Science is not the private playground of people in white coats with clipboards. Popular Science is a good thing. The problem, however, with popular science is that it can introduce all kinds of misconceptions. Take, for example, this story, in which the BBC quotes Professor Frenk FRS as follows:
We are now able, using the biggest, fastest supercomputers in the world, to recreate the whole of cosmic history.
The problem here is that Professor Frenk has been literally quoted. Without the context of the surrounding article in Nature magazine, it sounds like the team has recreated all of the Universe’s history in a very big computer.
Unless you’re a cosmologist, or a computing person, or a skeptic, you could be forgiven for thinking that they’ve done exactly that, such is the myth that surrounds computers, and the things that “they” can do with them.
“They” is “we”, and “we” can’t do that.
What Professor Frenk didn’t say (but what I infer when I have my scientist hat on) is:
We have a model that describes certain aspects of cosmic history. It is by no means a complete model, but one which can be used for virtual experiments. It enables us to check certain theories against what we observe in our own Universe. To run these experiments we are using the biggest, fastest supercomputers in the world because if we didn’t, human kind would be extinct before we got the result; even so, the computers are still way too slow and too small.
That’s the science bit. That’s the bit Richard Feynman succinctly described as follows:
If it disagrees with experiment it is wrong.
Frenk (et al.) are running an experiment to see if the outcome agrees with what we can all see when we look at the sky.
For science to be popular it doesn’t have to be smoke, mirrors and awe. It’s all about keeping it simple. Simplicity is the enemy of misconception.
