Re: A plea to save "New Scientist"
- From: gregegan@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx (Greg Egan)
- Date: Sun, 17 Sep 2006 07:15:30 +0800
In article <1158433076.373611.18030@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>, "Igor"
<thoovler@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Greg Egan wrote:[snip]
New Scientist is a British-based publication where many thousands of lay
people get their information on scientific matters, and (IMHO) it does an
excellent job about 70% of the time. But the combination of a
sensationalist bent and a lack of basic knowledge by its writers (most
obviously in physics) is rendering it unreliable often enough to
constitute a real threat to the public understanding of science.
I don't think it's just New Scientist, which for the most part I don't
really have much of a problem with. I think it's popular science
writing in general, both in print and other media such as TV. In the
process of "dumbing down" to reach a wider audience, the tendency has
been to throw out critical thinking and replace it with fluffy
nonsense. But I think that's been true in all areas, and not just
science writing. This has always been a concern, but it seems to have
gotten worse in the last few years.
Of course it's not *only* New Scientist, and of course there are worse
offenders.
But this is a case where New Scientist has been unambiguously derelict in
its duty to its readers, so if you think they're not a lost cause
completely, now is the time to tell them that they've crossed the line.
If they are allowed to shrug this off as some kind of arcane difference of
opinion between experts, both sides of which deserve to be published
(though the experts who thought Shawyer was wrong got short thrift in the
article), then they really will have lost the plot completely.
I mean, this isn't just a matter of their usual practice of hyping some
exotic new theory fresh from the arXiv that 99% of physicists would
consider implausible, but which can't actually be disproved yet. This is
misrepresenting a fundamental principle -- relativistic conservation of
momentum -- that is accepted by every competent physicist. That Shawyer
could (apparently) find people in the UK government and NASA to take him
seriously is depressing, but it doesn't change the fact that any physics
graduate who stayed awake for the definition of the energy-momentum
4-vector will know, as a matter of certainty, that the centre of mass of a
closed system can not accelerate, no matter what is bouncing around inside
it. Maxwell's equations and special relativity, on which Shawyer
supposedly based his calculations, certainly do *not* violate conservation
of energy-momentum, so any calculation that suggests they do is simply
wrong.
--
Greg Egan
Email address (remove name of animal and add standard punctuation):
gregegan netspace zebra net au
.
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- A plea to save "New Scientist"
- From: Greg Egan
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