The question we asked to Marcus Chown, Jonah Lehrer and Gary Marcus was:

Do you need to dilute the essence of the subject matter to make science popular? How do you make your topic accessible without ’dumbing down’?

Gary Marcus

The answer to the first question is easy: “No, not if I am doing my job”. To paraphrase James Bond, good science writing should be distilled not diluted.

The answer to the second question is a good deal harder. Saying that an aspiring science writer must “write clearly” or “communicate the essence” is like asking a novice stock trader to “buy low, sell high’; nice advice, but not very specific. Good science writing is like good teaching — the trick is to meet your audience in the middle: suss out where they are likely to be, and try to connect where they are with where you’d like them to be.

In my experience, analogies and metaphors are often the best tools — but also the most dangerous. Analogies are powerful because they allow us to draw a whole slew of connections simultaneously. If you can tell a reader that orbiting electrons are like orbiting planets, you can immediately allow them to almost build a new system of understanding, based on another idea that they already know well.

But analogies must be chosen with care, and they often aren’t. Take for example the common metaphor of genome as a blueprint; every reader knows what a blueprint is, and there’s a clear relation between blueprints (which give plans for building houses and skyscrapers) and genomes (which give plans for building butterflies and puppy dogs). At first glance, it seem like a fine metaphor.

In reality, the genome-as-blueprint analogy is a perfect example of dumbing down. The blueprint metaphor leads readers to think of genomes as fixed, passive, even static; each notation in a blueprint has a direct counterpart in the finish object; this line makes a wall, that one becomes a window. Genomes contain nothing of the sort; there’s no diagram of a finished product. Instead, genomes are made of individual genes, and those genes are nothing like the pixels in a drawing. Rather, each gene is sort of like an IF-THEN line in a computer program, specifying a particular protein that can be built (the THEN) and a set of conditions for when and where that protein might be built (the IF).

The net result – omitted entirely from the blueprint metaphor – is a system of incredible beauty; each of the 25,000 or so genes in our genome acts on its own, as a part of grand self-organizing dance, responsive to the environment, yet capable of underwriting vast complexity.

MC: I agree with this. In my case I always stress that the metaphors give only a partial picture – a glimpse, if you like – of reality. Take the big bang and the universe. These are fundamentally 4-dimensional things – that is, they exist in 4 dimensions of space-time – and so, as 3-dimensional creatures, we can never grasp them in their entirety. It’s possible to explain how it is that all the galaxies are flying away from us yet we are not at the centre of the universe by using the analogy of galaxies as raisins in a rising cake. If you could sit on any raisin, you would always see all the other raisins receding from you. Of course, then people say: what about the edge of the cake? and then I say, well, maybe it’s an infinite cake! This is an example of a metaphor being stretched too far like the gene blueprint metaphor. But I think it’s liberating to realise that all metaphors have their limits (except the mathematical metaphor because, for some mysterious reason, the universe dances to the tune of mathematics!) and that, if you can’t completely grasp something about the universe, that may be because it is fundamentally ungraspable and all we can get is glimpses of the truth.

Good science writing, like good teaching, is about finding out what’s truly interesting about some aspect of nature, and then communicating it as directly as possible.

Marcus Chown

Nature’s true language – for reasons nobody really understands – is mathematics.

So, strictly speaking, all translations of mathematical equations into words dilute the subject matter and dumb down. Nevertheless, it is always possible to communicate something useful in a popular book. There are levels of understanding. To really understand Einstein’s theory of gravity you need to understand the mathematical intricacies of the geometry of curved space-time. But, actually, the deep ideas that underlie the theory are remarkably simple, even obvious (of course, it took the genius of Einstein to notice the obvious!). So an awful lot can be conveyed in words. It’s not quite the full understanding of the mathematical theory. But it’s still very worthwhile. The important thing, as Einstein himself recognised, is not to go too far. “Things should be made as simple as possible but not simpler,” he said.

I think I’m fortunate that, when I write, I am actually struggling to understand things to my own satisfaction. And my criterion of whether I really understand something just happens to be whether I can communicate it to someone on the number 23 bus (an unlucky person, if they happened to sit next to me!) or my wife, who is a nurse and has no physics background. If her eyes glaze over and she starts looking for the TV remote control, I know haven’t succeeded and ought to try again. So I’m lucky, really, that my trying to get my head around things – and I think in visual terms – is the same thing as trying to communicate science to a non-scientist reader. Long may there be that overlap because, even if no one reads a book I’ve written, it will have still served a purpose for me!

Jonah Lehrer

I think “diluting the essence of the subject matter” is the exact opposite of good science writing. The job of a writer, after all, is to amplify the essence of the subject, to minimize those extraneous details and focus instead on the story, the newness, the big idea. So if you’ve diluted the essence you haven’t just failed as a science reporter – you’ve failed as a writer.

That said, there are particular tradeoffs that all translators of scientific research must learn to navigate. It’s inevitable, of course, that facts and information are left on the cutting room floor – the audience doesn’t need to know every acronym. The only secret I know – and I’m afraid this is a very banal secret – is to focus on the larger narrative and then pick and choose your details accordingly. My job, in other words, is to find the story and then be true to the story as justified by the facts. But not every fact that makes up the story need to be in the story itself. That doesn’t make the story “dumbed down” – it just makes it a better story.

Of course, these elisions are entirely a matter of judgment, and require experience and good editing (and a good editor!)

The real problem I have with most science writing isn’t mere accuracy – not getting facts wrong really isn’t that hard. The much more difficult challenge is accurately conveying the struggle and toil and thrill and humanity of the scientific process. Nobody likes to read about PCR’s and Western blots and the mechanics of fMRI and all those technical details but I believe that describing the process is essential. Otherwise, all you’ve got is a stripped down set of dry information lacking context. We can’t just summarize the shiny new facts – we also have an obligation to show where those facts came from.

The panellists

Gary Marcus is a Professor of Psychology at New York University and Director of the NYU Infant Language Learning Center. A high-school dropout, Marcus received his PhD at the age of twenty-three from MIT, where he was mentored by Steven Pinker. He was tenured professor by the time he was thirty. The author of The Birth of the Mind and editor of the Norton Psychology Reader, he has been a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in Behavioral Sciences at Stanford. His writing has appeared in the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times, among other American newspapers.

Marcus Chown is an award-winning writer and broadcaster. Formerly a radio astronomer at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, he is currently cosmology consultant of the weekly science magazine New Scientist.

His latest book is We Need to Talk About Kelvin. About Quantum Theory Cannot Hurt You, The Times said ‘readers will experience happy eureka moments.’ The Never-Ending Days of Being Dead, was called ‘a limousine among popular science vehicles’ by the Guardian, ‘a masterpiece’ by Astronomy Now, and described as ‘like being at a party … with an almost perfect DJ’ in the Independent. Marcus Chown has also written a work for children, Felicity Frobisher and the Three-Headed Aldebaran Dust Devil.

Jonah Lehrer is editor-at-large for Seed Magazine and a contributing editor at NPR’S Radio Lab. He has written articles for Nature, New Scientist and the MIT Technology Review. He graduated from Columbia University in 2003 with a degree in neuroscience, and spent two years studying 20th Century Literature and Theology at Oxford University on a Rhodes Scholarship. His first book, Proust was a Neuroscientist was published in the US by Houghton Mifflin in November 2007. He also writes a highly regarded science blog, The Frontal Cortex.

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