From black holes to black history

Q: Speaking of societal good, you get into the social side of science in a number of essays.

A: There’s a whole essay on the reporting of science to the public, and how the press generally does not convey the uncertainty in the information provided by the scientists. This is rampant in medical circles, where people are waiting for that next cure for some ailment — so they wait by the office doors of the people doing the research, and then they have a limited study, and in some of the cases there’s an effect.

So what’s the headline? “New cure for cancer,” or “New cure for the common cold” — without saying, “Oh, this is medicine that helped 10 percent of a sampling of people get better, and the placebo helped 11 percent.” So there’s not enough conversation about the trials, the integrity of the result as it flows out of the number of trials that were conducted, the uncertainties of the analysis. These are not part of the communication toolbox of the science journalist.

Here’s another one: There’s this widespread expectation that scientists sit there in blissful confidence that they’re lords of the universe because they understand what’s going on. And then, all of a sudden, some new theory comes along and everybody has to go back to the drawing board. If only I had a nickel for every time that picture was played out in the first sentence of an article.

If a scientist is not befuddled by what they’re looking at, then they’re not a research scientist.

Q: It’s always more newsworthy if a scientist is puzzled by something.

A: But we’re always puzzled by something. And that fact is never conveyed. People think we have some kind of easy-chair arrogance, where someone says, “Oh, this will force everyone to forfeit their cherished theories.” Excuse me, but if you have something that works better than my theory, I’ll throw mine out in a minute. What we’re trying to do here is get closer to nature. The caricature of science is that we hold tight to the theories we have, and shun challenges to them. That’s just not true. In fact, we hold our highest rewards for those scientists who can prove others wrong. And by the way, they are famous in their own lifetimes. We don’t wait until they’re dead.

Q: In the course of your own career, what has puzzled you, or what sorts of scientific theories have you come to reconsider?

A: Well, I’m with everybody else — just dumb, stupid and ignorant about the nature of dark matter and dark energy. Those are problems for the ages right now. Our ignorance of what dark matter is has been with us since the 1930s, and our ignorance of dark energy has been around since the 1990s. It’s remarkable that we can measure the existence of something, and yet otherwise know nothing about it.

Q: A lot of people may see you on TV and read your books and not realize that you’re still involved in research as well. I believe I saw your name listed among the researchers behind the recent COSMOS Collaboration findings about dark matter…

A: Yeah, talk about the challenge to playing both of those worlds! I try to eke out a third of my total time devoted to frontier research problems. But in practice, a lot of these other projects rise up – media, writing, speech-giving, that sort of thing. So then it ends up shrinking down to no more than a day a week, and many weeks it’s just half a day a week. That’s 10 or 20 percent of my time.

Q: How do you feel about that?

A: It’s frustrating, because my source of energy for bringing science to the public derives entirely from my access to the frontier of research. I have this fuel supply that’s replenished by every paper that I publish, every computer program that I write, every quantity of data that I reduce. That fills up the fuel tank, and then I run out to the street and grab people and say, “Did you know that the universe is expanding?!” I have energy to attack people on the street and bring the universe down to earth for them, whether asked for or not. So it’s hard.

Q: On one hand I can see that’s a frustration, but on the other hand somebody’s got to do that job of science communication, and a lot of scientists shy away from that.

A: The reason why somebody’s got to do it, is that most of the science that we do is completely taxpayer-funded — the National Science Foundation or NASA, for instance — so to suggest that the work we do is off-limits from the public is to create a priesthood. And that’s not what science is. One of the greatest features of science is that it doesn’t matter where you were born, and it doesn’t matter what the belief systems of your parents might have been: If you perform the same experiment that someone else did, at a different time and place, you’ll get the same result.

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