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Scientific Writing and “Science Writing” (2015)
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- slowmovintarget 6y agoFunny to see this now. One of the things my wife and I have been doing to engage our brains during the pandemic is to brush up on our knowledge of hard science. Of particular fascination for both of us has been cosmology and the frontiers of physics. We knocked into Sean Carroll's video series on YouTube by first encountering one of his lectures at the Royal Institution [1],[2]. We've been working our way through his "Biggest Ideas in the Universe!" series where he talks through history of physics and cosmology through to modern practice. I've also been reading through one of his books (and have read Stephen Hawking, Kip Thorne, Roger Penrose, Brian Greene, Lee Smolin, and others) and all of this has gotten me to a point where I could listen to an actual presentation to physics students and faculty on quantum mechanics and understand what was being discussed, despite not being up to doing the math myself. Yet this expedition over the last few months has made me wonder how someone who only encounters science through the media's presentation of it as "truth" could even know where to rest their hands to grapple with these ideas. Perhaps I'm being fooled into thinking I have some grasp of the matters discussed. Though I certainly feel as though I have a much better idea of the limits of my understanding, maybe that's wrong. Yet, I wonder how much of what the author opines of here is the usual emergence of Sturgeon's Law. Maybe 90% of "science writing" is crap. Is there evidence of it getting worse? (It feels like it, because of social media and Tweet-based reporting with the pandemic, but that's subjective.) [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_Institution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_Institution [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5hVmeOCJjOU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5hVmeOCJjOU