Chris Lintott’s Universe

As many as 35% of Britons believe that the Moon landings were fake? apparently so, thanks to a survey commissioned by the people behind the X-files movie.

I don’t believe it. No, really, I just don’t believe it. People are cleverer and more discriminating than that. It’s well known that these surveys - or any piece of research - is strongly influenced by the form the question is in. I can’t find the exact questions used for this survey anywhere (I’ll send an email to the PR company, but I strongly suspect it will do no good) but I’ll bet you anything the question was phrased as something like ‘Some people believe there is evidence to support the following theories. Which of them do you agree with?’

Seemingly fair, but enough to access the unconscious bias that makes us want to agree with the person we’re speaking to. If some people believe these things, then perhaps there is evidence after all and I’d better just say yes. The same survey found that 3% of people believe that ‘The world is run by dinosaur-like reptiles’ and that - the belief and the number - sound like rubbish to me.

I enjoyed this honest piece in Saturday’s Guardian from Nick Laid, a poet struggling to write about modern astrophysics.

Can complexity of this kind be versified? Poetry evokes better than it explains. There is also, for the poet, the danger of simply being seduced by new terminology, the taste of exotic words. The poem becomes a list. And there is the lack of shared reference. Mention a telephone or tree, a marriage or goose-bumps, and we have some similar notion of what is meant. Our experiences of science are either abstract or mediated. How far can we imagine what a cell is like? Or a radio wave? Outer space comes to us only through telescopes and satellites.

And with space, the measurements cannot be apprehended. How do you describe things of this size or length of time, this speed or heat? Experience, being broadly empirical, gives us no meaningful terms.

The latter problem is one I understand - the true answer to the sometimes half-awed question of ‘how you get your head round such large numbers’ (the age of the Universe, the size of the Galaxy) is that you don’t, you just learn to use them. But the rest of this poet’s lament? I’m not so sure. Is it really easier to describe what a marriage between two people means than it is to talk about the red blood cells that flow through their hearts as they beat together?

I don’t mean to belittle the hardship of the poet’s task; there’s a reason I write in prose and fairly workaday prose at that when I try to describe the Universe. But Feynman, as so often, had it right:

It does not do harm to the mystery to know a little about it. For far more marvelous is the truth than any artists of the past imagined! Why do the poets of the present not speak of it? What men are poets who can speak of Jupiter if he were like a man, but if he is an immense spinning sphere of methane and ammonia must be silent?

The language we use as scientists is often strangely divorced from that in the rest of the world; it makes sense to me to describe something as trivial when we can see how to get to the answer, whereas non-science friends may get upset by the description. To take a second example, consider the word ’significant’; for me, loaded with statistical meaning and for others a vague statement. These tangles get worse when worlds collide - mathematicians will consider any of the language in my papers unbelievably sloppy - and worse of all when a term escapes the scientific lexicon and takes on a glorious life of its own; ask any physicist to define a ‘quantum leap’ and the answer you get will be very different from the one you expect.

All of this musing was triggered by a wonderfully discursive post on the Language Log blog about the origins of the ‘black’ part of a ‘black hole’, triggered by a reported incident when someone felt it had been used in a racist context. Language Log is essential reading for anyone who enjoys looking at language, whether scientist or not, by the way.

Sample quote : I’m afraid, though, that the search for collocational analogies for X hole, beyond X=black and X=white, is hampered by interference from unrelated patterns.