Skip to main content
Culture, history and society

Culture, history and society

A model approach to society

01 May 2003

David Wallace looks at how the traditional one-way view of the "public understanding of science" is being replaced by a two-way dialogue, and considers how some simple models from physics and mathematics might help scientists to think about this challenge

Science in Britain today is in an improving financial position. Significant increases in funding for education and research are filtering through from government coffers. Politicians, it seems, have realized both the lack of support given to education in the past and the value of research in today’s knowledge economy.

But we cannot take this change of heart for granted. In the long run, public support for what scientists do will be crucial in increasing funding further. The advancement of physics will depend on a dialogue with the public that is based on mutual understanding and realistic expectations on both sides.

My thinking on this topic has been influenced by stimulating discussions that I have had with social scientists. Most scientists (myself included) were probably only dimly aware of the sociology of science until the physicist Alan Sokal published his now famous spoof paper “Towards a hermeneutics of quantum gravity” in the journal Social Text (1996 46/7 217-252).

Sokal’s intention was to parody how the language of science and mathematics was being abused by some post-modern writers. His article triggered an acrimonious turf war between the two sides that not only centred on the misuse of language but also highlighted a philosophical difference about the nature of science itself (see “Science studies – what’s wrong” by Jean Bricmont Physics World December 1997 pp15-16).

In an extreme view of physics, which I myself held as a young researcher more than 30 years ago, physicists search for the ultimate theory of forces and matter, from which everything else will follow as a secondary scientific endeavour. In contrast, the extreme post-modernists whom Sokal was parodying put the individual at the centre. Some sociologists view scientific knowledge as the shared views of a group of individuals – a “social construct” – rather than as some fundamental knowledge about nature.

My views on the “absolute truth” of theories and our ability to make accurate predictions are best illustrated by some work in probability theory that was carried out by Vladimir Vapnik and Alexey Chervonenkis in 1968. They showed that if we have access to only a finite amount of data, our ability to predict and generalize from the data is limited. To use a phrase coined by the computer scientist Les Valiant in 1984, we can only be “probably approximately correct”. So while I am pretty sure that the Sun will rise tomorrow, for example, I cannot be absolutely certain.

The apparent gulf between scientists and sociologists has narrowed in the last two or three years. Scientists now openly acknowledge that the emergence of an accepted theory involves “social interaction” of some form. Indeed, in many areas of physics, such as cold fusion and high-temperature superconductivity, the scientific disputes have been extremely hostile and personal. The extreme views of post-modernism in social sciences, meanwhile, have given way to a more pragmatic discourse with which scientists can engage. Even the widest gulf, it seems, may be narrowed with a little humility.

The encode-decode metaphor

The debate between scientists and social scientists has mainly focused on the challenges of communicating with fellow academics. But physicists must also communicate with the wider public. Traditionally this has been done through the “public understanding of science”, which can be caricatured along the following lines: when you (the public) have understood what we (the scientists) are saying, everything will be okay. Recently, however, scientists have moved towards a new dialogue, driven partly by the genuine concern that many people have about new technologies, and partly by the strident view of campaigning special-interest groups. This new dialogue is more of a two-way process.

But what does the public think about scientific researchers? According to a recent survey carried out by the Office of Science and Technology in the UK, less than a half (48%) of the public who were interviewed trust scientists in universities to provide accurate information on scientific facts. On the face of it, this is pretty shocking. Most of the public, it appears, do not trust us to tell the truth about scientific matters. However, other sources of scientific information are viewed even less favourably, with only a third of TV news and current-affairs programmes being regarded as trustworthy sources of scientific information. The equivalent figures for environmental campaign groups (30%), government advisory groups (13%), tabloid journalists (4%) and government ministers (4%) are lower still.

So while science may be difficult and specialized, the public is prepared to give scientists quite a big benefit of the doubt. But how can we build on this relatively advantageous position? I find it helpful to think in terms of the “encode-decode” metaphor, which dates back to the work of the sociologist Stuart Hall some 30 years ago. Encoding and decoding is an essential issue in communicating data and takes a huge range of forms, such as CD-ROMs, magnetic disks or computer displays. Given this huge diversity of formats, different systems must conform to common standards. We need to take data that have been encoded in a source, transmit them through a physical carrier of some kind, and then decode the transmission for storage or display in the recipient medium. Formats and standards are what make communications between different physical systems possible.

As for human communication, our my personal experience of the physical world is contained in the complex bag of chemical transmissions and electrical signals that is inside you and me. If we are to communicate successfully, I have to think carefully to encode what is inside me so that you can decode the sound and light waves that reach you. Similarly, I need to be sensitive to how you have encoded your views when I try to decode the signals that I receive from your speech and gestures. This two-way process is essential to successful communication and understanding.

I have found this a useful metaphor not least because it underlines why engagement with the public is so challenging. First, in some subjects we are trying to “encode” scientific understanding of topics of which the public will have little day-to-day experience. Second, we have no common formats in the human body akin to the standards prescribed for encoding data in physical systems. The one area where we do have standards that transcend the individual is, of course, mathematics, which is why it is such a powerful framework for understanding the physical world. Unfortunately, mathematics is not an appropriate way of engaging with the public.

Why more means less

Let me finally suggest a metaphor for why it is that the more we know, the less we seem to know. It is based on the idea of a “space of organized knowledge”. This space contains regions that are “understood”, surrounded by regions that are “not yet understood at all”. Near the boundaries between the two, the uncertainties and errors increase as our theories become more approximate and less probably correct. Our existing knowledge is “measured” by the volume of the inner regions, while their surface area is a measure of “what we know we don’t know”.

This space can be illustrated by considering how knowledge expanded as we entered the quantum era early last century. Macroscopic phenomena described by classical mechanics, for example, occupy a sub-region that is now part of a larger region that also describes objects moving at close to the speed of light.

Our search for new knowledge uncovers new phenomena, as much as it deepens our knowledge in mature areas of science. Molecular biology and the genome, for example, are built on physical laws, but they surely represent a new field of science – a new dimension in this space of organized knowledge. Quite clearly, the space of scientific knowledge is already of a high dimension, and will become of an even higher dimension in the future. Recalling that objects in a higher dimension usually have a higher surface area to volume ratio than those in a lower dimension, this metaphor gives us one way to think about why the more we know the less we seem to know.

While scientists may well query the value of this kind of concept, I am sure that many social scientists will query its entire validity. They might, however, be reassured if we acknowledge that this space is not absolute and fixed. Radical restructuring of the space of organized knowledge does take place and can be regarded as the highest goal of the scientist. Maxwell’s theory of electromagnetism, for example, united the previously disjointed phenomena of electricity and magnetism.

I am conscious that much of what I have said is of limited practical use in taking forward a science-in-society agenda, but it should at least provide food for thought.

Copyright © 2024 by IOP Publishing Ltd and individual contributors