Is Good Scientific Journalism Possible?

scida sends in a link to his blog post exploring the question of whether, roughly speaking, science journalism is an impossible task. From the post: "I have spent the better half of the past six months trying to understand one thing: how can you effectively present primary scientific literature to the general public? Is this even possible? ... During the past few months, I have spent entire days locked up in my office, writing my first manuscript to be submitted to a peer reviewed scientific journal. While doing so, I have come to realize the following: details can change everything. There are a number of assumptions I have been forced to make while analyzing my data, many of which are critical for both my methodology and the development of few of my arguments. Why? Often, the information I require simply isn't available (the studies haven't been done, or the studies that exist are based on assumptions of their own). Now, can someone unfamiliar with a particular field, nay, a sub-discipline of that field, recognize these assumptions for what they are?"

Comments

Re:Assumptions are bad, uncheckable assumptions wo

[Coryoth]

My suggestion: Make everything explicit. Unfortunately this just isn't feasible in a lot of cases. A while ago it occurred to me that it might be interesting to try and actually explain my Ph.D. thesis to a general audience -- I decided to make a project out of it, in which I would lay out the necessary background and build up enough information and terminology that I could actually explain the rather rarefied topics of my thesis without resorting to glib descriptions and vague analogies that gloss over pretty much all the details. I got started a while ago, and things are progressing well. You can read my efforts so far at The Narrow Road. However, while I'm managing to cover the required background topics in a way that I think a general audience can understand, two problems remain:

1. I am still glossing over fine technicalities -- at this stage it would confuse rather than inform, and much of it is pendantry that won't be necessary till later... maybe I'll come back and fill the technical holes, but...
2. I am nowhere close to being finished. I'm barely even started. I've been writing pieces as a hobby project for a year, and have only covered a little ground. I expect that I'll be able to explain the basic ideas of my thesis in another 2 or 3 years, by which time the total material will comfortably fill a large book.

In other words, there's just too much ground to cover. It isn't possible to be fully explicit, not without writing a book instead of an article. The reality is that science (and my field, mathematics) is extremely specialised these days, and this has resulted in a disconnect between those doing research work and the general public (personally I feel this disconnect it worst in mathematics). Now I do certainly feel that trying to heal that disconnect, at least a little, is important (it is another of the motivations for my project to explain advanced mathematics to a general audience), but that is a life's work in and of itself, not something you can do on the side while writing an article.

Einstein's take on the writer of popular science

[mincognito]

"Either he succeeds in being intelligible by concealing the core of the problem and by offering to the reader only superficial aspects or vague allusions, thus deceiving the reader by arousing in him the deceptive illusion of comprehension; or else he gives an expert account of the problem, but in such a fashion that the untrained reader is unable to follow the exposition and becomes discouraged from reading any further. If these two categories are omitted from today's popular scientific literature, surprisingly little remains."

This was written by Einstein in a forward for Linconln Barnett's popularization of the theory of relativity in 1948.