	18	19	20	21
22	23	24	25	26	27	28

International fixed calendar

The world calendar avoids this problem by dividing the year into twelve months, three per season, with the same names as the current months. The three months of each quarter would last, respectively, thirty-one, thirty, and thirty days. Each quarter would consist of thirteen weeks (ninety-one days) and would always start on a Sunday. In this case, the quarter calendar in the following table would apply to all quarters and all years. The first month of the table would apply to January, April, July and October. The second, to February, May, August and November. The third, to March, June, September and December. The additional day that would complete the 365 of the ordinary years, the world day, would be placed between Saturday, December 30th and Sunday, January 1st of the following year. The extra day of leap years would be placed between Saturday June 30th and Sunday July 1st.

The main difficulty to reach an agreement for a reform of the calendar has a religious origin: Jews, Adventists and Seventh-day Baptists oppose breaking the strict succession of the days of the week with the insertion of extra days, which would affect the interval between two consecutive Sabbaths, for them untouchable. The Catholic Church and many Protestant churches, on the other hand, don’t seem to have a problem to accept the change. Since these proposals were made, 66 years ago, nothing has been done. Change does not appear to be imminent.

D	L	M	X	J	V	S
1	2	3	4	5	6	7
8	9	10	11	12	13	14
15	16	17	18	19	20	21
22	23	24	25	26	27	28
29	30	31

D	L	M	X	J	V	S
			1	2	3	4
5	6	7	8	9	10	11
12	13	14	15	16	17	18
19	20	21	22	23	24	25
26	27	28	29	30

D	L	M	X	J	V	S
					1	2
3	4	5	6	7	8	9
10	11	12	13	14	15	16
17	18	19	20	21	22	23
24	25	26	27	28	29	30

World calendar

The same post in Spanish

Thematic Thread on Time: Previous Next

Thematic Thread on Science and History: Previous Next

Manuel Alfonseca