Year: 2013
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Making science public: A question of colour
Yesterday I was staring at a poster of the periodic table hanging on our kitchen door, a remnant of my son’s school days. I began to muse; imagine it was just a black and white series of elements and numbers, as it was when it was first invented? Who decided to colour it in, and…
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Science as a cultural institution: The role of metaphors
I have recently discovered some (old) books written by Jacob Bronowski, scientist and science communicator, which are a real joy to read. I wrote a blog post based on them where I explored issues around science and values; I also promised to write something about his views of metaphor. Finding likenesses For Bronowski science and…
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The values of science as a cultural institution
In the context of discussions about a controversial essay by Steven Pinker, entitled ‘Science is not your enemy‘, I came across a blog post by Jon Brock which mentioned two blooklets that were new to me. They were written by the famous scientist and science communicator Jacob Bronowski. One was The Common Sense of Science…
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Consensus on climate change: Tracing the contours of a debate
Soon the new IPCC report on climate change will be published (a leaked version is already circulating). This will probably generate a lot of talk about what one may call the four Cs: Consensus, certainty, confidence and credibility (let alone the other two Cs: climate and change). The discussion about consensus is already in full…
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Perform or perish? Guilty confessions of a YouTube physicist
This post by Philip Moriarity was first published in physicsfocus on 9 August, 2013 and has been reposted here with the author’s permission. This week is YouTube’s Geek Week so it seems a particularly (in)opportune moment to come clean about some niggling doubts I’ve been having of late about physics education/edutainment on the web. Before…
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The ‘Making Science Public’ blog: What is it for?
Our ‘Making Science Public’ blog puzzles some readers, and perhaps rightly so. One blogger in particular pointed out recently that he found what we are doing ‘confusing’. This confusion emerged in particular in the context of us posting some guest-posts on climate science and climate politics (and climate scepticism) and also in the context of…
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More heat than light? Climate catastrophe and the Hiroshima bomb
There has been some discussion on Twitter today (14 August) about the wisdom or otherwise of measuring the heat being retained by the Earth in terms of Hiroshima bombs. The analogy is presented by John Cook and Dana Nuccitelli on their Skeptical Science blog, drawing on an academic paper by Church et al to describe the heat…
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Are climate sceptics the real champions of the scientific method?
At the Science in Public conference, which we hosted in July, Alice Bell convened a panel on science and the green movement. Following the conference Alice asked me to contribute to a series of posts on the same theme for the Guardian’s Political Science blog, focusing on my research area of climate scepticism. The post…
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The little-known secret of “not-doing”
Guest post by our visiting fellow, Jeff Tamblyn, film maker and director of Kansas vs. Darwin. The campus itself might have been what drew me to the MayFest Grounds Tour at the University of Nottingham – it’s vast, sweeping, and dotted with stately buildings and huge trees, many of which are more than three centuries old.…
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Science communication: From filling deficits to appreciating assets
I recently read a blog post on science communication by John Timmer and a response to this post by Peter Broks, which made me think about (a) the public understanding of the ‘deficit model’ and (b) how one can get from saying science communication should be engaging in the ‘co-creation’ of meaning (Broks) to giving…
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