About a year ago I was walking with with a dear friend in Manhattan completely engaged in idea building together. Fore me intensely delightful activities like this make the leap to Csikszentmihályian flow and I tend not to notice the time and space I'm embedded in as carefully as I should... Fortunately she is far more perceptive of these things and carefully guided me through the human and vehicular traffic without indicent. I've been told I can be engaging and perhaps even interesting during times like this if the subject is something we both love. But there is this problem - I'm not very good in other communication modalities.
Recently I've been asked to give several talks to general audiences. I don't mind public speaking, but I also tend not be be very good at it (my TEDx talk is a bit painful to watch - fortunately food was not allowed in the auditorium). I'm ok if there is a subject of mutual interest and have an idea of the appropriate level. And feedback from the audience is extremely important - especially visual feedback. But if the feedback goes away I'm toast and the performance - and value of the communication - leaves something to be desired.
Writing has similar issues. One of the reasons why these posts and my personal emails are full of typos and spelling errors is in an attempt to keep a conversational flavor I don't go back and edit. The temptation to wordsmith and tighten up on precision is too strong and the note begin to take on the smell of a textbook. A few years ago I rediscovered this tendency as I was toying with writing a different sort of energy book.1 I found myself tripping badly in my attempts to describ the underlying concepts. I couldn't get a handle on who would understand this without explanation and who would need four other concepts under their belt before the concept could be explained clearly. Who would want explanations and who would find them boring. None of the compromises seemed to work well as story telling. Don't let anyone tell you otherwise - finding the right level and words for this sort of thing is not easy work.
The strange thing is I can usually explain this type of physics to most sharp people even if they have very non-technical backgrounds, but often only if we are talking to each other face to face. The telephone removes too much of the presence required for the explanations to work well and face to face is better than a video link. Many people are much better than me. Feynman was an expert explainer, but most of his filmed pieces were responses to questions posed by an interviewer - one on one was his natural high information bandwidth channel. He was also a brilliant lecturer, but the nature of his communications changed to something a bit different and focused on a less general audience. Carl Sagan was and Neil deGrasse Tyson, and E.O. Wilson are fantastic public communicators - a very rare quality among scientists. These skills require real work to perfect. Neil told me he will spend dozens of hours preparing for a five or seven minute interview on the Colbert Report. It is not natural or easy, but he is so good it looks that way.
The issues I have with different communication modalities and the need for direct feedback from what are sometimes called "out of band" channels2 and undoubtedly exist in people from many other fields, but I think they are especially important for science as only a small portion of the public have a notion about how science works and what reported results mean. At the same time science policy is of enormous importance - witness issues like global warming, nuclear proliferation, healthcare, nutrition, and a thousand other things. The tobacco industry and a few others on the political left and right discovered that the nature of scientific communication makes it possible to easily manipulate public opinion and leave most scientists almost without defense.3 My book project was a reaction to this. I naïvely thought that better education would make a big difference, but now I'm not certain this is the best way to spend my time.
None of this will settle itself soon. I've been having some second thoughts on the book and alternate ways to get some of the more important bits across. If I think it could make a modest different I will go ahead and find the time somewhere.
In the meantime I look forward to those wonderful times when I can engage with some of you one on one in playful ideas - but, and this is an important safety tip, be warned if we are walking that you shouldn't take traffic safety cues from me:-)
I leave you with a delightful layman's discussion of the Higgs boson that nicely skates through the jargon. When I'm one on one with a smart non-physicist this is pretty much how I would approach it, but everything tends to fall apart when I shift communication modalities and lose my way.4 Synchronous out-of-band communication channels are the headlights that cut through the darkness for me.
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1 In talking to industry groups about energy and global warming I found most people lacked a basic understanding of the physics to make informed decisions. The notion of the book was to concentrate on removing much of the jargon and getting the physics of energy and power on the human scale. The goal was not to have the reader understand the basic physics or how to solve equations, but rather a good qualitative sense of what is going on. How do you ask questions like a physicist before moving to the calculations?...
2 An enormous amount of information is subtly communicated through prosody, gestures, facial expressions, body positioning and more. Voice channels can pick up some of this, video a bit more - but face to face is almost always best. Asynchronous and one-way discussions can miss a lot and a good deal of confusion is possible with neither party recognizing that at the time.
3 A few great reference books:
Don't be Such a Scientist by Randy Olson ... I don't agree with everything he says, but his book pointed out major problems I was unaware of and has allowed me to repair a few (unfortunately not all) of them.
Merchants of Doubt by Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway A well researched and incredibly important book to anyone who worries about science policy and the issues of science and the public.
4 When I try to explain the Higgs field I use an analogy of a "fame" field and actors walking through a room of people vs the rest of us to explain the concept of a coupling constant.
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