Is popular science in crisis?

In the last thirty years, interest in scientific popularization has decreased worryingly. Perhaps not unrelated to this is the loss of prestige of science, which the man in the street tends to consider guilty or accomplice in some threats, such as the proliferation of nuclear weapons, the uncontrolled destruction of the environment or climate change.

During this time, several permanent sections of the media dedicated to popular scientific have disappeared, as well as a few important magazines, while books on popular science do not usually achieve great sales, with few exceptions, mainly related to health.

In the mass media, the only thing that matters now is the appeal of the headline, at the expense of scientific accuracy. Thus the effects of this type of dissemination are often negative and counterproductive: instead of informing, they distort the public opinion. I have spoken about the harmful effects of this type of disclosure in several posts in this blog.

The golden age of scientific popularization

Scientific popularization, as it was carried out after 1970, can be divided into three large groups:

• High-level scientific popularization, represented by magazines aimed at readers with a good scientific base, who want to stay up to date on the advances made in disciplines other than their own:

o   Scientific American, which had entered its second century of existence and published monthly each year less than one hundred long select articles, in addition to a small number of short information articles. Its prestige increased even more when it became the medium through which some important discoveries were made public, this journal being chosen instead of better-known scientific publications, such as Nature or Science. Thus, in October 1970, Martin Gardner published in his section (Mathematical Games) the first article dedicated to the Game of Life, devised by the British mathematician John Conway: The fantastic combinations of John Conway's new solitaire game "life". And in May 1975, Gregory Chaitin published in Scientific American his famous article Randomness and Mathematical Proof, where he showed that the randomness of integers is undecidable, an undecidability theorem comparable to Gödel’s.

Platitudinous scientific projects

Scientific research has become a race against time. Researchers must publish as much as possible in certain journals because their salary depends on it. They must also propose research projects that would receive official funding, on which will depend their ability to hire scholarship assistants and finance doctoral students, plus the possibility of making trips and paying registration fees for conferences where they will present the status of their research.

However, some researchers lack the imagination to design and propose new research projects. What happens then? They may pose problems whose solution everyone knows and design a research plan to demonstrate it by means of statistics or in some other way that sounds scientific. If the design is astute enough, the official entities that award projects will be convinced to finance the project. On the other hand, by doing this, researchers are playing it safe, because they know the results of their research before doing it.

Super-accurate Innumeracy

A.K. Dewdney

Between 1984 and 1991, A.K. Dewdney authored numerous articles in the section on Mathematical Games of Scientific American. He was one of the successors to Martin Gardner, most famous contributor of that section. Dewdney is also the author of an amazing book, The Planiverse (1984), which belongs to the same genre of mathematical fantasy as Edwin Abbott's Flatland, published just a century earlier.

In the previous post I offered a few examples of innumeracy taken from A.K. Dewdney’s book 200% of Nothing. In this book, Dewdney points out, among many others, two very frequent mathematical mistakes. The first consists in giving so few digits of a number that it loses all usefulness (he calls those numbers nums, to indicate that they are not full numbers, as they are not complete). The second mistake is the opposite: giving too many digits of a number, beyond what is necessary or makes sense. He calls unnecessary digits dramadigits, as they only serve to give the particular number a more dramatic look.

Let's look at an example from Dewdney's book:

The top ten scientific discoveries of the century

The magazine Science News has reached in 2021 one hundred years (a century) of existence. To celebrate this anniversary, the magazine has published a list of what, according to its author, are the ten greatest scientific advances made between 1921 and 2021. This is the list, ordered according to the opinion of the article’s author about the importance of the discovery (from highest to lowest):

What are scientists researching about?

Plant research in space (NASA)

In previous posts I have mentioned some dangers faced by the future of science in the face of the growing obstacles suffered by basic research and the tendency of politicians to prioritize practical applications. The arguments I offered in those posts were qualitative. It is possible, however, to obtain real quantitative data, extracted from the journal Science News, which publishes a fairly complete summary of the results of research in all fields of science and technology. By analyzing 23,946 articles published during 30 years, I have obtained the following table, which shows the number of scientific news related to fourteen of the most researched topics in the fields of biology and medicine during that period of time. (More than half the research results belong to those two fields).

The extinction of the dinosaurs

Since their discovery, at the beginning of the 19th century, dinosaurs have always awakened human imagination. The past existence of such large animals, which seemed to have left no trace in the current fauna, is quite suggestive. In the multitudinous field of science, dinosaurs have always occupied an extremely attractive place. Dinosaurs have appeal.

On the other hand, the mystery of the disappearance of dinosaurs was soon posited. What could have caused their extinction? In the next century and a half, various possible causes were proposed, such as the following:

• It was said, for example, that primitive mammals could have caused the extinction of dinosaurs by eating their eggs. The trouble is, both groups of animals lived together for a hundred million years without any problem. In fact, mammals were cornered by their giant neighbors and could not develop and spread until they disappeared.
• It was also said that the apparition of flowering plants (Angiosperms) during the Cretaceous period, the last when dinosaurs lived, could have caused their extinction by a change in their diet. The trouble is, the Cretaceous period was very long, and flowering plants appeared thirty million years before the extinction of the dinosaurs. If they could put up with that diet for so long, why should it suddenly be fatal for them?
• Another reason adduced was a change of climate. During the Mesozoic Era (the age of the dinosaurs) the Earth's climate was quite warm. Then, in the Tertiary period, it was colder. The bad news is that climate changes are usually gradual, while the disappearance of dinosaurs does seem to have been quite fast. Therefore it was proposed that the cause of the extinction could have been a sudden catastrophe that would have caused a sudden climate change.

Headlines and texts

Prehistoric pregnancy (Science News)

On several occasions I have criticized the distortion of scientific news by the media, especially the headlines, by saying things contradicted by the text, which apparently are more appealing. It seems that many journalists (at least those in charge of headlines) follow the old journalistic dictum, usually quoted in several forms, more or less equivalent, which, as is often the case with these lapidary phrases, has been attributed (probably apocryphally) to diverse personalities, such as William Randolph Hearst:

Do not let reality spoil a good headline (or a good report).

What I think regrettable is the fact that a magazine dedicated to scientific popularization, such as Science News, also falls in this trap of offering appealing headlines, which after reading the text can be seen not to correspond to the content. Let’s look at a few examples, offered during the week of February 19, 2017: