A Physicist Offers His Prescription For Improved Science News Coverage

When the "fifth force" burst upon the scientific scene in January of 1986, its arrival was noted with great fanfare by the nation's news media. "Hints of Fifth Force in Universe Challenge Galileo's Findings," proclaimed the New York Times the day after the discovery was announced in the journal Physical Review Letters. (56:3, Jan. 6, 1986). But when the force was pronounced all but dead almost four years later at a December 1989 conference in Les Arcs, France, no reporter was present to note its lonely passing, and you are unlikely to find its obituary in your morning paper. The demise of the fifth force turned out to be as important an advance for physics as was its birth, yet the headlines have failed to materialize. Understandably, a scientific discovery that challenges conventional wisdom is more newsworthy than the finding that the establishment was right after all, and science reporting is generally not a high priority in the first place, compared to politics, crime, and sports. But it is a pity that science journalists and their editors don't follow up some of the stories they report, the way that the investigative reporter follows up a nascent scandal in the governor's office. This leaves the public with the impression that there are so many unresolved questions and unanswered challenges in physics that physicists don't really know much about the workings of the universe, despite their expensive machines and fancy theories. In reality, the physicist's basic picture of a world governed by quantum mechanics, relativity, four basic forces (gravity, electromagnetism, weak nuclear, and strong), and associated fundamental particles has been extraordinarily successful. Look, for example, at the experiments reported last fall by physicists at the particle accelerator at the European Center for Nuclear Research (CERN) near Geneva. They confirmed the idea, long favored by theorists, that the "quarks" that make up matter come in three families of two quarks each. By far the majority of advances in physics are of this "conventional" sort, and reporting of these achievements to the public should by all means continue and be improved. But if the unconventional discoveries are to be reported, they should also be followed up. After the reputed discovery of a fifth force by Ephraim Fischbach of Purdue University, more than 25 experiments were carried out in an attempt to confirm or refute the discovery. Some early experiments, such as measurements of gravity up an 1,800-foot tower in North Carolina, or down a 1 1/2-mile-deep borehole in the Greenland icecap, favored a fifth force. These were duly reported in daily papers. But more often than not, experiments tended to show no evidence for such a force. Even some of the early "positive" experiments were later found to be beset by subtle but understandable errors. Upon reanalysis, they also showed no fifth force. The consensus of participants at last December's meeting in France was that there is now no credible evidence for a fifth force of nature. Isn't this a backward step for physics? Not at all. The experiments carried out to search for a fifth force ended up yielding extremely precise knowledge about the nature of the force of gravity over distances between one foot and one mile, which is a region where our prior knowledge was woefully inadequate. The consequences of this new knowledge for fundamental physics and for such allied fields as geophysics have yet to be understood. That the results favored good old Galileo and Newton over Ephraim Fischbach is simply the way matters turned out. Just as the fifth force's coffin was being sealed, another controversial phenomenon was being born. This came in the form of a report by two Japanese researchers that spinning gyroscopes seemed to exhibit antigravity, or a reduction in their weight, when spun in one direction, but showed no such effect when spun in the other. This was reported in the Physical Review Letters on Dec. 18, 1989, and in the nation's newspapers the next day. Is history about to repeat itself? At last December's conference in France, a group from the University of Colorado reported that they had failed to find the effect in their apparatus. This challenge to conventional physics will probably suffer a speedier demise than the fifth force, but unless things change in the way science is reported, I won't bother to scan my local newspaper for the death notice. Clifford M. Will is professor of physics and member of the McDonnell Center for the Space Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis. He is also the author of Was Einstein Right? (Basic Books, 1986).

A Physicist Offers His Prescription For Improved Science News Coverage

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