Science! buuuu...

Are there any commonalities between closet monster and science?

Scary movies always consider people's common fears. Such as dark, an abandoned house, someone walking on your yard in the middle of the night, a man sleeping under your bed while you are actually sleeping on it, et cetera. After spending considerable amount of time watching science fiction movies, I wondered the motive behind blending science with apprehension. Why was science being presented as something to be concerned of? Then it hit me, it is not only the movies... There are plenty of material around us to make science sound freaky. I understand that a man with a hatched in the middle of the highway might be scary, but why people are freaked out when they hear the word ge-ne-tic-mo-di-fi-ca-ti-on? Media could have been a good starting point to analyze things, but media feeds itself from public. Yet, I think more proper question is:

Why public is scared of science?

Because scientists do not communicate with non-scientists well enough . I think there is a serious problem in the way science is delivered to general public. Even worse, fear seeds are planted into general publics minds through education, in very early ages. Remember your school days; after a long day in the classroom how many of you did not have a take home message as "chemistry is boring, how am I gonna understand this?" and even worse "how this information will help me in real life, anyways?"

Ouch!

Lack of entertainment and a failure to connect real life issues to science is what we suffer in the classroom. No association with real life makes science as an unnecessary and unnecessarily difficult subject. What a pity! Science is not a formation of equations to memorize nor nerd occupation. It is a way of thinking, seeing and understanding life. As Richard Feynman puts, "You can know the name of a bird in all the languages of the world, but when you’re finished, you’ll know absolutely nothing whatever about the bird… So let’s look at the bird and see what it’s doing — that’s what counts. I learned very early the difference between knowing the name of something and knowing something."

Exactly! "Learning the difference between knowing the name of something and knowing something." This is a glimpse of scientific thinking. Even only having this ability is a beneficial skill for life. Indeed science is for life. Above all, it is for humanity.

Nevertheless, world of science accuses the ignorance of general public -- what a dilemma. Accusation is mostly stated as, "general public suffers lack of knowledge and does not really try getting it from a proper resource". (I refer to this behavior as "chronical believe everything you see on TV syndrome" which thousands suffer.)

However I think it is scientists responsibility to go out there and reach those people. Yet, I find it ironic that scientists underestimate general public' s opinion, even joke about it. Ipso facto wrong. As a scientist, it is our role to undo Fox Channel's appearance as number one science information resource for many others. It is scientist's job to figure ways to explain things clearly and help public overcome their fear.

Science is for life, and you have to explain yourself accurately to the one's who has it.


~betül

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Here are some bits from my "there is still a hope" list:

Council for Science and Technology of UK
http://www.cst.gov.uk/cst/about/history.shtml

How stuff works? Science channel
(plain and uncomplicated answers to complicated stuff - just what we need!)
http://science.howstuffworks.com/

Problem-based learning (PBL)
(My favorite - I am gonna put more stuff about this cool teaching method)
http://www.cse.emory.edu/sciencenet/coll_curr/pbl_links.html

and some of "consequences of bad communication" links:

http://sciencelies.com/
(clearly breaks my heart, though he has some points)

http://www.churchofbeliefscience.org/
I will get to science and religion connection too. Well.. when I find one.

http://www.imdb.com
For all the scary science movies available. (there are so many of them to post one by one!)


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