Trendy vicars
I know it’s been a bit of a long time since my last blog entry (I’ve been on holiday again, although I won’t bore you with the details this time), but I’m going to sort of continue where I left off with the last entry. Is getting publicity for science always a good thing and does it actually encourage people to become more interested in science?
The problem science has is something I like to call the ‘trendy vicar’ syndrome. Both science and vicars are inherently not trendy, so any attempt to try to make them trendy just rings false. In the same way that a vicar trying to connect with the ‘kids’ by affecting a liking for My Chemical Romance seems plain ridiculous, so does trying to make science seem more relevant by wrapping it in some form of popular culture.
On the other hand, non-scientists tend to perceive science as being difficult, dry and fairly boring, so any attempt to explain science to non-scientists needs to sex the science up a bit. So how do you do that? How do you make science thrilling and exciting to the unconverted, without making it look like a vicar with an earring.
A classic example of how it can go horribly wrong happened a few years ago, when Radio 2 favourite Katie Melua released a song called Nine Million Bicycles, in which one of the lyrics mentioned the age of the universe. Science writer Simon Singh then took her to task in an article for the Guardian, arguing that she had got the age of the universe wrong and proposing some more accurate lyrics. But all that he achieved was to make cosmology sound even less exciting than Katie Melua, which is a feat in itself.
A more recent attempt occurred last month when the Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC) announced a competition to find a successful alternative ending to the 1969 film The Italian Job, which currently ends with a bus full of gold balanced precariously on the edge of a cliff. The competition is meant to mark both the 40th anniversary of the release of the film and the 140th anniversary of the creation of the periodic table, which obviously includes gold.
Now when I first received the press release about this I thought it was a pretty stupid idea. The connection between the film and the periodic table is incredibly tenuous and the whole competition has a bit of a childish, Blue Peter feel about it. Furthermore, Richard Pike, the chief executive of the RSC, claimed that The Italian Job is ‘the most popular robbery movie produced’, which is over-egging the pudding a bit. What about Reservoir Dogs, Heat and the re-make of Ocean's Eleven, all of which are better and arguably more popular robbery movies.
But to my surprise the competition seems to have caught the imagination, at least of newspaper editors. Not only was the competition covered in a number of British daily papers, but it was also mentioned on the satirical news quiz Have I Got News For You.
So, like the switching on of the Large Hadron Collider, the competition has definitely been successful in getting science into the newspapers. But will it actually help to get people more interested in science? Well, I’ll try to answer that question in my next blog entry, which will probably be in around two weeks’ time.
