March 14, 2000
ESSAY
Pushing the Limits of Science, and of Public Relations
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By LAWRENCE M. KRAUSS
A few months ago, an e-mail message reached my desk from an Energy Department official saying that
so many calls had been placed to the
White House about a news item on
the Web that plans were under way
to brief the president.
This is perhaps not out of the ordinary. But what makes the story unusual is the subject of the article.
An online news network reported
that a "world-destroying black hole"
might be formed in experiments
about to begin at the Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island.
This is probably the first time ever
that anyone even considered briefing
a president about a black hole.
The uproar began as a result of a
letter to Scientific American suggesting that Brookhaven physicists,
in an effort to smash heavy nuclei
with sufficient energy to make them
momentarily merge into a kind of
"quark soup," might accidentally
create a black hole that would swallow the entire Earth.
It sounds like
the stuff of science fiction.
The problem is that the real goals
of the experiment can also be made
to sound like science fiction.
In an understandable effort to raise interest
in their program, Brookhaven officials, like those at other accelerator
laboratories, had announced that
they were attempting to reproduce
the conditions of the earliest moments of the Big Bang, the vast explosion that created our entire visible universe. This is scary stuff. No
wonder someone got concerned.
The problem with taking this literally, of course, is that the scale is all
wrong. The collision between a pair
of gold nuclei is a whopper on a subatomic scale.
But the total amount of
energy in the collision is sufficient to
heat up a teaspoon of water by about
one millionth of a degree. This emergency would have to be multiplied by
some incredible new chain reaction
even to be noticeable without sophisticated measuring apparatus.
By contrast, in the earliest moments of the Big Bang there was
more energy stored in a region the
size of an atom than the Sun will emit
in its entire lifetime. Perhaps more
important, cosmic rays from space
have been bombarding nuclei on
Earth for billions of years with more
energy than would be deposited in
the Brookhaven collisions.
The fact
that we are still here is pretty good
evidence that Brookhaven is not likely to destroy the world.
The intentions of the Brookhaven
press office were good, of course.
The reasoning, I am assuming, was
that to interest the public, the program had to sound "sexy." There is
a discouraging trend of late, however, that promotes hype in science.
Unless scientific ideas or discoveries
are earth shattering -- if not literally, then figuratively -- then they
don't seem to be newsworthy.
The problem here is that most developments in science, including the
most important ones, are usually incremental. Rarely does a single result really "revolutionize" a field,
even though we read this over and
over when discoveries are described.
The same day the Internet story
surfaced, a prime time television
program was broadcast on, of all
things, string theory.
This highly
mathematical area of particle physics is being developed in the hope
that some day it will explain the nature of all the known forces.
On the program, I heard that protons are made of quarks, which has
been experimentally verified. But in
the same breath I was told that
quarks are made of strings, a statement that has no basis in fact. I also
was surprised to learn that if we
could actually discover strings, we
might open doors to interstellar travel and perhaps even time travel.
Now, string theory may have the
potential to enhance our picture of
reality.
But it hasn't. This doesn't diminish its interest for physicists, but
it is premature to hail it in public. It
has been around for almost 20 years,
but it has yet to address or resolve a
single observational issue associated
with the physical universe.
This is not a very impressive
record when contrasted with major
theoretical developments of this century -- general relativity and quantum mechanics, for example, which
were developed to address observational issues, and whose predictions
met the test of experiment before being lionized.
Ultimately the biggest danger in
trumpeting theories prematurely is
that most theories, regardless of
their potential or beauty, turn out to
be wrong. If we wish science to remain more credible to the public
than pseudoscience, we have to be
very careful about the claims we
make.
It is difficult to popularize science
and not fall prey to the tendency to
hype.
I readily admit my own guilt,
having recently learned the hard
way how overstating the case may
backfire.
After writing in a book
about the remote theoretical possibility of warp drive -- something
that might be possible in principle,
but most likely never in practice -- I
saw some of my hype used on the one
hand in ill-advised proposals by
NASA engineers to try to design
warp drives now, and on the other by
people who argue that aliens must be
using warp drives to come here to
abduct Earthlings.
But avoiding hype in science is
more important than ever, because it
is clear that many in the public cannot distinguish claims of scientists
from those of pseudoscientists.
The statistics speak for themselves. A recent Gallup poll indicated
that 47 percent of American adults
believed humans came into existence 10,000 years ago, in spite of evidence to the contrary.
The recent school board ruling in
Kansas, removing almost any mention of evolution in the state's required curriculum, demonstrates
that even elected officials, who may
provide money for science or education, don't really have a good handle
on what makes science tick.
Baby steps may not make headlines, but, usually, carry the day
eventually. Our modern technology
is testament to their power.
We
shouldn't need the hype. At the same
time, the public should be warned
that the same rules apply to science
news as to any other news.
Most
often, a little common sense, and a
dose of skepticism, can separate the
wheat from the chaff.
Lawrence M. Krauss is head Chair of the Physics Department at Case Western Reserve University, and the author of "The Physics of Star Trek."
