Update: for some reason, WordPress reverted to a first draft of this article – the corrected version (hopefully I caught all of the typos and anti-grammaticalizations) is now posted.

Planet hunter and solar system troublemaker Mike Brown at Caltech is the discoverer of the “dwarf planets” in the outer solar system, which resulted in astronomers accusing Pluto of masquerading as a planet.  He and his observing team made headlines all over our own little world when his team discovered Eris in 2003, (pronounced EER-is) which ended up being larger than Pluto.  Add to the list Dr. Brown’s other discovered Plutonian cousins Orcus, Sedna, Quaoar, and the recently renamed Makemake (pronounced MAH-ke MAH-ke), and you’d think he was gunning for poor little Pluto, spotting object after object that challenges Pluto’s status as the P in Uncle Ned’s Pants

I knew Texas was its own planet, but.. ?

Having sparked the exploding controversy of Pluto’s planetary predicament, Mike Brown knows first hand how the media picks up science stories and spreads them throughout the civilized world.  His blog post from a few weeks ago is a great walkthrough of the process that a scientific paper goes through in its journey from journal article to headline.

As Dr. Brown notes, there are really just two major gatekeepers to this world of scientific celebrity – the journals Science and Nature.  Even though its becoming crucial to our very survival on the planet given the state of global warming, science is getting squeezed out our daily newspapers and broadcast news these days, as editors are desperately trying to find more space for Britney Spears and Lindsey Lohan’s trip to the circle K in search of Bubbalicious.  So many media outlets and journalists have limited time and budgets in which to write science stories these days, and default to pick up almost all of their stories from these two journals.  Sure, they may read the occasional press release, but they almost completely ignore the other scientific journals that are chock full of great stories to be told.  Just scan your mind for how many times you’ve heard or read the phrase “as will appear in the journal Nature” or “as reported in the journal Science” as opposed to “as published this month in the Astrophysical Journal” or “as will appear in this month’s volume of Applied Clay Science.”

The problem is, as Dr. Brown puts it, Science and Nature have… well, a “reputation” with some scientists.

Interestingly, though, along with publishing important ground-breaking papers appears to come the requirement that a larger than usual fraction of the conclusions published in these journals turn out to be incorrect. This leads to the semi-joking line that you often hear amongst astronomers: “Just because it is published in Nature doesn’t necessarily mean that it is wrong.” But it also leads to the real ambivalence that some feel for results published in those journals. People sometimes consider them to be flash and hype with no real substance and turn their noses up at the papers published inside.

And he sums it up in a quote that he attributes to oceanographer Jess Adkins:

Nature and Science are the People Magazine of science. And like People, no one wants to admit to reading it, but everyone wants to be in it.

Does that mean I’m going to read one day that the pressure of the media spotlight has been too much on the relationship of Pluto and Charon, and that Charon has taken the kids, and is staying over at her “friend” Neptune’s?

The reliance on Science and Nature as the source for a huge amount of our science news narrows the public’s view of what’s out there, just like having only two TV stations would hugely bias the news that you received.  (Hey, that’s IS essentially what we have today!)  And apparently in that rush for publicity, the journal has had some less than solid science thrown at them. (I’m curious at the exact mechanics of how the peer review process is failing in this regard for these two journals).

Everyone wants to see better science coverage in our local and national media.  The evaporation of science from the American public landscape is a huge reason for the growing scientific illiteracy in this country.  If science disappears from our public discourse, then it ceases to have relevance in many peoples lives.  If it’s out of sight, it’s out of mind.  And in today’s world, we cannot afford to be out of touch with what’s going on in the world of natural discovery.  Science has defined our success as a species, and we give it the cold shoulder at our own peril.

Plus, people LOVE to learn about science.  In my career as an astronomy educator, writer and planetarian, I’ve experienced nothing but true excitement from folks when something really cool and amazing is realized by someone for the first time.  You can see it in their eyes, and it changes them in ways big and small.  More often than not, those cool and amazing things are current astronomical or scientific discoveries straight out of the headlines.  People WANT to be engaged – they are hungry for science to be a part of their lives. I encourage science journalists (and there are many examples of good science journalism out there) to go that extra mile – fan out to the rest of the scientific world for your headlines – there are fantastic, engaging (dare I say prize winning) topics out there waiting to be mined.

And let’s all write our local papers and TV news stations – tell them we want to see more science in black and white or flashing across the tubes.  Do it – for the sake of the Plutonian children!

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 26th, 2008 at 4:40 pm and is filed under astronomy, science. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.