The first level of communication is the routine communication with his teammates, people working on the same topic and who aim at solving the same scientific problems. It is a highly specialized discussion where use of jargon is recommended to keep a high level of accuracy and avoid misunderstandings. The communication is in this case a mixture of equation writing, drawing, exchange of code and rational discussion.
The second level of communication is the publication: it can be a report, an article, a digital notebook. The purpose here is to communicate in detail the method, the results, the analysis and the conclusions of the work so that your peers can try to reproduce, to falsify, to confirm or to improve your work. Therefore, it has to be clear, accurate and complete. This level is typically what is expected from a scientist.
The third level of communication is the oral presentation. The purpose here is to attract the attention of the scientific community on your work, either to get collaboration, help, contradiction, funding. An oral presentation is, by definition, limited in time and thus can focus only on a limited number of points. Therefore it cannot address technicalities. The communication has to highlight some key ideas, it has to activate some triggers in the audience to motivate them to look at your work in more detail (through communication of the second and first level). Honestly, given what I see during conferences this is an exercise which is, most of the time, poorly done.
The last level of communication is the communication with the public. Void. Blank. This is the ultimate difficult exercise. The hell on earth. And it has become worse in the last years. Before, the main contact with the public was through the media and the journalists and only some chosen distinguished scientists were allowed to talk to the journalists. So the difficult exercise of explaining science to a broad audience was to the charge of the journalist. Difficult because you have to find the compromise between the accuracy of the facts and the interest of the public. We touch here the heart of the problem: the scientific method (but not the results!) is fundamentally not attracting. By definition, it is rational and not emotional. Most people expect emotion. There can only be a conflict when we want to communicate about science.
https://thezproject.wordpress.com/2016/09/20/the-art-of-science-communication/
You write " Even if the lonely genius Einstein myth persists, the reality is that science, whatever its domain of application, is an endeavor at the scale of humanity."
ReplyDeleteEinstein might have remained a "lonely genius" if not for Max Planck.
I would say that science is an heuristic process with many variables. There is no dogmatic approach to it. Ideas come from individuals within groups of 1 to n ppl. And there is a process of natural selection we go through to separate the good ideas from the bad. The selection process requires good communication skills to express an idea to your group and peers. But if you say something that is unbelievable by anyone, it doesn't matter how good your communication skills are.
Jack Martinelli It's not my writing, it's Rodolphe D'Inca's.
ReplyDeleteJack Martinelli I agree with most of what you said except maybe for the last sentence and the question to make the community accept something "unbelievable". I think that the purpose of scientific communication is not to make your peers believe yours results but merely to attract their attention on your work to explain clearly the its context, the methods and experiments used to get the results. Communication will make it possible for people to discover your work and to replicate it so that they get convinced by themselves or, that they refute the results with counter arguments.
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