By Margaret Harris
Some people fear public speaking more than illness or death. I’m not one of them, but I’ll admit to some qualms on Monday morning, when I travelled to the University of Westminster to speak about science to a group of journalism students.
As I rode the Metropolitan Line train up to Westminster’s Harrow campus, I wondered what sort of speaker the students were expecting. I was giving the talk as part of a Royal Statistical Society (RSS) programme to train journalists in basic statistical principles and how science works; however, unlike most of the people involved in the programme, I am neither a professional scientist nor a statistician. Moreover, the official RSS curriculum places a strong emphasis on statistics and scientific practices in medical science, which isn’t exactly my strong suit either. So while I knew the programme was aimed at helping non-specialists understand basic concepts like risk, the scientific method and the role uncertainty plays in science – all topics that I’m fairly comfortable with – I couldn’t help feeling like a bit of an imposter.
Fortunately, I had help. My co-presenter on the day, Lea Trela, is a bona fide expert in medical statistics, and we’d agreed in advance that she would handle the statistics part of the workshop while I did the science part. And after some head-scratching, I’d also found ways to modify the RSS’s standard “Science for Journalists” presentation by substituting suitable physics examples for one or two of the original medical ones. For instance, I used the BICEP2 “cosmic inflation” story as a case study of what can happen when honest, well-intentioned scientists get something wrong; how peer review and the scientific method (eventually) works to correct this; and the challenges that journalists face when reporting on still-undecided science.
Our combined presentation was well received, with lots of good questions from the 30 or so students in the room, but sadly, Monday may have been both my first and last chance to give it; I’ve heard that funding for the RSS Science Journalism programme runs out at the end of this year. But just in case I’m wrong about that, can anyone suggest some other examples of good (or bad!) physics reporting that you’d like to see discussed in the future?
