The Daily Howler - 09/19/05

CONSTANT AS THE SPEED OF LIGHT! The parson Meacham just couldn’t wait to repeat a simple story: // link // print // previous // next //

MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 19, 2005

JESS B. SEMPLE: Three cheers for Lisa Randall, Harvard physics professor! In Sunday’s Times, she wrote a lengthy piece about distorted public discussions of science. Deep in her piece, she hit on a problem—people love simple stories, she said, and the press corps loves to supply them:

RANDALL (9/18/05): Sometimes, as with global warming, the [seriousness of the scientific community’s] claims have been underplayed. But often it's the opposite: a cancer development presented as a definite advance can seem far more exciting and might raise the status of the researcher far more than a result presented solely as a partial understanding of a microscopic mechanism whose connection to the disease is uncertain. Scientists and the public are both at fault. No matter how many times these ''breakthroughs'' prove misleading, they will be reported this way as long as that's what people want to hear.

A better understanding of the mathematical significance of results and less insistence on a simple story would help to clarify many scientific discussions.

Our analysts cheered as Randall told a verboten tale—we humans just luvv “simple stories.”