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Critical reflections

01 Jul 2004 Robert P Crease

Robert P Crease looks back from his 50th column on the exposure his articles have received.

For your edification

When I wrote my first “Critical Point” in May 2000, I imagined that in each essay I would gently edify readers on various aspects of research outside physics that are relevant to events and issues in it. The result was not what I expected. I turned out to be the one who was edified.

“Edified” is not really the right word. More accurately, I got exposure. I got it the way that actors and advertisers mean it, which can never be bad. I got it in the sense that lawyers use the term, which can never be good. And I got it in the medical sense, like the bracing and invigorating – and only potentially dangerous – effects of a brisk walk in the cold.

This has taught me a few lessons about column writing.

Listen to your readers

While writers may think and act as if they are producers and the readers consumers, that is bad practice. The readers of a column are invariably more diverse, experienced and knowledgeable than its author. The first lesson I learned was to look for opportunities to tap into this resource.

For instance, after I had written only a few columns a reader asked me about the philosophical commitments of physicists: was it true, he asked, that almost all physicists are critical realists, as physicist-turned-Anglican priest John Polkinghorne had claimed in a recent book? Maybe, the reader suggested, I should use the column to poll physicists.

Being well-versed in the philosophy of science, I had my own opinions about the philosophical commitments of physicists. But perhaps, I thought, this reader was right and I ought to generate statistics.

I knew that if I simply listed the names of philosophical positions – idealism, instrumentalism and so on – readers’ responses would depend on their prior assumptions about the position, thus biasing the data.

So in my poll (October 2001 p18) I set up a webpage that listed a series of entities – the Earth, colours, atoms and so forth – and asked readers to tick which ones they thought were real and which not. I wrote up the results in a subsequent column (April 2002 pp15-17).

The success of this exercise led to other “interactive” columns on beautiful experiments (May 2002 p17; ) and physics humour (September 2003 p19; December 2003 pp14-15).

These columns generated exposure in the form of articles in the New York Times, the Sunday Telegraph and the Toronto Globe and Mail; led to me appearing several times on BBC radio; and spawned my book The Prism and the Pendulum: The Ten Most Beautiful Experiments in Science (2003 Random House).

Have a thick skin

I knew that political columnists receive harsh feedback from a tiny fraction of their readers, but thought this unlikely with the Physics World audience. I was wrong.

One reader was “horrified” when I used the word “pendulums” in an article about Léon Foucault’s device. This was so contemptible, the professor continued, that “it made the article impossible for me to read”. I pointed out that the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) lists “pendulums” as correct, and “pendula” as “formerly (rarely)” the plural form. Light-heartedly, I asked whether he might not be referring to a different kind

of pendulum, noting that the force of gravity seemed to be somewhat stronger in his academic environs. I also suggested a compromise plural – “pendul*” – and asked whether he would read my article if I used it. But my correspondent would have none of it, and said I should know that the OED is an agent of cultural decay.

And he was one of the more polite complainers. I have been accused of “censorship”, “arrogance”, “stupidity” and “high self-importance”. Others accused me of holding back the progress of physics, costing it jobs and endangering its existence by not using the column to promote or denounce this or that idea or theory. The column on “Crackpots and their convictions” (May 2001 p14) generated especially hostile mail from individuals I had never heard of, some of whom thought I was targeting them personally and trying to destroy their careers. Two darkly hinted at impending legal action.

Have a hard heart

Every scientist, I suppose, fantasizes at some point about making a discovery that changes the world. Every writer has a similar fantasy, about writing something that sparks developments that matter.

I occasionally entertain such thoughts in connection with what I think of as my “outrage” columns. In them I vent anger at episodes in which important scientific facilities were destroyed, or leading scientists smeared, by activists who, disguised as progressives but motivated by reactionary politics, have succeeded in cowing government agencies while the rest of the scientific community stands by all but idle (May 2003 p19; January 2002 p17 and September 2001 p18).

Many of these columns ended with something like, “If you don’t care about what’s happening here, you don’t care about the future of science”. That thought threatens to become my version of “delenda est Carthago” (“Carthage must be destroyed” – the phrase with which the orator and politician Cato the Elder ended his speeches in the Roman Senate against the city’s rival). I secretly hoped that these columns would induce sufficient anger in enough scientists or administrators to foment some kind of cultural rebellion against pseudoscience and faux-progressivism, and spark changes in the planning and promoting of scientific projects.

Alas, the revolution is yet to happen.

The critical point

Each column generally culminates in a phase transition, in which I try to show how the subject or episode at hand transformed into a lesson about the relevance of research outside physics. For me, this remains the point. But saying this reminds me of a final lesson that I have learned by reading other columnists: never write about the column. In the end, a column is just another article in just another issue. Column writing is a far less profound and complex subject than physics.

I know I am violating this rule now, but I promise not to do it again. Unless, somehow, I manage to last another 50 columns. Meanwhile, I will hope for the revolution.

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