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Contrary to Belief (page 13)
Wallace Tucker
First Paragraph
One of the primary goals of communicating science to the public is to capture the excitement of scientific discoveries while trying to follow the advice of Joseph Pulitzer. Writers and speakers often fall short of this goal and say too much, use too much jargon, or use picturesque language carelessly, as in saying that a neutron star is “incredibly dense”, when the data have shown that the density is credible.
Comments about this article
Gary D. Timothy
23 Feb 2009, 03:07
Excellent points! I can only hope that more scientists would adhere to
these methods of communication. Especially scientist speaking on evolution,
for example. (this article applies to all the sciences, not just
astronomy.) For a very long time I have railed against sloppy explanations
like "these birds developed bigger, stronger beaks in order to crack harder
nuts." Of course this is not what happened in evolution. Instead, some
birds had a genetic variation that resulted in larger, stronger beaks which
enabled them to crack the harder nuts available to them. Thus they were
better suited to the available food supply of harder nuts and so better
equiped to survive and pass along the bigger0stronger beak gene to their
offspring.
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