Which scientists can winningly explain a flame, time, sleep, color, or sound to 11-year-olds?
DOI: 10.1063/PT.5.8150
Early this month, Stony Brook University’s Alan Alda Center for Communicating Science announced the fifth in an annual series of Flame Challenge contest questions—"What is sound?"—for any scientist who cares to submit a written or filmed answer. On 7 November, a Wall Street Journal headline summarized : “Clear science education, as judged by 11-year-olds.” A few other media organizations have joined in the coverage , which in past years has grown to be extensive.
The WSJ piece opens by reporting that the contests have involved thousands of judges: fifth- and sixth-graders from more than 30 states and from 18 other countries. The point is “to see how well the scientists can use their explanations to engage and inspire the students.” The 17 November WSJ carried a letter to the editor from past winner (“What is color?”) Melanie Golob extolling the Flame Challenge.
Actor and contest originator Alan Alda ‘s science advocacy, a sort of parallel career, goes back a long way. It often centers on physics, as can be seen in the challenge questions. When Alda portrayed Nobel laureate Richard Feynman in the Broadway play QED, a New York Times reviewer in 2001 observed that “the role of a maverick eccentric physicist would appear to be custom made for Mr. Alda, best known as the maverick eccentric surgeon in the television sitcom ‘M*A*S*H.’” Alda wrote the drama Radiance: The Passion of Marie Curie . At the World Science Festival next March in Brisbane, Australia—to be held in addition to the usual annual festival in New York—Alda will present Dear Albert , which he wrote to delve “into Albert Einstein’s personal correspondence, tracing an intimate and unfamiliar line across his life and work.” Afterwards he’ll be joined on stage by physicist Brian Greene, seen most recently in a brief Einstein discussion on Stephen Colbert’s late-night TV talk show (where Greene enthusiastically performed two illustrative physics demonstrations). Alda serves as an adviser and board member for the annual festival, founded by Greene and journalist Tracy Day .
In a sense, Alda’s science interest began when, as a kid, he asked a teacher what a flame actually is. He never forgot the answer: “Oxidation.” Memory of that deflatingly clinical, curiosity-undermining response led to the name of, and the first (2012) question in, the Flame Challenge.
Alda introduced the contest in a 2012 Science magazine commentary . One passage in particular showed why the Flame Challenge is about more than just having fun with kids:
Scientists have recognized for some time that there is a harmful gap in understanding between their work and much of the rest of the world—one that can hold back scientific progress. Scientists urgently need to be able to speak with clarity to funders, policy-makers, students, the general public, and even other scientists. (Not to mention the poignant wish of some young researchers to be able to explain their work to their grandmothers.) I first got insight into this problem while interviewing hundreds of scientists on the television program Scientific American Frontiers [where] rather than doing conventional interviews, I had conversations with the scientists in which I kept barraging them with questions until I finally understood their answers. As a result, their work became more accessible to the audience (and to me) than if I had stuck to a standard interview format. Having to talk with someone who was truly trying to understand caused an actual human interaction to take place in these interviews. There was more warmth, and the real person behind the scientist in the white lab coat could emerge. Suddenly, both young people and adults could see that scientists were like them, with a natural way of speaking and even a sense of humor.
Clarity for funders and policymakers? That’s not about kids. In October, the Boston Globe reported on 32 Boston University scientists’ participation in an “improvisational theater game” conducted by the Alda Center for Communicating Science—a game “designed to train them to pay close attention so they could better connect with audiences.” Here’s a noteworthy passage:
“We are in fiscally restrained times, and it’s clear that not all politicians understand the importance of supporting research,” said Gloria Waters, BU’s vice president and associate provost for research, who convened the professors in September for the day-long bootcamp led by a team of actors and journalists.
“Your goal isn’t to sound smart or entitled,” one instructor told the group, who are more accustomed to lecturing students or sharing the minutiae of their research with colleagues than having to “dumb down” their material for the average Joe. “Don’t get bogged down in the details.”
Some of the scientists, trained skeptics, questioned the need to devote a large chunk of their work day to improv exercises. They have experiments to monitor, research grants to write. What insights could they possibly glean from actors?
“You can’t do good science without good communication,” Alda said. “You need to raise funds. The public has to back it. And you have to respect the fact that policy makers have not spent their lives studying science. They don’t talk your lingo.”
Alda doesn’t appear to embrace the science-communication concept engagement model, an approach that contrasts with the deficit model. Should scientists lecture captive lay audiences unidirectionally to reduce the public’s deficit of science awareness and knowledge? Or should they instead seek bidirectionally to reduce that deficit by actually engaging nonscientists? When 11-year-olds get to control the conversation, scientists must work hard not merely to lecture, but to engage.
Writer Kellie M. Walsh recognizes and values the contrast. At the New York Academy of Sciences Magazine, her 6 October interview article “Discovering a common language with Alan Alda” examines Alda’s vision for connecting science and society.
The American Chemical Society and the American Association for the Advancement of Science sponsor the Flame Challenge. Scientists thinking of entering—as more than 400 have done in each of the contest’s past years—can consult the entry form for details about submitting fewer than 300 words of text or less than 5 minutes of video before 20 January 2016. The Flame Challenge offers a $1000 cash prize for winners—individuals, or teams of up to four—in each category. The winners will be brought to New York City, where they will meet Alda and be honored at the World Science Festival that begins in late May.
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Steven T. Corneliussen, a media analyst for the American Institute of Physics, monitors three national newspapers, the weeklies Nature and Science, and occasionally other publications. He has published op-eds in the Washington Post and other newspapers, has written for NASA’s history program, and is a science writer at a particle-accelerator laboratory.