Carl%20Sagan%20-%20The%20Demon%20Haunted%20World

No Such Thing as a Dumb Question
enthusiasts and scientists in other fields. I'm not just talking about
teaching introductory courses for undergraduates. I'm talking about
efforts to communicate the substance and approach of science in
newspapers, magazines, on radio and television, in lectures for the
general public, and in elementary, middle and high school textbooks.
Of course there are judgement calls to be made in popularizing.
It's important neither to mystify nor to patronize. In attempting to
prod public interest, scientists have on occasion gone too far - for
example, in drawing unjustified religious conclusions. Astronomer
George Smoot described his discovery of small irregularities
in the ratio radiation left over from the Big Bang as 'seeing God
face-to-face'. Physics Nobel laureate Leon Lederman described
the Higgs boson, a hypothetical building block of matter, as 'the
God particle', and so titled a book. (In my opinion, they're all
God particles.) If the Higgs boson doesn't exist, is the God
hypothesis disproved? Physicist Frank Tipler proposes that computers
in the remote future will prove the existence of God and
work our bodily resurrection.
Periodicals and television can strike sparks as they give us a
glimpse of science, and this is very important. But - apart from
apprenticeship or well-structured classes and seminars - the best
way to popularize science is through textbooks, popular books,
CD-ROMs and laser discs. You can mull things over, go at your
own pace, revisit the hard parts, compare texts, dig deep. It has to
be done right, though, and in the schools especially it generally
isn't. There, as the philosopher John Passmore comments, science
is often presented
as a matter of learning principles and applying them by
routine procedures. It is learned from textbooks, not by
reading the works of great scientists or even the day-to-day
contributions to the scientific literature . . . The beginning
scientist, unlike the beginning humanist, does not have an
immediate contact with genius. Indeed . . . school courses
can attract quite the wrong sort of person into science -
unimaginative boys and girls who like routine.
I hold that popularization of science is successful if, at first, it does
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