On Sunday, The New York Times fronted a story about a 36-year-old man, Matt Heverly, who "started a recent workday as any young father might: up at 5:30, gulping coffee, fixing a bottle for the baby. He threw on jeans and a T-shirt and drove his two sons to day care. He stopped to get the brakes on his Toyota checked and swung by the bank."
Then, the Times breathlessly reports, "he went to the office ... to drive a $2.5 billion robot on Mars. The emphasis is mine, but it could as easily have been that of the Times, if it allowed italics for emphasis. The writer, Brooks Barnes, is evidently astonished that somebody who drives a NASA rover--on Mars!--also spends his time filling baby bottles and getting his brakes checked. Yes--this is rocket science!
The story is fine. For the most part, it talks about what's involved in driving a rover on Mars, and it's illuminating and entertaining. But Barnes can't quite drop the idea that scientists, to paraphrase F. Scott Fitzgerald, are different from you and me.
He's amazed by where they work: "In many ways, this is like any other office: gray industrial carpeting, fluorescent lighting, cramped cubicles that are mostly undecorated, unless you count empty cans of Red Bull. A small pantry has packages of dried fruit snacks. There is the occasional potluck dinner and an office softball team..."
Wow! Rover drivers work in cubicles and play softball! What did Barnes expect? Space suits and empty glasses of Tang?
This could have been a story about any other scientist, who fills the baby bottle, checks the brakes, and goes to the office...to find a cure for cancer. Or to predict the climate 100 years from now. Or to construct an entire genome from a finger bone thousands of years old.
These are the kinds of things scientists do. The front-page editors at the Times might have massaged this story so that Barnes didn't sound quite so surprised to discover that even rocket scientists sometimes mow the lawn.
-Paul Raeburn
Comments
I did say that the story was entertaining and illuminating. I learned a lot from it.
But in my view, scientists are people, too--pretty much like the rest of us. They are smart people with interesting jobs. So are a lot of writers we know.
When a prominent story seems to suggest scientists are somehow different from the rest of us, or have more interesting jobs than anyone else, I think that's inaccurate. That's what I meant by the Fitzgerald quote: Why would it be worth remarking that they mow the lawn or check the brakes unless they are perceived to be somehow different from the rest of us?
Anyway, I agree it was a perfectly fine story, but I thought it was a bit naive--the same thing Charlie meant, I think, when he said it was giddy and slobbering.
While I always enjoy a good takedown, I agree with Charlie: "No harm, no foul." Suggesting that "the Times might have massaged this story" to make the reporter sound less surprised flies in the face of the reporting itself. From the story:
And frankly, what better way to get people interested in science that to remind readers that the profession puts the remarkable within our grasp, and that fantasical notions to explain our world look petty compared to what we learn when we use science to explore our world.
I thought his point, breathless as it was, is the opposite of Fitzgerald's observation. Rocket scientists are, in the garden variety ways, the same as you and I. I enjoyed the somewhat abstracted but maybe representative anecdote about coolest job at the cocktail party - even though cocktail parties these days are as rare as new starts on big Mars missions.
If a writer who usually is on the Hollywood beat shows up on feature assignment to cover real science that is nothing like Iron Man but is done on the operatic scale of a NASA JPL mission, one might expect them to fall for it and get excessively giddy slobbering over the geeky heroics of it. I gotta confess that stories like this were what I devoured as a kid. Maybe a few more school children will think about getting into AP science and math first chance they get. No harm, no foul.