Letter

This letter was in response to Lisa Randall's awesome editorial in the Times yesterday, which can be found here.

Dear Prof. Randall,

Thank you so much for your editorial in the New York Times yesterday. You very clearly articulated several points I've been making to fellow students, family and strangers in coffee shops for years.

I have to say that I am, sadly, pessimistic about some of your proposals. I believe scientific ideas will continue to be named and misnamed in their early stages of development using convenient and often colloquial terms.

From some of my conversations about the Big Questions in science, I've gathered that non-scientists give science credit on a couple of bases: its intuitiveness and its history of past successes. The notion of force and anthropomorphized descriptions of disease are fairly intuitive. Getting man to the moon and curing disease have been impressive successes, great PR. But because their faith in science is contingent on results and intuitiveness, not based on a deep belief inthe scientific method(s), it dwindles when faced with seriously unintuitive or non-productive ideas, such as cosmological theories or string theory. The dwindling has begun, and I doubt it will stop until we have a complete, workable theory for something the public considers significant.

I would love more people to be able to accept the complexity of science and the fact that "incomplete" does not mean "wrong." However, given the current political climate and state of the union, scientists telling non-scientists to "just trust us, we've been doing this for hundreds of years and know what's best," isn't going to fly. I really wish I knew of some way to make people accept science as it is and to understand that its weaknesses do not invalidate it. I just don't think asking them is going to do it. We need...collateral? a breakthrough? I don't know.

Anyway, I'm sorry for taking up your time if you've read this the whole way through. I didn't mean to sling my pessimism at you for so many paragraphs. Thank you again for bringing such important ideas to a large audience.

sincerely yours,
Maggie XXX [best not to have the last name in the blog]
(Yale '05, B.S. in Physics)

She sent me a very nice response:

Thank you for your thoughtful message. I wish I knew the answers. I personally decided to at least try to make it possible to understand more complex theories by writing a book and investigating what can be done. In any case, it's not just science these days, but everything that is overly simplified in the media. I hope it improves.

Best, Lisa Randall

Why, Professor Randall...write about science for the general public? What a splendid idea. I think I'll try it. (Come on Seed, take me on board, baby.)