In a sense, science is a circular process of information discovery, dissemination, and use. Communication of information is centrally important in the practice of science today. Since the rise of ‘‘modern’’ science—a drama which, in the West, might be said to have begun with the astronomy of Copernicus—the style, media, methods, and purposes of scientific communication have changed dra- matically. Today, original scientific information is communicated by and for specialists, in ways that exclude all but their peers. This is not bad—it works perfectly well for members of the intended audience; but it also has the dual effects of fragmenting science as a whole and making scientific information unintelligible to the vast majority of people. These factors, in turn, contribute to science illiteracy.1
The first entry in the revised edition of Hellmans and Bunch’sThe Timetables of Science(Touchstone/Simon and Schuster, 1992) is 2,400,000B.C. when pa- leolithic hominids in Africa first learned to manufacture stone tools. Thus, the very earliest emergence of what might be called science shows how, as ancient humans sought and gained understanding of the natural world, they applied this knowledge to create technologies that bettered their lives. The motivation behind science is essentially human—the desire to understand the world and our place in it—and essentially practical—the need to manipulate our world to our ad- vantage.
Still, throughout history, as science and technology have advanced, they have become increasingly fragmented, and this process naturally excludes a large proportion of the general population. In antiquity, certain things were taught to, and thus known by, only a few. Often, as in ancient Egypt and Babylonia,
scientific knowledge was embedded within ritual and myth, revealed only to priests. Later, in the Hellenistic world, a rigorous form of learning based on Aristotle’s inductive method, which provides the foundation for what is today called thescientific method, took place in academies to which the majority did not have access. At another level of society, specialized crafts and technologies developed that were learned, then practiced, only by dedicated artisans. Thus, long before anything like true science existed, certain types of technical skills and knowledge were already reserved to a small group.
Today’s science literacy crisis is something totally different, though. While an advanced understanding of any field will always be the private realm of specialists, in the past any educated layperson could learn about and keep up with basic scientific and technological topics. This is no longer the case, in part because of the exclusive communications system that science has developed.
Remember from Chapter One that information is a key ingredient in science literacy. If the information available makes no sense to a person, it is of no use.
Because the nature of scientific communication has changed so dramatically since the time of Copernicus, looking at the history of those changes can help us understand today’s deficiencies in science literacy.2
450 YEARS OF SCIENTIFIC INFORMATION
Copernicus addressed the First Book of his historic 1543 tomeDe Revolu- tionibus Orbium Caelestium(On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres) to the educated nonscientist of his day. In it, he described his heliocentric theory of the universe in style and language specifically intended to be read and un- derstood by anybody with a general academic education. That he did so in a book that was otherwise extremely technical and mathematical, and which could be understood fully by just a handful, reveals much about the practice of science in that era. These educated nonscientists were the gentry, the scholars, the land- owners, the nobility, and, not least of all, the ecclesiastical authorities of the day. While they were not scientists, by virtue of their learning they were in the general intellectual mainstream of sixteenth century Europe, and, further, they had money, power, and influence. Copernicus knew that the success of his theory depended in no small part on its appeal to these groups.
Although Copernicus’s theory was not generally accepted until after his death, it was certainly known and discussed by many public factions. The idea that the Earth might not occupy the center of the universe was much more than a narrow scientific dispute—it was a major debate throughout all of late medieval civilization.3According to the noted historian of science Thomas Kuhn, ‘‘The significance ofDe Revolutionibuslies less in what it says itself than in what it caused others to say.’’4Much of the controversy centered around its theological ramifications, and at that level it was expressed through Church tractates and philosophical discourses, but it also forced an examination of religious doctrines that penetrated to all levels of society. The central issue was whether an astron-
omer could legitimately speculate about what Johannes Kepler called ‘‘the in- nermost form of nature.’’ The revolution initiated by Copernicus was social as well as scientific. Science was on its way to becoming an institution, and that had a major impact on civilization as a whole. Nobody would be untouched by it.
Galileo’s dispute with the Catholic Church symbolized the tensions between religious dogma and these new scientific theories. In 1633 an aged Galileo bowed before Pope Urban VIII and recanted his teachings of a sun-centered universe; this image has endured as a symbol of the conflict between rational science and religious faith. Although scholars continue to study and interpret the complex events that led up to the famous recantation, one factor that clearly concerned the Church was Galileo’s enormous public popularity, and thus the degree to which his theories had reached the minds of the populace at large.
His teachings were all the more dangerous for that very reason.
Galileo was a supreme popularizer. He was dedicated to the promotion of the experimental method in general and the Copernican system in particular. He ardently wished for all who could read to test his ideas. Instead of writing his major scientific treatises in jargon and mathematics (as he did with other works), he used his considerable literary skills to produce works that could be widely perused and discussed. Consider the popular appeal of the following passage fromSiderius Nuncius(The Starry Messenger), where he reports the discovery of the moons of Jupiter, which he had beheld through his telescope:
There remains the matter which in my opinion deserves to be considered the most im- portant of all—the disclosure of four PLANETS never seen from the Creation of the world until our own time. . . . Here we have a fine and elegant argument for quieting the doubts of those who, while accepting with tranquil mind the revolutions of the planets about the sun in the Copernican system, are mightily disturbed to have the moon alone revolve around the earth and accompany it in an annual rotation around the sun. . . . Now we have not just one planet rotating about another while both run through a great orbit around the sun; our own eyes show us four stars which wander around Jupiter as does the moon.5
Galileo recognized that this discovery was too significant to be communicated in the technical and typically understated language of science. Instead, he trum- peted the discovery. Popularizing his theories led to his greatness, and perhaps also his downfall.
A mere fifty years passed between Galileo’s last published work and Isaac Newton’s first, but during the interim science itself had become more institu- tionalized, and its means of communication had changed. Constitutionally, Gal- ileo and Newton were worlds apart. While Galileo was robust and festive, Newton was frail and aloof. Moreover, their approaches to science were decid- edly different. While Galileo presented his findings to all educated laypersons, Newton quite consciously wrote his master work,The Mathematical Principles
of Natural Philosophy (or the Principia), in which he showed how calculus could be used to compute motion and physical forces, in a dense, heavily math- ematicized prose that no nonphysicist could understand. He explained his mo- tives for doing so:
To avoid being baited by little smatterers in mathematics, I designedly made thePrincipia abstract; but yet so as to be understood by able mathematicians who, I imagine, by comprehending my demonstration would concur with my theory.6
These comments foreshadow the development of a new style of scientific writ- ing, one that spoke solely and exclusively to peers. It thus fell to others to describe and interpret Newton’s revolutionary work to the masses.
Although Newton himself disdained popularization, his work nonetheless had great public impact. Within his lifetime, popular renderings of the central ideas of thePrincipiabegan to be published, and these works, along with very popular public demonstrations of scientific experiments and new technologies, fomented an intellectual climate in which science came to be regarded as an authoritative way of knowing. British society first, then Europe and America, embraced a so- called natural philosophy. Newton’s success at mathematizing the forces of push, pull, and acceleration inspired a belief that through the application of scientific principles all of the workings of nature could be predicted, understood, and thus harnessed. This, in turn, led to fervent entrepreneurship and technological de- velopment.7
Thus, the seventeenth century marked a period of tumultuous transition in how science was done and communicated. In his classic three-volume history of science, Rene´ Taton contended that ‘‘in less than a century—from Gilbert’s De Magnete to Newton’s Principia—the face of science had changed almost beyond recognition.’’8At around the turn of that century, any educated person could keep up with and comprehend virtually all published scientific works of the era. There was really no science per se, just natural philosophy, and it subsumed all disciplines and specialties. Over time, however, several trends and developments began to erode this monolithic, philosophical science. First were the great works and discoveries of the likes of Galileo, Rene´ Descartes, Francis Bacon, and Newton, whose ideas challenged the authority of beliefs that had gone unquestioned since antiquity, and in doing so gave scientists new license to speculate. This led to the development of the scientific method, a new way of thinking about and doing science. Further, new technologies, such as the telescope and Leeuwenhoek’s microscope, opened entirely new vistas to exper- imental scrutiny. Finally, as previously mentioned, advances in mathematics, especially Newton’s calculus, led to its being increasingly adopted as ‘‘the lan- guage of science.’’ Science had become a profession; symbolic of this profes- sionalization, the Royal Society was founded in 1660.9
The specialization of science meant that new, original information often could not be communicated directly to a lay audience. The scientific journal—a format
designed for currency and specialization—emerged as the primary vehicle for conveying the results of new research, which were usually couched in technical language. The growing number of journals paralleled increases in the amount of research being done—a harbinger of today’s ‘‘information explosion.’’ (It has been suggested that a contributing factor to the great nineteenth century physiologist Johannes Muller’s mental breakdown was his despair over being unable to keep abreast of the proliferating literature of his field.) In order to organize this information, the first indexes and review publications appeared in the early eighteenth century.10
Still, throughout the eighteenth century and into the nineteenth, much science remained intelligible to laypeople. Charles Darwin, for instance, wroteThe Or- igin of Specieswith the idea that it would be read by biologists and nonbiologists alike. In the early nineteenth century armchair scientists still made major con- tributions in observational sciences, such as biology and earth sciences, but lacked the intellectual knowledge or access to the necessary technological equip- ment to make similar contributions to such fields as physics or chemistry. This created a widening information gap between scientists and the public. Popular- izers such as Mary Somerville, who wrote the widely readOn the Connection of the Physical Sciences(1846), appeared in increasing numbers to fill this gap.
Further, several scientists took it upon themselves to popularize their own fields.
Michael Faraday, for example, gave a series of public lectures, one entitled ‘‘The Chemistry of the Candle.’’11
In America, where a strong sense of science nationalism and a faith in tech- nological progress had developed by the mid-nineteenth century, concentrated efforts were launched to debunk misconceptions and superstitions that impeded this progress. New publications such asScientific American (1845) were inau- gurated to further this cause.12 There were significant substantive differences between many of these popular works and the primary works whose contents they reported. For example, although Scientific American featured populariza- tions written by scientists, many other forums contained material by journalists, educators, and civic leaders, who all too often had ulterior motives for writing, such as promoting a point of view or a political cause, or simply selling mag- azines.
This phenomenon is the subject of John Burnham’s studyHow Superstition Won and Science Lost.13Nineteenth and early twentieth century scientists such as Faraday, Asa Gray, John Wesley Powell, John M. Coulter, F. W. Clarke, and Louis Agassiz were among a group Burnham called classic ‘‘men of science’’
(in this era, there were few women in science). These individuals maintained a perspective on science that transcended disciplinary fragmentation and, because of their almost evangelical enthusiasm for the scientific method, promoted the
‘‘religion of science’’ among a broad public. Their self-perceived role was to correct the errors of superstition. From the mid to late 1800s, these men and others like them were active popularizers; but with ever increasing specialization among the sciences, later generations were to produce fewer and fewer such
figures. The task of presenting science to the public thus passed largely to those who lacked the technical education to do an adequate job.
Burnham traces four stages in the early popularization of science in the United States:
• Diffusion—when science did not need condensation, simplification and translation;
• Popularization—when men of science tried to share their vision of the religion of science.
• Dilution—when popularization passed into the hands of educators, who represented science only at second hand, and, simultaneously, journalists;
• Trivialization—when popular science consisted of impotent snippets of news, the prod- uct of authority figures.
The final stages of the process, he contends, had been reached by the middle of the twentieth century, and the result is evident in the public’s poor science literacy today.
In the twentieth century, science has been popularized by an ever-increasing variety of popular media, the domain of ‘‘secondhand’’ science popularizers.
Marcel LaFollette’s studyMaking Science Our Owndescribes in detail the con- tent of science features published in general interest magazines from 1910 to 1955, demonstrating how many contemporary images of science were formed.14 Finally, science fiction emerged as a distinct literary genre. In part because of its popularity and in part because of a lack of information from more authori- tative sources, it contributed much to the public’s perceptions of what science could and could not do. Technology created numerous new vehicles for popular science, such as radio, motion pictures, and television.
In the years immediately after World War II, the new science of nuclear physics, which had abundantly displayed its potency at Hiroshima, stimulated a broad, media-based wave of popularization. Many of these images contained contradictions. On one hand, the accomplishments of the Manhattan Project were depicted as a triumph of human ingenuity, but on the other hand, the image of scientists suffered due to a public perception that, by intruding upon the affairs of God, they had unleashed a terrible force on humanity.15Another study ex- plores in detail the multifarious images—some good, some bad, some frivo- lous—of the definitive scientist of the era, Albert Einstein.16 He was widely admired for his genius, but also incorrectly faulted for having unwittingly set in motion the chain of events that led to the development of the Bomb. The time lent itself to wild speculation and fears, which were expressed in all va- rieties of media.
In The New Priesthood (1965) Ralph Lapp identified, for perhaps the first time, the potential danger to American democracy of a general public that lacked a basic understanding of science. Lapp suggested that Americans tended to re- gard scientists as latter-day Sadducean priests endowed with esoteric knowledge
and decision-making authority.17These were to become major concerns in the post-Sputnik era, and political initiatives were launched in an attempt to reassert America’s scientific ascendancy and competitiveness. Those initiatives do not seem to have had a long-term impact, however. The very same concerns were echoed in Rustrum Roy’s 1986 editorial inBioscience: ‘‘Science will die as a vital culture shaping force for the same reason that theology (not religion) died . . . a few centuries ago—it became too precious, the province of an elite priest- hood.’’18
More recently, the commercial enterprise of science popularization has seen some ups and downs. The apex of the boom cycle may have come in the late 1970s and early 1980s with the inception of twenty new general science mag- azines (includingOmni,Discover,Science 80, and a revampedScience Digest), seventeen new television shows (includingNova,Omni,Walter Cronkite’s Uni- verse, and such PBS series as CosmosandThe Ascent of Man), and more than sixty newspaper sections dedicated to popular science.19ATimemagazine cover story onCosmoscreator Carl Sagan declared that ‘‘ennui’’ about popular science
‘‘has turned into enthusiasm.’’20Former Fermilab director Robert Wilson called popularizations ‘‘the new literature of science’’ that would integrate a ‘‘tech- nology of humanism into the common culture.’’21Some of these ventures were short-lived because of market saturation and lack of advertising revenue. Nev- ertheless, if science popularization did not emerge as a blockbuster industry, it did prove that it can attract and sustain an audience.22
Recognizing how the general public learns about science is essential for un- derstanding why science literacy in the United States is low (and, also, perhaps, why so many students eschew science studies). The general public acquires meaningful information (ormisinformation) about science through various me- dia. Invariably, whenever professional scientists speak of the need to improve science literacy, they call for more and better popularization. Thus, America’s science literacy can only be as good as the quality of the information that is available and the means by which it is sought and used. This phenomenon is described by Oscar Handlin in his historical study of science and popular cul- ture:
Since the explanation of the scientists was remote and incomprehensible, a large part of the population satisfied its need for knowing in its own way. Side by side with the formally defined science there appeared a popular science, vague, undisciplined, unor- dered, and yet extremely influential. It touched upon the science of scientists, but did not accept its limits. And it more than adequately met the requirements of the people because it could more easily accommodate the traditional knowledge to which they clung.23
Clearly, popular science should not be presented as science per se—it is an interpretation of science. As with any interpretation, it can be more or less accurate and authoritative. Where it is less so, distortions and misunderstandings