Science in the media: 21 - 27 August 2010
DOI: 10.1063/PT.4.0996
In this week’s review of how science is covered and discussed in the media, Steven T. Corneliussen looks at the exaggerated danger of solar storms, the privatization of knowledge, circumventing peer review with online tools, and denying climate change.
Neil deGrasse Tyson versus solar hype
In a letter to the New York Times, the astrophysicist and Hayden Planetarium director Neil deGrasse Tyson asks, “Who could argue with Lawrence E. Joseph’s efforts in “The Sun Also Surprises ” (Op-Ed, Aug. 16) to encourage disaster readiness in response to potential hazards from the sun’s 11-year solar cycle of storms?”
I know I hadn’t argued. In fact, I had come close to reporting that op-ed in this venue. I guess that in my trust for the editors’ science-material vetting, it hadn’t registered with me that Joseph was identified not as a solar physicist or astrophysicist, but as the author of Aftermath: A Guide to Preparing for and Surviving Apocalypse 2012—a somewhat hyped title, now that scientist Tyson calls it all into question. Joseph’s warning had seemed plausible that without “aggressive preparation” for the consequences of big solar storms—for example, consequences for “some 5,000 vulnerable transformers in North America"—the country will “run the risk of a disaster magnitudes greater than Hurricane Katrina.”
But in my experience, Tyson’s manner as a public science leader—as a sort of latter-day Carl Sagan—usually comes across as jovial, witty, light and friendly. Yet consider not just the substance but the tone of the rest of Tyson’s letter in response to Joseph’s op-ed alarm:
The cosmos is indeed armed with multiple ways to kill us. But unlike Mr. Joseph’s claim, none of them are scheduled for 2012. Fear of 2012 is a worldwide delusion spread by the scientifically illiterate on the scientifically underinformed, fueled by a million Web pages that predict cosmic disasters on an epic scale.
For the record, the next solar maximum will not happen before mid-2013, but, more important, it’s expected to be among the weakest peaks on record. So if the world ends in 2012, it will not be the fault of the universe.
Serious stuff, and&mdash as emphasized by Tyson’s unusually vivid bluntness—maybe a reminder that scientists often have good reason to complain about journalists’ wrong choices concerning science facts.
Against knowledge privatization
As a teaser blurb for this book review by Robert Darnton, Harvard’s Carl H. Pforzheimer University Professor and director of the Harvard University Library, the New York Times says that the book’s author “draws on the founding fathers for arguments against the privatization of knowledge.” Professor Darnton himself invokes fundamental American values in a review that amounts to a historical essay on the balance between intellectual property rights and the rights of the commons -- an essay of possible relevance, for example, to anyone tracking the overall dynamics of the open-access movement in scientific publishing.
Lewis Hyde’s Common as Air: Revolution, Art, and Ownership “an eloquent and erudite plea for protecting our cultural patrimony from appropriation by commercial interests.” He writes that Hyde “invokes the founders in order to warn us against a new enclosure movement, one that would fence off large sectors of the public domain—in science, the arts, literature, and the entire world of knowledge—in order to exploit monopolies.”
Darnton quotes Thomas Jefferson: “The field of knowledge is the common property of mankind.” And Benjamin Franklin: “That as we enjoy great advantages from the inventions of others, we should be glad of an opportunity to serve others by any invention of ours, and this we should do freely and generously.” Darnton also cites the copyrights and patents passage in the Constitution. Then he adds, “But the devil can quote Jefferson, and lawyers can construe the Constitution in ways that restrict knowledge rather than promote it.” This leads to a passage that merits repeating verbatim:
[Hyde] shows that Franklin did not tame lightning in Promethean fashion, all alone, by directing his solitary genius at the heavens. Franklin actually collaborated with three other experimenters in a common laboratory set up in the Pennsylvania State House. He also applied information derived from earlier theorists and experimenters, including William Harvey, Isaac Newton, the inventors of the Leyden jar, and many wits who had noticed the similarity between electric sparks and lightning.
Franklin’s famous kite experiment did indeed express original insight about the nature of electricity as a single “fluid” with positive and negative charges; but when Franklin reported it in The Pennsylvania Gazette, he did not mention that he was the experimenter and did not attach his name to the article. When publishing instructions on how to make a lightning rod in Poor Richard’s Almanac, he also refrained from noting that he was the inventor. And he never sought a patent for it, because he had drawn on a common stock of knowledge and felt committed to “produce something for the common benefit.”
The same attitude lay behind Jefferson’s description of knowledge as “common property.” It pervaded the entire Enlightenment, when men discussed experiments and ideas in correspondence networks and a chain of academies that extended from St. Petersburg to Philadelphia. Above all, they communicated their thoughts through print. Letters, learned societies and the printed word came together in the creation of a Republic of Letters, an egalitarian world of knowledge open to everyone -- at least in principle, although in practice it was restricted to a literate elite.
The ideal of a Republic of Letters may sound archaic, but it is still alive. Hyde also evokes it with another name, the “cultural commons,” which summons up associations with current projects for sharing knowledge like Creative Commons, the Public Library of Science, Wikipedia and the Internet Archive. He contrasts it with efforts to close off sectors of knowledge so as to exploit them for private profit, as in the case of companies that attempt to use the understanding of the human genome in order to gain control of DNA segments related to diabetes and breast cancer.
In a United States where copyright now lasts for the life of the author plus 70 years, Darnton asks, “What can be done to protect the cultural commons from further enclosure?” In answering, he cites Hyde’s praise for “projects like General Public Licenses, which channel intellectual property into the public domain, and the Distributed Annotation System, which prevents the monopolization of genomic knowledge.” Darnton concludes that if “we reassessed our history ... we would reassert our citizenship in a Republic of Letters that was crucial to the creation of the American Republic -- and that is more important than ever in the age of the Internet.”
Note: You can hear Lewis Hyde online in the NPR Marketplace segment “Copyright: How should ownership be structured? ”, which NPR blurbs this way: “Bill Radke talks to Lewis Hyde, author of Common as Air. Hyde argues that current copyright laws are hindering people’s ability to live and act publicly.”
