All Things

Astroprof’s Page has an interesting discussion of the difficulties of science journalism.

I think the quality of science coverage is improving at many of the major newspapers at least. As Astroprof mentions, Mark Carreau has, for example, done a good job for the Houston Chronicle. Perhaps it’s a positive outcome from the Challenger tragedy, but it seems that about that time many of the media outlets here in Houston started giving a lot more attention to manned spaceflight. The “main” industries in Houston have long been oil & gas and real estate, but for quite a few years now space has also been accorded that sort of status by the Chronicle and several of the TV and radio stations.

An experienced, knowledgeable science reporter is hard to replace. I subscribed to Science News for years, but after Dietrick Thomsen and Jonathan Eberhart left, the physics and space coverage were just not the same. I doubt most publishers have the means to get into a bidding war for the limited supply of top talent, and no one could expect a relatively new science journalist to be able to match their reporting.

One of the problems with science and tech journalism is that folks in these fields often expect journalists to do all the work. Such a mindset would seem ridiculous in politics, where there’s whole staffs of hacks feeding carefully-crafted sound bites to the media and identifying “talking points” for their candidate’s every appearance.

Businesses likewise spend vast amounts on marketing and public relations, but most researchers, and even technical staff inside many businesses, somehow don’t seem to think these functions are part of their job. Of course, a lot of engineers, scientists and programmers aren’t that good at communications skills, or just plain don’t like to talk about themselves, but somebody in these research groups and engineering departments needs to take up the role of communicator, so the outside world can understand the value and needs of their efforts.

Journalists are under a lot of pressure with the kind of deadlines that most of us couldn’t even imagine, so it’s only smart to realize they’re going to need some help. That’s one of the things I’m trying to do with some of my sites, particularly AeroGo (for aerospace and engineering education) and RealCurrents (for current events), in which I’m trying to provide important but little-known background information and to point out things deserving more attention (which I generally categorize with the tag “Press Coverage Holes”).

Where there are failings in science/tech journalism, beyond just ignorantly trying to cover a field the reporter knows nothing about, I’d say that one of the biggest problems is that of naively swallowing pronouncements from big research groups without knowing what is going on elsewhere. We saw some of that a few years ago, for example, with some coverage of the Human Genome Project, that focussed too much on the government research, ignoring Celera Genomics’ private effort that ended up getting done first.

The result is that journalists are often lacking in understanding about the overall policy and business aspects of research, and consequently end up focussing too critically on superficial technical aspects. We saw that just this past week, when many media outlets were talking about the possible abandoning of the International Space Station, due to computer problems - what was a rather remote possibility, technically, while saying not a word about how NASA’s busily going about building a station they expect to abandon anyway, not too many years after completing it.

It seems to me that journalists ought to be a little easier on programs that suffer technical glitches that are really just part of the normal course of research & development, but be discerning enough to realize when an effort has really lost its way or when a policy has serious unresolved issues. With so much needless technical criticism, a lot of R&D managers are understandably gun-shy about the press, which just perpetuates the disconnect to journalists described above.

Back in the 1980s, I came up with a fascinating technical concept, very advanced. I spent some time pursuing it but came to two conclusions. First was the painful realization that I’m not really a hardware person. I am fairly good with machines and electronics, but I can’t work in the speedy and adept manner that a true hardware person does in building something.

The second conclusion was that it didn’t really matter for the time being, because virtually none of the technologies needed to build it were ready. Many were starting to be developed, but some were completely obscure.

Even today it’s hardly certain that the concept would work, even in principle. Nevertheless, I have noticed a curious trend over the past two decades. One by one various of the technologies needed have popped onto the radar screen and become available, or at least in steady development. Yet there’s still been a key ingredient missing, an appropriately dense power source.

There are several possibilities already apparent, but none appeals to me as much as sonofusion, the claimed attaining of a fusion reaction from extreme pressures reached by cavitating/collapsing bubbles stimulated by ultrasound. The initial experiments, done by Rusi Taleyarkhan and a team at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, were reported in 2002. The methodology was soon questioned and little has been reported until recently.

Now an experiment done at Purdue by Yiban Xu and Adam Butt appears to provide further support of the possibility of sonofusion. The researchers also claim to have made progress in understanding how the required pressures could be produced by cavitation.

Obviously, much work likely remains just to confirm that fusion may actually be occurring, let alone to make practical use of it. Nevertheless, the prospect of a tabletop fusion reactor would excite any aerospace engineer.

As an engineer, I have been trained to be skeptical of technology, yet as an entrepreneur, I know that sometimes good surprises do happen, and that it pays to be positioned to take advantage of them. The payoff on sonofusion, should it prove to be real, would still be quite a ways off. Nevertheless, I continue to be amazed and delighted at how the pieces of a complex puzzle seem to be steadily falling into place.