What to expect at the March for Science

Editor’s note, 25 April: You can read Physics Today‘s roundup of the March for Science here .

Scientists and science enthusiasts across the globe will mobilize on 22 April to participate in the March for Science. The primary event , to be held in Washington, DC, will feature a rally, four hours of speakers, and a march from the Washington Monument toward the US Capitol. More than 500 satellite marches will take place throughout the US and on six continents.

Organizers brand the march a “celebration of science” that calls for “political leaders and policy makers to enact evidence based policies in the public interest.” Backers insist that the message is nonpartisan, even as they acknowledge that the event was catalyzed by President Trump’s election and wouldn’t have occurred without it. “If the administration said, ‘We value science and we love it and we don’t want to jeopardize the next generation of scientists,’ there would be no march,” former National Institutes of Health director Elias Zerhouni told reporters in a conference call.

Nonetheless, he asserted that “this is not a partisan issue. It’s not one administration versus another. It’s the age-old debate of rational approach to the universe versus irrational approaches to the universe.” Scientists need to counter what Zerhouni says is a worldwide “anti-science, anti-elite, anti-technology movement.”

More than 100 scientific organizations have signed on as partners for the march, including the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), the Union of Concerned Scientists, and the Planetary Society. The American Institute of Physics (which publishes Physics Today) chose not to take a position on the march, although many of its member societies, including the American Astronomical Society and the American Physical Society, have endorsed it. Some scientists have expressed concerns about injecting politics into science, while others have criticized the march organizers’ inconsistent messaging on diversity and inclusion in the scientific community.

Rush Holt , chief executive officer of AAAS, says that although the idea for the march surfaced in January, “it was built on a growing concern that reached the level of anxiety about conditions under which science can thrive, conditions that have been challenged and threatened in a lot of ways for a number of years.” Among the new threats, he cites restrictions on travel from Muslim-majority nations, gag orders imposed on some government scientists, and the equating of ideology and opinions with fact-based evidence.

“My vision of the march is not something that is partisan or political, but a reaffirmation of the fact that science is important and should be taken into consideration and supported,” says Sean Carroll , a Caltech theoretical physicist who will be speaking at the Los Angeles event . He says he may “draw some connections between science and democracy, how they came out of the same environment and some of the same values.”

Rutgers University theoretical physicist Matthew Buckley , co-organizer of the rally to be held in Trenton, New Jersey, says although his fields of high-energy physics and astronomy don’t seem particularly threatened, the reported silencing of some government scientists working on environmental topics should disturb all scientists. “Climate change is why many people are showing up,” he says. “The fact that EPA scientists were being given gag orders, that very important agencies are being defunded, and that scientists are losing their ability to do research is really concerning.”

Carroll shrugs off the worry that scientists’ participation in marches could be misinterpreted as overtly partisan. “Having been on the internet a long time, I know that everything will always be interpreted the wrong way. But it’s a good thing, and we can’t help people who are going to interpret it badly.”

Physics Today editors will be at the march in Washington and will produce a full report next week. Check out the Physics Today Facebook page for updates during the march.