Science Journalism: The Not so Good, The Worse, and The Downright Awful

Almost without question, the state of science journalism is shit. This includes articles in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and most of the popular press you've ever read. (I don't think that I'm alone in this, nor do I think that this phenomenon is confined to physics. I can imagine economists and psychologists and home makers all sitting in their respective social circles, talking about how journalists simply don't get it.) It's SO bad that I can't even remember the last time I read something worth reading from some pop science publication.

I want to pause, from this impending tirade, to exempt from all of the following maelstrom of hate speech some truly shimmering exceptions: in particular, I would actually pay for a subscription to Scientific American, and a few others. Of course, I will also exempt most books written by actual scientists, like The Elegant Universe and The Road to Reality.

Now, back to the show.

It is simply ridiculous to imagine that some national publication, like New Scientist, or Discover Magazine, couldn't hire an actual scientist to do the writing. I mean, they probably pay some person with a B.A. degree in journalism and a passing interest in science to write popular, and interesting stories designed to sell subscriptions. But honestly---most people don't know much about physics, and these publications are doing nothing to help the matter.

There are too many categories of incompetence, and here I will list three, with examples. In general, articles about physics are either deliberately misleading, ridiculously confusing, or downright wrong.

Deliberately Misleading

While I can cut and paste many links here, I'll choose one from this week:

e=mc2: 103 years later, Einstein's proven right

First of all, the science.

All matter is made of protons, neutrons, and electrons. The protons and neutrons are made of quarks, and the quarks interact with each other by exchanging gluons, just like electrons interact with each other by exchanging photons. The force that binds the quarks together is called the strong nuclear force. There is a strange property of this force that the strength of the force increases at larger distances. You're familiar with the way magnets work, for example: the closer you put them together, the stronger they attract or repulse. The attraction between two quarks due to the strong nuclear force, on the other hand, becomes stronger as you pull the two quarks apart.

One of the consequences of this is that the protons and neutrons (which are made of quarks), weigh much more than they should. Each quark weighs about 5 MeV, but protons and neutrons (which are made of only three quarks) weigh closer to 1000 MeV. The reason is due to the properties of the strong nuclear force. Remember, Einstein says E = mc^2, so the energy exerted in separating the three quarks which make the proton or neutron manifests itself as mass (m = E/c^2). And, as you can see, this is where MOST of the mass of the neutron and proton come from. What is lacking, however, is an accurate way to calculate the mass of the proton. This is a very important piece of science, because having such a calculation would allow us to really understand the dynamics of the strong force.

And this is what was recently done: a group of French, Germans (who LOVE to calculate), and Hungarians devised a way to actually do the calculation from first principles. This is impressive in and of itself, however, it aparently doesn't sell magazines.

Enter Yahoo! science writers. The title of the article implies that somehow some doubt about Einstein's Theory of Special Relativity, which was considered more or less proven by 1920. That aside, as I outlined for you above, anyone who's studied particle physics could have told you that most of the mass in the proton comes from the binding energy between the quarks.

Even if I ignore the shitty perspective on science, the article reads like something a kid in middle school wrote:

By showing how much energy would be released if a certain amount of mass were to be converted into energy, the equation has been used many times, most famously as the inspirational basis for building atomic weapons.

Wow...many times! Perhaps even MORE inexcusable is what the French National Center for Scientific Research had to say:

"Until now, this has been a hypothesis," France's National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) said proudly in a press release.

"It has now been corroborated for the first time."

So the article fails for many reasons:

1. The writer is a douchebag.
2. The writer totally missed what was really interesting about the physics that was going on.
3. Gratuitous use of E = mc^2.
   

Ridiculously Confusing

I had some trouble filling this section, so I will defer to two blogs which I read regularly: Clifford Johnson, a string theorist at USC, and Peter Woit, a mathematician at Columbia.

Recently, the History Channel aired a special on Parallel Universes which fits this bill pretty nicely. I didn't actually watch this episode (I don't watch much tv), but it has caused quite a stirring among physicists in general. Peter Woit writes (in a post entitled Shouldn't Something be Done?):

It seems to me that it would be a good idea for people in general, and the scientists involved in this in particular (Clifford Johnson, Max Tegmark, Michio Kaku, Joe Lykken and Alex Filippenko) to contact the History Channel with a polite request that this program not be rebroadcast, and that steps be taken to avoid creating more disasters of the same kind.

Clifford Johsnon, who was involved in the consulting for the project, was equally disheartened:

Got to first commercial break. Er… need more whiskey. There’s some good science embedded in there somewhere (e.g., Tegmark talking about inflation, and WMAP results and flatness and so forth (but the laser beams!?)), but the voice-over (among others) is taking serious liberties (like claiming right at the beginning of the show that scientists have evidence that there may be parallel universes…sigh. No, No, No, No. That was really not necessary.)…

So it seems that even with the help of people who are noted for their skills at explaining things to people, journalists are made of fail.

Downright Wrong

The last category of pop science trash comes from Bruno Maddox at Discover Magazine:

Three Words that could Overthrow Physics: "What is Magnetism?"

A brief history lesson. The pinnacle of classical physics is, without a doubt, the unification of electricity and magnetism by Maxwell in the mid 1800's. Not only did Maxwell show how two, seemingly distinct phenomena actually stemmed from the same force, he introduced a paradigm---namely unification---that drives theoretical physics even today.

However, Bruno Maddox would have you believe that we haven't learned anything in the past 140 years. The article is written in sort of a bombastic "look-at-all-the-words-I-learned-while-leafing-through-real-physics-books" style:

This information was not easy to come by. My copy of Electronics for Dummies now shares a shelf with Mathematics of Classical and Quantum Physics by Frederick Byron Jr. and Robert Fuller. Should a doctor at any point take a cross section of my brain, she will find patches of scarring and dead tissue, souvenirs of the time I pursued the mystery of magnetism across the 11-dimensional badlands of string theory.

What's worse, he actually researched this piece of shit:

Students of human pathos may one day cherish the 16-minute recording of me, with my 100 percent positive-feedback rating as an eBay purchaser, failing to make renowned physicist Steven Weinberg, who won a Nobel for unifying electromagnetism with the so-called weak force, admit that he can’t explain how a magnet holds a dry-cleaning ticket to the door of a refrigerator.

I can't imagine Weinberg putting up with this raving lunatic for very long---it makes me throw up a little in my mouth to think of this idiot sitting across from Weinberg in his office, trying to make Weinberg "admit that he can’t explain" how a magnet works.

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Physics is a trivial thing, in the grand scheme---but what about the things that journalists are writing about Iraq and the Presidential candidates? I can't trust these people to understand how a fucking magnet works, and now I have to vote based on what they're telling me? Just examining these issues has made me a bit uneasy...when confronted with two sources of information, what do you do? Can you tell when some journalist misunderstood the events that he witnessed, or when some copy editor just wants to sell more newspapers, or when something truly important happens? Can you trust journalists to be fair and impartial, or are there a bunch of ignorant dumbasses like Bruno Maddox running around, trying to convince experts that they're wrong?