Pop Goes the Science

I guess Wittgenstein poisoned the waters for me to some extent. Back in the day, when I considered myself a Wittgenstein disciple (if it even makes sense for an undergraduate to identify himself in that way), his harsh remarks about "popularizers" of science left a lasting impression. Wittgenstein was not only one of the the most important logicians and philosophers of the twentieth century, he was also widely and deeply read in the physical sciences (he was also a respected engineer and architect and did some work in anatomy as well) and had little patience for popular, journalistic accounts of science. So, I've harbored lingering suspicions of science popularizers.

I'm not really entitled to hold such a view, given that my own scientific literacy is pretty limited. Nevertheless, I couldn't resist attending today's university forum, which featured Brian Greene of Columbia University. I guess you could say that Greene has more or less taken up the mantle of the Great-American-Explainer-of-Science from the late Carl Sagan, although his expertise is limited to the more abstruse field of string theory, rather than astronomy per se. I own a copy of The Fabric of the Cosmos (never read it but it LOOKS good, and I've given copies to my uncle and dad) and his earlier book, The Elegant Universe, sold over a million copies and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. He also produced a PBS series on the latter.

Greene was quite the showman. He's a dynamic lecturer--which was certainly welcome, given the staid mode of presentation of most forum and devotional speakers. He clearly knows how to work a room, even if it has seven or eight thousand people in it. He did a pretty good job, giving thumbnail sketches of Newtonian physics, Einsteinian physics, Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle and, --Ta-Da! --String Theory in all of 35 minutes. While the presentation erred on the side of being overly facile (a decent junior-high student could have followed the presentation well enough), anyone that can cover so much ground so deftly in so little time is on to something. No mention of the controversies surrounding string theory these days (ugly tales are told about all sorts of professional pressures to toe the line on endorsing string theory--hiring decisions, tenure decisions and such hinge on being on the right side of the divide) but I guess that much was to be expected.

As it turns out, I think a Wittgensteinian defense could be mounted for such presentations, which, I must admit, I found entertaining if not terribly challenging. Wittgenstein seemed to hold the view that mastering a problem--really knowing one's way around it--implied that one could talk about it at all levels of granularity to all kinds of audiences. If that's the case, I think Greene did an impressive job indeed.