This is an important topic.

One of the reasons that astronomy is often lost to the public is that so much scientific communication is based on astronomical theories presented as fact. There is little connection with observational astronomy in a way that a general audience can relate to. Even modern astronomers have some difficulty illustrating those relationships and end up hanging up on a specific level of abstraction with no relation to the observational world.

Another reason doesn't occur as much in astronomical science as it does in other sciences such as human life sciences and environmental sciences. With so many scientists doing contract "research" the results have very heavy spins which correlate with the strategic objectives of the sponsors. It is too bad that such obvious lack of integrity is so profitable and so unrecognized and chastised by peers.

This URL was sent to me by an astronomer friend. I enjoyed reading it and will continue to do so.

John,

I had a different expectation of this article because of the title - 'framing' has become something of a bad word in the hard science world because activist science sites use it to mean getting their point across in a way that makes the public adopt their ideology and science does best when it sticks to the facts.


That said, on your main point the internet is both liberator and culprit here. In the rush to remain relative and competitive in a much faster world, some sites even print these press releases verbatim, mistakes and all - and they're rewarded for it by getting thousands of readers from social news sites where the submitters rush to be 'first' with a news article ( disclaimer: at scientificblogging.com we sometimes do that also, but some press releases are well written ) so we've reached a much different problem than we used to have.


It used to be that journalists were suspect because they didn't understand or were filtered by editors so scientists could use this medium to get the information straight to the public.

Now it's to the point where those news release reprint sites have marketing people everywhere voting up their press release content on news sites, so journalists, who we hope have at least done some fact checking, are more trustworthy than the stuff we might get that looks like it is 'from the source.'

Science in general needs to do a better job of presenting the concept of the size of the universe. When on vacation I recently told a waitress that although I wrote on astronomy, I avoided topics inside the solar system. I therefore did not know that much about it. She asked in confusion, “What else is there?” Although I responded with galaxies, nebulae, and supernova, the answer was less than satisfying to her. After thinking for a couple of days, I concluded that her question was reasonable for a person not educated in astronomy.

Since that day, I compared the visible universe to a sphere the diameter of the contiguous United States. On that scale, our solar system would be almost as large as the smallest cell in the human body. Presentation of astronomy needs to convey this sense of size.