Sometimes I feel discouraged when I witness the gulf between science and the general public. Sure, millions of people are avid consumers of science books, podcasts, TV shows, and videos, and that is wonderful. When I was growing up in the 1970s, it was much harder to access science. There were magazines like Scientific American and Popular Mechanics. There was the occasional documentary series — think Jacob Bronowski’s The Ascent of Man and Carl Sagan’s Cosmos. But the general public certainly has more accessibility to scientific content now.
Despite this, little has changed. The people most interested in science are those who understand its relevance to their lives and who are legitimately curious about the workings of Nature. But the vast majority remains uninterested. Most people are dismissive of what science does and how scientists work.
To these outsiders, science is a black box. They see scientists as weird, cold rationalists, devoid of any hint of spirituality — as people who care only about their own research and their grants.
Sure, some admire what scientists produce, from the cures they find for diseases to the rovers they send to Mars. Science does have a massive “wow” factor. But these remarkable feats of human creativity and skill are seen from a distance that no one has felt compelled to shorten.
A moment of understanding
I will give an example of how I came to realize this problem in my own life. About twenty years ago, I did a live interview for a radio station in Brasília, the capital of Brazil. The interview took place during rush hour at the city’s busy bus terminal. The depot was crowded with workers from rural areas who came to the city to work all sorts of jobs, from cleaning the streets to working in factories and private homes.
This interview made me rethink my understanding of how to bring science to the largest number of people. It impacted me for the rest of my life. It made me realize that making science relevant to a wider audience requires an emotional, not just a rational, appeal.
When science speaks to people’s hearts, it makes a much deeper impact than any list of discoveries and clever accomplishments. The “wow” factor from achievements is ephemeral. The one that sticks is the one that shakes you inside.
The interviewer asked me questions about science’s take on the apocalypse. It was inspired by a book I had just published, The Prophet and the Astronomer: Apocalyptic Science and the End of the World. The book focuses on cataclysmic celestial events and how they have inspired religious narratives as well as scientific research. By cataclysmic, I mean asteroid or comet collisions, like the one that accelerated the extinction of dinosaurs; stars exploding and collapsing into neutron stars and black holes; or the fate of the Universe as a whole, either expanding forever, or shrinking back into a singularity.
A practice ancient and modern
I started the book arguing that images of celestial chaos stand out in many religious texts. Witness the many instances that stars, or fire and brimstone, fall from the sky in the Bible. Sodom and Gomorrah in the Old Testament, and the Apocalypse of John in the New, are but a couple examples. Remember also how the Celts believed that the skies would fall on their heads to mark the end of a time cycle. Signs of celestial chaos were obviously extremely scary, and they were frequently interpreted as messages of impending doom. In the late 17th century, scientists such as Edmond Halley and Isaac Newton used their science to try to make sense of such events.