Amazing Breakthrough Day: April 1st
So you’re thinking, “April 1st… isn’t that already supposed to be April Fool’s Day?”
Yes—and that will provide the ideal cover for celebrating Amazing Breakthrough Day.
As I argued in “The Beauty of Settled Science”, it is a major problem that media coverage of science focuses only on breaking news. Breaking news, in science, occurs at the furthest fringes of the scientific frontier, which means that the new discovery is often:
Controversial
Supported by only one experiment
Way the heck more complicated than an ordinary mortal can handle, and requiring lots of prerequisite science to understand, which is why it wasn’t solved three centuries ago
Later shown to be wrong
People never get to see the solid stuff, let alone the understandable stuff, because it isn’t breaking news.
On Amazing Breakthrough Day, I propose, journalists who really care about science can report—under the protective cover of April 1st—such important but neglected science stories as:
BOATS EXPLAINED: Centuries-Old Problem Solved By Bathtub Nudist
YOU SHALL NOT CROSS! Königsberg Tourists’ Hopes Dashed
ARE YOUR LUNGS ON FIRE? Link Between Respiration And Combustion Gains Acceptance Among Scientists
Note that every one of these headlines are true—they describe events that did, in fact, happen. They just didn’t happen yesterday.
There have been many humanly understandable amazing breakthroughs in the history of science, which can be understood without a PhD or even BSc. The operative word here is history. Think of Archimedes’s “Eureka!” when he understood the relation between the water a ship displaces, and the reason the ship floats. This is far enough back in scientific history that you don’t need to know 50 other discoveries to understand the theory; it can be explained in a couple of graphs; anyone can see how it’s useful; and the confirming experiments can be duplicated in your own bathtub.
Modern science is built on discoveries built on discoveries built on discoveries and so on all the way back to Archimedes. Reporting science only as breaking news is like wandering into a movie 3/4ths of the way through, writing a story about “Bloody-handed man kisses girl holding gun!” and wandering back out again.
And if your editor says, “Oh, but our readers won’t be interested in that—”
Then point out that Reddit and Digg don’t link only to breaking news. They also link to short webpages that give good explanations of old science. Readers vote it up, and that should tell you something. Explain that if your newspaper doesn’t change to look more like Reddit, you’ll have to start selling drugs to make payroll. Editors love to hear that sort of thing, right?
On the Internet, a good new explanation of old science is news and it spreads like news. Why couldn’t the science sections of newspapers work the same way? Why isn’t a new explanation worth reporting on?
But all this is too visionary for a first step. For now, let’s just see if any journalists out there pick up on Amazing Breakthrough Day, where you report on some understandable science breakthrough as though it had just occurred.
April 1st. Put it on your calendar.
- Brain Breakthrough! It’s Made of Neurons! by (1 Apr 2008 19:00 UTC; 71 points)
- 's comment on Open Thread, April 1-15, 2012 by (1 Apr 2012 19:16 UTC; 14 points)
- Rationality Reading Group: Part Q: Joy in the Merely Real by (30 Dec 2015 23:16 UTC; 9 points)
- [SEQ RERUN] Amazing Breakthrough Day: April 1st by (9 Mar 2012 4:58 UTC; 8 points)
What newspapers do you read? Where I come from, a weekly supplimentary on Science/Tech covers a lot of gruond. I’m sure you hail from a slightly better off locality.
Ecouter. S’il vous plaît. I can accept exaggeration, to make a point. But not this. Reddit/Digg? Jesus! You must bonkers and nuts mixed with a whole lot of pre-concieved misconceptions.
nice idea. Personally, I think it’ll be very difficult indeed to get the press to do this kind of thing, because the press put profits before their social duty—in this case a NEW science story will sell more newspapers, and therefore make them more money, even though it is fairly clear that it’s a bad thing to do.
How about this: convince the US National Academy of Sciences to put out a weekly or monthly report, written by prominent scientists, on some settled science. That way the scientific community would do the hard part, and the press would have something slightly more newsworthy. Just an idea...
Or, you could write an article to some newspaper to whom this is relevant. Perhaps New Scientist or Scientific American would publish an article on why settled science is a good thing to report, and why it’s unethical for the press to constantly report breakthrough science.
If I have some time, I might like to write in to new scientist myself about this. Would this be Ok? - obviously I’ll attribute the idea to you.
A mainstream publication probably wouldn’t do this, but I can imagine Slashdot, Google, and various tech/sciece/health blogs doing this as an April Fool’s joke. If you don’t have a blog, do it to a friend: “Omg! Did you hear that scientists have figured out how to plot what the night sky would look like from any point on earth at any point at time and with any light pollution level???? This will change EVERYTHING!”
Preferably, the web sites would make the “new”s about something of practical use, so that it looks like a new breakthrough. Some ideas:
-Scientists have discovered that simple “Turing” machines can do all the computations of modern computers! -Mathematicians have discovered that prime numbers can be used to provide military-grade encryption of messages! -Engineers have discovered a way to make heavy objects support their own weight merely from the pressure of the air flowining around them!
Wikipedia does something similar on April Fool’s—posting on the main page all sorts of things which sound fake but are actually real.
Not quite the same, but you may enjoy the following from The Onion, where April Fools Day is a year-round event: “Buoyant Force On Area Object Equal To Weight Of Water Displaced”
Dead link. Now here.
I love this proposal!
As long as the newspapers are at it, they should use ‘Amazing Breakthrough Day’ as an excuse to change the Atrology section to the ‘Astronomy’ section.
Yes yes yes yes yes yes yes!!!
Be totally serious about this! Spread it around the internet! This is such an amazing idea! Next April Fool’s day is going to be the best one ever!
Gosh, I’m so ridiculously excited no one’s even going to take me seriously.
I’m not in USA but people here in my country really don’t read newspapers a lot anymore. 90% of newspapers are quite low-quality, so called “yellow press”. So really internet is a media of a greater quality. Most of newspapers are covering stuff like politics, economics, other stuff which seems more “clear” for the people reading them. But in fact, e.g. a seller of apples trying to argue with a postman about situation in Syria is quite much the same if they would discuss collision of black holes.
How do you know that?
Could you clarify your question?
How do you measure the quality of internet and newspapers? How do you compare their impacts? What do you know about the postman’s knowledge of black holes?
In short I measure this the similar way as you measure which restaurant for you is good and which is bad. Probably there exist postmans whos command of knowledge about black holes is very strong, but I believe an average postman knows quite little on topics like that.
Which country are you from?
the country just above the Black sea on the map ;)