Re:Carlo Rovelli on the ‘greatest remaining mystery’: The na...
by smallnamespace on Saturday June 23, 2018 @01:49AM
(#17379748)
I think that science is grossly lacking in good spokespeople who are respected in the field, and it should be rewarded more within the academy, not less.
When a large fraction of the population has frankly anti-scientific beliefs and when funding for continued scientific endeavor depends on votes, science needs to continually justify and promote itself in the public eye.
Are there dangers to that? Yes. But it's worse than holing up in the ivory tower to only quietly do research.
Re:Carlo Rovelli on the ‘greatest remaining mystery’: The na...
by yashevde on Saturday June 23, 2018 @04:15PM
(#17383204)
I agree, but it's unlikely that they will get respect and reward within the academy. They are just as susceptible to feelings of envy as people outside the academy.
You can see this manifest itself in the academy's treatment of Carl Sagan, and in the many ramblings of Murray Gell-Mann about Richard Feynman. Sure, their expositions of the science may not have been rigorous and they weren't perfect human beings, but maybe that's what it takes to popularize science and draw people in.
I often see the role of science popularization as that of turned the science illiterate to literate, not the uneducated to the educated.
Re:Carlo Rovelli on the ‘greatest remaining mystery’: The na...
by HopDavid on Saturday June 23, 2018 @07:54PM
(#17384131)
I would call Tyson a good spokesman for science if he had a high regard for rigor and accuracy. But he does not.
http://hopsblog-hop.blogspot.com/2016/01/fact-checking-neil-...
If you mean by "real scientist" that they are doing real work that advances the field, some of them are and, yes, some of them aren't. I don't mean that as a criticism, because there is real value in being a PR person for science. (Some danger if they do it poorly, but a lot of value, too.) Hawking, for instance, was certainly a real scientist by any measure, right up until his unfortunate passing, but also did good PR and wrote some very popular books. And not to pick on him, but according to his CV [1], Neil deGrasse Tyson hasn't published a paper in a decade, and if you skip three related papers in 2007-2008, hadn't published prior to that since 1998. Doesn't mean he's not doing useful stuff, or that he wasn't at least a scientist in the past, but he's certainly not on the same sort of track as Hawking was.