Journalism in India, including science reporting, is in the main much like journalism in the US and other anglophone places. Who what where and so on with a few quotes and an effort at colorful style. But some of it, including science coverage, can have an unusually rarefied air. It may assume its audience has a comfort with technical terms that most editors here in the states would think is flat astounding. I have one example along that line, from which I confess to having constructed the preceding generality.
Recently, in Nature Photonics, a paper got fairly wide attention. It described a way to confine photons (gamma rays in this case) inside a reflective cavity or hohlraum in such a way that a few of them merge head-on just right and convert to a pair of particles. In other words, the massless but energetic photons produce a little bit of matter. From energy, matter, a nifty expression of Einstein's assertion of their underlying equivalence. Of course, this is a process of pair-production in which the new particles comprise anti-matter equivalents of one another so if they encounter one another poof, back they go to energy. Big whoop. Anyway, here is how it got written in one prominent Indian newspaper:
- The Hindu – Shubashree Desikan: A new way to turn light into matter ; Right off the bat, writer Desikan makes reference to the photo-electric effect and before her lede has finished, has also referred without further explanation to pairwise photon-photon interactions, electron-positron pairs, a Monte Carlo simulation, and the Breit-Wheeler process. First words of the 2d graph: Quantum electrodynamics.
Zowie. A graduate seminar in a college physics department outwardly would be quite at ease with such terms (and have the confused ones in the audience too afraid of being teased for ignorance if they confessed to being lost), but not many casual readers of the daily newspaper would have any idea what this is all about. It'd be like mentioning, uh, three body beta decay or RNA reverse transcriptase in a daily story and thinking the next logical word is therefore. Give the poor reader a clue.
Naturally, the newspaper's ombudsman, given the job title of readers' editor, weighed in to sort things out.
- A. S. Panneerselvan: The science of science writing ; (It might be noted in trivial aside that the reader's editor's byline is corrected here at KSJTracker but misspelled at the piece, confirmed by consulting his bio. For a moment I thought I'd found a word, even though a proper name, with three e's in a row that is not something silly such as wheeeeee! One suspects it was a bad move for the copy editor to allow a typo on the reader's editor's name to slip by.)
What interests me is that Mr. Panneerselvan says nothing about the barrage of unexplained technical arcana in the story. Rather his first remark is about an error, spotted by a newspaper reader (who DOES clearly coexist happily with physics terms). The story asserts that among previously recognized ways to convert energy to matter is the photoelectric effect. That is not very close to true. All us tracker readers know the photoelectric effect, explored by Einstein (who got his Nobel for it), don't we? Pause here to allow consultation with the wizards at Wikipedia. It is the mechanism by which a photon may hit a material and out will come an electron. But the electron existed before the photon arrived. In a photon collider, emerging particles may be new to the world. The writer seems to have mixed up two dualities: wave-particle, and energy-mass. The reader's editor goes on to discuss the difference between writing on social sciences and science, to expound on the paper's dedication to covering science as well as it does politics, macroeconomics, sports, etc. It is fun to read his description of the challenges of science reporting. "It takes enormous skill to present arcane and complex news of scientific discoveries and explorations in a language that is accessible to the general reader. The distinctiveness of science journalism lies in producing prose that is simple but not simplistic, that respects the intelligence of a reader without being condescending."
Well, yes. Mr. Panneerselven takes things seriously. But science writer yours truly has trouble with his declaration that the flub in the photon-collider story arose partly from use of an analogy to explain the physics. He writes, "While employing an analogous example enriches our understanding in social sciences, it may backfire as in the case of Suashree's report because of extreme specificity of each subject. An analogy in a science story forces the writer to add annotations and afterward to explain the intended meaning." Uh, without analogies a lot of science writers would take even more words to explain the science. Metaphors and analogies are not much more hazardous on our beat than on any other. I have written that neutrinos were once regarded as crazy uncles. No regrets.
Of keen interest to some tracker readers will be that two science journalism organizations get specific citation in the reader's editor's discussion: The Council for the Advancement of Science Writing comes up (I'm on its board, so had no trouble running down the source of some phrasing he attributes to CASW. It's in our Guide to Careers in Sciene Writing.) Sessions in Helsinki last year of the World Congress of Science Journalists also get description here.
A hat tip to Washington DC-based science writer Sandeep Ravindran for the tip to this insight into Indian science journalism style and oversight.
For the record, here are a few other stories on turning energy into matter by the careful bonking of photons:
- Los Angeles Times – Karen Kaplan: With gold and photons, scientists offer way to turn energy into matter ;
- NBC News – Alan Boyle: Scientists Lay Out a Siimple Plan to turn Light Into Matter ; Very clear with a good passage on whether this basic physics feat has already been achieved with a different hardware set-up.
- The Daily Beast – Andrzej Wojcicki: We Can Creat Matter from Light?!
- The Verge – Jacob Kastrenakes: Scientists propose collider that could turn light into matter ;
- The Guardian – Ian Sample: Matter will be created from light within a year, claim scientists ;
Far as I can tell, these have to be gamma rays that whiz into one another, kiss, have a hot hook-up, and produce the occasional electron and positron. Gamma rays and light alike, when their wave functions collapse, are composed of photons. But to say this experiment will turn light into matter puts into the reader's mind a far gentler feedstock for the process than in reality. Gamma rays are serious business. Do not let many of them get into your eye.
Grist for the Mill: Imperial College London Press Release ;
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