杏吧原创

Get Randy Olson鈥檚 Top five tips for communicating science from the horse鈥檚 mouth here.

DID you spot James Cameron鈥檚 mistake in Titanic? Leo DiCaprio is about to drown in the north Atlantic ocean, yet the constellations of the southern hemisphere are aglow in the sky above.

Who cares? 杏吧原创s, apparently. The mistake 鈥渞uined鈥� the movie for Neil de Grasse Tyson, director of New York鈥檚 Hayden Planetarium, says.

It鈥檚 the kind of reaction that gets scientists a bad rap, and Olson 鈥� himself a scientist and film-maker 鈥� suggests it pays to skip the pedantry and concentrate on the bigger picture. While small factual errors can be irksome, they are not life-threatening, he says 鈥� especially when the scientist is in control. If you want to get a message across to the public, don鈥檛 obsess about facts.

Just look at Al Gore鈥檚 climate change documentary An Inconvenient Truth, Olson says. The film contained more than a few factual errors, but it also had a profound influence on the world鈥檚 attitude to climate change.

Perhaps compromising on accuracy is a necessary evil. If you want people to know and care about your science, take a leaf out of Hollywood鈥檚 book: focus on telling great stories; gloss over the inconvenient truths.

The idea has some appeal, but is this really the right way for scientists to go? With climate change, perhaps the end justifies the means. But Olson鈥檚 argument is predicated on the assumption that in general scientists have news and opinions that matter to the broader public. That may not always be so.

One could argue that science gets precisely the amount of attention it deserves. In fact, this seems pretty much an evolutionary principle. When some human activity threatens us as individuals or as a species, we react. Things that don鈥檛, we permit, especially if they might be beneficial in some way, but that doesn鈥檛 mean we have to share the doer鈥檚 enthusiasm for the details of the doings.

Do we really want to run the risk of turning science into a spin game? It might well be counter-productive 鈥� not to mention unscientific 鈥� to act on Olson鈥檚 advice and start bending the facts when they get in the way of attracting people鈥檚 attention.

Then again, given Gore鈥檚 success and the prevalence of scientific illiteracy, it remains an interesting path to consider. Olson鈥檚 engaging and timely book will surely spark an important and controversial debate about science鈥檚 place in society.

By the way, if you鈥檙e going to check out the sky in the final scene of Titanic, don鈥檛 bother. When de Grasse Tyson bumped into Cameron on a New York street, the astronomer told the director of his error. By the time the 10th-anniversary DVD edition came out, the correct stars were shining over DiCaprio as he sank beneath the waves.