How Can We Have Science Literacy Without Literate Scientists?

If we scientists have a God, he is Quantus, the champion of quantitative reasoning (who I imagine looks like Mercury, but with winged sneakers and a portable PC). Our numerical description of nature marks our intellectual style. But outside our temple, Quantus and his computer can't help much. In the wider world, as we teach, sell a research program, or explain medical risks to an anxious public, we must rely on the same insubstantial vehicles used by advertising copywriters and humanities professors: words. I like numbers as well as anyone but words have special meaning for me. My parents painfully learned English as adults and passed on to me their hard-won appreciation of their adopted tongue. Because I love the English language, I think about how it connects with science. How many of the words that we bandy about are understood by nonscientists? Can we count on scientific literacy? Part of the answer is to recognize that science literacy does not come by osmosis. It must be taught. The first crucial things we give students are our fundamental words and the concepts behind them. If the ideas behind the words are unclear, no amount of later problem solving will make a student conceptually literate. That student becomes the voter who, as Thomas Jefferson hoped, makes informed choices about society's issues. The noble goal of informed decision making, however, is hard to reach in science, whose deepest understanding needs both conceptual and mathematical literacy. If we must choose, it's more important to teach citizens the difference between fission and fusion than to teach them how to calculate the speed of a falling body. But then how do people gain quantitative understanding of complex events like global warming? In other areas, we might ask how citizens gain understanding of international trade or constitutional law. But in fact, we don't expect detailed knowledge. What we do expect is that trustworthy experts explain their opinions, and where they come from, to guide nonspecialists. In the same way, we must have reliable scientists who assess and clearly explain scientific matters to the public. Otherwise science will become remote from human needs, and unsupported by human funding agencies. That's why we scientists must become literate, articulate, and eloquent. I firmly believe that we do better science when we explain and illuminate the process. I know how my careful weighing of the words as I write a research paper helps me appreciate my results, sometimes changing my view of them; how explaining even the most fundamental concepts deepens my understanding; and how finding a way to make nonscientists comprehend my research increases my excitement because I share it with them. Any scientist can aim for eloquent and literate communication. Even in routine written and oral presentations, we can exercise the bedrock virtues of good organization and lucid exposition. And if we're willing to experiment, things can get really interesting. We can add a dash of imagery, for instance, with its immense power to convey ideas and fix them in our minds. (I will never forget my college chemistry teacher talking about the "bare, quivering nucleus" left behind when an atom is completely stripped of its electrons.) Or we can try new styles, such as writing a research paper in the first person, which is almost guaranteed to free and improve one's writing. Like all scientists, I need Quantus. When I picture him vaulting through the air in his Reeboks, ready to deliver answers with a quick strum on his PC, I'm seeing much of what science is all about. My plea is only to add to our pantheon. Along with the pragmatic and calculating Roman Quantus, if we look sometime to the Greek Calliope, muse of lyric poetry and eloquence, we will enrich science and how we do it. Sidney Perkowitz is Charles Howard Candler Professor of Physics at Emory University in Atlanta.

How Can We Have Science Literacy Without Literate Scientists?

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