New Year, new blog
Well somehow two weeks has become two months. So my new year’s resolution is to write this blog a lot more regularly. But seeing as I’ve promised that before and it hasn’t happened yet, we’ll have to see whether this resolution falls into the cliché of being quickly forgotten.
Anyway, I’m still going to continue where I left off last time, and that was talking about how to get people interested in science. Last time, I mentioned the recent successes that CERN and the RSC had in getting science into the papers. But although it’s always good to get a positive exposure for science, I don’t think that doing so actively encourages an interest in science.
A newspaper report about science is fairly ephemeral; people read it and then forget about it. Actually engendering an interest in science is a much longer-term process and requires a great deal more hand-holding.
For I think that most people have a background interest in science, or at least certain aspects of science, but are intimidated by it. Science is difficult, complicated, and infused with jargon and obscure technical terms that only the initiated fully understand. So as with many aspects of so-called high culture, like opera, people don’t know where to start. They need a friendly guide.
This was brought home to me when Bill Bryson wrote his A short history of nearly everything. All of a sudden, friends who had hitherto only shown a minimal interest in science were all buying it. It turned out that they were interested in science, but were just waiting for the right person to explain it to them. They’d already read and liked Bryson’s travel books, and trusted that he’d make science just as entertaining.
That’s the thing about most areas of science; you can’t just dive straight into them if you’re a novice. You need to be helped through the often difficult terrain, especially at the start. Now this is what science writers are meant to do and there are a lot of other popular science books that also offer a fairly general introduction to science. But the thing is that there aren’t many science writers who are as well known to a general audience as Bill Bryson. And for a difficult topic like science, people want someone they already like and trust to explain it to them.
So to take advantage of this general background interest in science, you really need to employ well-known faces as the friendly guides. The BBC did this during its coverage of the switching on of the Large Hadron Collider, part of which was presented by the comedian Ben Miller. Now there was a bit of criticism about this, but Miller studied quantum physics at Cambridge University and still has an interest in the subject, so why not take advantage of him.
Indeed, comedians would probably make a good choice of presenters for science programmes. For there are a number of comedians who seem to have an interest in and fairly good knowledge of science, including Bill Bailey, Dara O’Briain and Chris Addison, and viewers would have more confidence in their ability to make a scientific topic understandable and entertaining than your average, unknown scientist.
But hopefully they’d still need the help of a good science writer.
