Strongly recommended for physicists and non-physicists alike. Lisa Randall is a string theorist at Harvard University. Her op/ed column in today’s New York Times is on the issue of communicating the complexities of modern science to laymen.

The gist of the story: scientists need to communicate in a precise manner dictated by facts, equations, models, and theories, yet need to express concepts in the imprecise vocabulary of natural languages such as English. By overloading commonly used words with jargonistic, technical, meanings, scientists now commonly face semantic issues in expressing their ideas in ever-more technical fields to non-experts, who get lost by interpreting jargon using their ordinary meanings.

Read about what other academics think:

  • Dave Bacon, The Quantum Pontiff, Delta X Delta P: “There is nothing that makes my Monday mornings brighter than a correct popular explanation of the uncertainty principle.”
  • Luboš Motl’s reference frame, Lisa’s op-ed: “[W]hile I agree with her viewpoint on creationism, I completely disagree with Lisa’s evaluation of the climate science”
  • Peter Woit, Not Even Wrong, Dangling Particles: “Instead of devoting their time to writing for the public about the scientific status of issues that they’re not really experts in [...] string theorists would do better to first address the outbreak of pseudo-science now taking place in their own subject..”
  • David W. Hogg, Hogg’s Universe, Science in the press: “Lisa makes the important (and rarely stated) point that language is not always transparent, and the opacity is used ideologically.”
  • Sean Carroll, Cosmic Variance, Lisa Randall on scientific communication: “[T]he unintentional confusion caused when a scientist is trying to be perfectly precise, yet creates an entirely incorrect impression in the mind of a listener. Words like “energy” or “work” or “uncertainty” can mean different things to experts and non-experts./And the stakes are high”
  • PZ Myers, Pharyngula, Danged physicists: “Biologists do recognize the limitations of the current theory. All that missing stuff is what keeps biologists busy.”/li>

There is an interesting subthread running between Peter Woit and Luboš Motl, that of the describing string theory as a “theory”. Woit stresses the empirical testable (and hence falsifiable) nature of theories, whereas Motl is inclined to consider only the axiomatic coherence (self-consistency) of theories. This seems to me like a cultural difference between mathematics and physics, or perhaps between experimental and theoretical physicists in particular.