Selling Tomorrows

OMNI Ushered in Age of "Armchair Scientists." Now it's Free Online.

The Internet Archive has just posted every edition of OMNI Magazine free for downloading, including beautiful PDFs that capture the art and ads of the time. 

Launched in 1978, OMNI had a profound effect on science literacy and people's understanding of tomorrow.  From Wikipedia: "Science Digest and Science News already served the high-school market, and Scientific American and New Scientist the professional, while OMNI was arguably the first aimed at "armchair scientists" who were nevertheless well informed about technical issues."

Reflecting the spirit of its times, both the NY Times and The Economist added science sections to their roster a month after the OMNI first dropped. The publication's 1986 cover story on nanotechnology brought that nascent field into the mainstream (see this timeline from MetaModern) and its art helped establish the futuristic aesthetic of the 80s (10 covers here). It was also an early nurturer of nerd culture.  As LiveScience notes, "As a short hand for an early version of geek-chic, OMNI appeared in "Ghostbusters", "The Breakfast Club" and "Star Trek IV", and was mentioned in "Jurassic Park" and the remake of "The Fly."

In 1982, OMNI published a "Future Almanac" which, if you were to read it, Ben Bova assured, "very little that happens in the next two decades will be a surprise."  By the way, copies of it are available for $4 via Amazon, and yes, I just bought a copy!

Here's an ad for OMNI from 1978 where it declares itself, "The magazine of tomorrow, on sale today." 

Science & Theory: "You Keep Using That Word. I Do Not Think It Means What You Think It Means.”

When people think "science," they wrongly and often think "permanence."  The Brainpickings blog has collected definitions of science from leaders who personify the field, and yet their explanations contradict what we hold true in our popular imagination. Some examples:

 

"All of science is uncertain and subject to revision.  The glory of science is to imagine more than we can prove" - Freeman Dyson

"Science is a way of thinking much more than it is a body of knowledge." - Carl Sagan

 

Confusion about what "science" means has a profound impact on public policy discussions and affects how people make decisions as they ascend up levels of certainty.  Consider the word "theory," as in "the theory of evolution" or "big bang theory."  Read this great layman's explanation of what a theory actually is, versus how we use the term in common culture (tip of the hat to Reddit for surfacing):

"The difference between a theory and a law is not one of 'truth' or in how confident we feel about it. It is not a difference in degree. Theories are not 'inferior facts.' Theories don't graduate to become 'laws' by being 'proven'...A theory is an explanation for facts. A theory can embody a large set of statements which can grow as the theory expands to explain more observations, more facts.

It explains facts. It cannot 'become' a fact...The theory of gravity is NOT the 'dispute over whether gravity exists...it means 'what explains gravity, or what is is explained by gravity."

 

Meteorologists Carefully Add Chaos to their Communications

In "The Weatherman is Not a Moron," Nate Silver gives a fascinating tour of how forecast models have evolved and delves into how uncertainty is communicated to the public.  

First up is the idea of modeling and an idea that Hari Selden himself would feel at home with. Snip:

"In 1814, the French mathematician Pierre-Simon Laplace postulated that the movement of every particle in the universe should be predictable as long as meteorologists could know the position of all those particles and how fast they are moving. Unfortunately, the number of molecules in the earth’s atmosphere is perhaps on the order of 100 tredecillion, which is a 1 followed by 44 zeros. To make perfect weather predictions, we would not only have to account for all of those molecules, but we would also need to solve equations for all 100 tredecillion of them at once."

Strikingly, it's the integration of the unknown into models that is making them more accurate. Like stock traders, meteorologists have begun to play the odds, acknowledging that they're an inherent part of the system.  

Unfortunately, communicating that uncertainty carries cultural baggage, motivating experts to hold back their full analysis. Private sector forecasters have a "wet" bias for predictions of rain, because the public is happy if it's sunny when rain is predicted, and angry if it rains when sun is forecast. In a more serious situation, Silver reports there was a storm in 1997 in Grand Forks North Dakota where the forecast's margin of error wasn't shared with the public.  The result?  Millions in damage that could have been averted through mitigation efforts like sandbagging.  

"The forecasters later told researchers that they were afraid the public might lose confidence in the forecast if they had conveyed any uncertainty."

World Science Festival to Feature "Future of Internet" & Storytelling Seminars

Tickets for the World Science Festival have just gone on sale, and two events promise new insights on how we perceive the future.  

The first features Vinton Cerf and is called "Internet Everywhere: the Future of History's Most Disruptive Technology."  Hey, anytime we can compare technological revolutions, it's going to be a good day!  I'm hoping for some good historical parallels and (if we're lucky) points on how economic systems will be changed.  The intersection of a deep recession with the rise of social technologies has got to be one of the more unusual things to happen in the past 1,000 years. 

The second event is called "Why We Tell Stories, the Science of Narrative."  The panelists will address whether storytelling has an evolutionary advantage, and I bet there will be some interesting facets on why we come up with such richly detailed stories about tomorrow and why they follow utopic/dystopic patterns. 

I'll be live-tweeting at @davidhrosen, with summary reports to follow here. Drop me a line if you're going!

 

Why US Education Embraced Science, Then Humanities in 20th Century

In his argument that U.S. education needs to focus on both the sciences and humanities, Alan Brinkley of Columbia neatly summarizes how we embraced science at the start of the 20th century, only to turn to the humanities when it failed to fix -- well.. us. 

"In the heady progressive years of the early 20th century, few things were more alluring than the promise of scientific knowledge. In a world struggling with rapid industrialization, massive immigration, and chaotic urban growth, science and technology seemed to offer solutions to almost every problem...Many Americans came to believe that scientific certainty could solve not only scientific problems, but could also reform politics, government, and business. Two world wars and a Great Depression rocked the confidence of many people that scientific expertise alone could create a prosperous and ordered world. In the aftermath of World War II, the academic world turned with new enthusiasm to humanistic studies, which seemed to many scholars the best way to ensure the survival of democracy and to resist tyranny."

Read the full article from Newsweek here.

Check out past posts on the oscillation between utopian/dystopian visions of the future here, here and here.

What Does a Real Scientific Controversy Look Like? - 10 Rules from Gary Herstein

One of the media's favorite news hooks is to cite a "scientific controversy."  It's an attention grabber because most people believe that science is set in stone, and that it's one of the few sectors of public life that's opinion-free.  Gary Herstein wrote a great post on the subject in July, and it's worth the full read.  Snip:

"Real scientific controversies casually require decades to play themselves out, and MSM journalists generally have neither the time nor the training to follow such play with the kind of nuance required to accurately portray them."

So I asked Miles O'Brien how Social Media is Beating Traditional Press at its own Game...

Miles O'Brien was a featured speaker at today's NASA Tweetup for STS-129.  After a terrific speech (watch it here via UStream)about how the internet has changed journalism, he was kind enough to share his thoughts with me on how the quality of information delivered via social channels can be superior to that found in traditional media.  Listen carefully because I think Miles coined a new term that should resonate in social circles...the "editorial commons." 

You can follow Miles on Twitter and check out his site here. 

Book: "Age of Wonder" Calls for More Imaginative View of Science

Kevin Berger at Salon reviews a new book that's been getting a lot of buzz: "Age of Wonder" by Richard Holmes.  It explores scientific advancement in Great Britain in the 18th and 19th centuries, a time when art and science shared common goals and spoke a common language.  I'm adding it to my reading list, but given the quality of Berger's review, I kind of wish he could just walk me through it. Snip:  

"A good history of science unreels like the practice of science itself. It wends through a world of experiments until a new reality arises. But the more layered story of that journey is that science is not just a process but is the men and women performing it. In his radiant new book, "The Age of Wonder," Holmes treats us to the amazing lives of the pioneering sailors and balloonists, astronomers and chemists of the Romantic era. Making good on the book's subtitle, he takes us on a dazzling tour of their chaotic British observatories and fatal explorations in African jungles, showing us "how the Romantic generation discovered the beauty and terror of science.'"

So What Messages About Science do Americans Get at Church?

It's amazing what you can discover just by asking a new question. In this case, Dr. Matthew Nisbet of American University -- and author of the Framing Science blog -- suggested to Pew that they ask what Americans hear about science from the pulpit as part of their regular survey of America and science.  Snip: 

"Of those who say their clergy occasionally speak about science or scientific findings, three-in-ten (30%) say the clergy at their church are usually supportive of science, while 11% say they are critical of science. A majority (52%) say the clergy's references to science are neither positive nor negative."

Read the whole post here. 

New Book Explores Chemistry's Portrayal in the Movies

Alfred P. Sloan grant in-hand, a scholar and artist have teamed up to explore the role that chemistry plays in the movies.  The pair watched more than 300 movies, most made after 1970 and considered to portray good stories and significant doses of chemicals.  The result is a new book, "ReAction! Chemistry in the Movies."  

Though the goal was, as reported by Omaha.com, to “have a collection of movies that chemistry instructors could refer to, to illuminate some theme in the classroom,” the themes have everything to do with human -- not physical -- nature. 

From Amazon: 

"It is about the dualities of Dr. Jekyll vs. inventor chemists, the invisible man vs. forensic chemists, chemical weapons vs. classroom chemistry, chemical companies that knowingly pollute the environment vs. altruistic research chemists trying to make the world a better place to live, and, finally, about people who choose to experiment with mind-altering drugs vs. the drug discovery process.

A good read for PR professionals in the chemicals sector seeking insight into how the public gets much of its information on the industry.