The Art of (Science) Storytelling
A very brief introduction to the great public science stories of the last century with Albert Einstein, Carl Sagan,Neil DeGrasse Tyson, and more.
At last years Origins Project, helmed by theoretical physicist Lawrence Krauss, there was a discussion/debate called “The Storytelling of Science”. On the panel were Krauss, Richard Dawkins, Tracy Day, Ira Flatow, Brian Greene, Bill Nye, Neal Stephenson, and Neil DeGrasse Tyson; a veritable who’s who of science entertainment (missing perhaps only Michio Kaku and Stephen Hawking to round out the panel). Most people will undoubtedly recognize a few names on this list. Nye and Tyson, at least; they have become an inescapable part of our culture these past few years.
Each presenter was given an allotted amount of time to tell a story, with science as it’s main focus. They ranged from the beauty of bird eggs (Dawkins) to enriching uranium for the Manhattan Project (Stephenson); Van Gogh’s Starry Night (Tyson) to Jane Goodall’s belief that we will one day find a Bigfoot (Flatow). Bill Nye’s focused on a small balsa wood plane that inspired him to become an engineer; one day working for Boeing. But the most important story came from Tracy Day. She was one of the two non-scientists (Flatow being the other), and the only female on the panel, but what she does is just as important as any scientist.
She co-founded (with Brian Greene), produces, and is CEO of the World Science Festival held in New York City every year since 2008. The festival brings science out into the streets, and asks everyday people and children to participate in the ongoing story of science. As “a production of the Science Festival Foundation, […] the Foundation’s mission is to cultivate a general public informed by science, inspired by its wonder, convinced of its value, and prepared to engage with its implications for the future.”
Last years events included a panel on nano-medicine, mapping the brain, the multiverse, an Innovation Square that included video games and demonstrations, and something called “The Rap Guide to Evolution.” “The Ultimate Science Street Fair” was a day-long Science demonstration held in Washington Square Park that invited children of all ages to participate in classes that included engineering bridges and the inside of sheep’s brains. Kareem Abdul-Jabbar was there to discuss his book on African-American inventors and the physics of Basketball.
The festival is part of a growing resurgence of Public Science; or rather the art of science storytelling. Engaging the public at large with astonishing facts about our universe; right here on this planet to distant stars. This branch of science is more important than ever. According to a study of all 2013 climate change studies, 10883 out of 10885 agreed that climate change is a threat. And yet there is still a debate in news media over the veracity of human-caused climate change. Ken Ham used his debate with Bill Nye to fund a replica of Noah’s Ark, which he believes to be a credible part of Earth’s history. It is this pseudo-science that necessitates this Public Science. Humankind benefits when the myth gives way to reality; when fiction is replaced with fact.
While the story of Public Science begins many, many centuries ago, the contemporary art of Science Storytelling starts with a celebrity of science unequaled to this day: Albert Einstein. Partly for genius, partly for his appearance, and partly for his place in history, Einstein holds a place in the hearts of many as the very face of Science. One of the great parts of Einstein’s story is how poorly he did in school. That is easily relatable for most of us; not everyone excels in their teen years, and we’d all like to think that we have a genius equation in us somewhere. Perhaps an E=MC², quite possibly the most famous equation in any field.
That his Annus Mirabilis papers came when he was just twenty-six is beyond astonishing, and certainly would have been enough to settle his Scientific Fame. But Einstein kept working, and in the 1930s he decided to call America his home to avoid returning to Hitler’s Germany. Here, his fame only grew. He was hounded so often for explanations of his theories or for photos that sometimes he’d lie about who he was, others he’d just stick his tongue out, which led to this most famous photograph.
Einstein’s story continues throughout World War II when he alerted Roosevelt to the possibility of a then only theorized device using enriched Uranium as a detonator. Roosevelt ok’d what became known as the Manhattan Project, based partly on Einstein’s insistence, which led to the creation and detonation of the first nuclear bombs. It can be argued that without Einstein’s letter (and fame as the preeminent scientist), Germany might have developed this weapon first. But the Allies won and led to the next great saga in Public Science: Space Exploration.
One of the spoils of war for America was Wernher Von Braun, sometimes called the Father of Rocket Science. After combining efforts with the U.S.S.R., America became embroiled in a Space Race to become the first country to put objects into orbit, send men into space, and most famously, put a man on the moon. And this is where Von Braun came in. It would be his rockets that created a new breed of celebrity: Astronauts.
The imaginations of people all over the world went wild as the U.S.S.R and the U.S. put their best minds to getting mankind into outer space. It took 15 years after the end of World War II before Russia finally succeeded, and Yuri Gagarin became the first man to orbit the Earth in 1961. Only a year later did John Glenn become the first American in Outer Space. And as soon as that was done, the two countries battled to see who would be the first to put a man on the moon.
In the meantime, Pop Culture dreamed about the possibilities of getting into space, and what would happen once we got out there. Two movies that came out in 1968 dared to ask that question, and gave two remarkably different answers. Planet of the Apes saw its astronauts going through a rift in space, and landing on a planet controlled by intelligent, humanistic Apes, and where man is subservient to that race of creatures. Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey saw its astronauts reach the moon, except in the titular year, we have colonized it; we even have a Hilton up there. There they discover a monolith, to suggest that perhaps we aren’t the only creatures to make it to the moon.
It would be less than a year later, that three men would make that fiction a reality. Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Michael Collins landed a lunar module on the surface of the moon. The first two men explored the surface of the moon and collected samples, sadly reporting that the moon was not made of Cheese, but of rock and sand. They would send photos back from the moon that would launch a generation of scientists. (And coincidentally, a handful of conspiracy theorists who think that Kubrick faked the moon landing).
Upon their return to planet Earth, Armstrong, Aldrin, and to a lesser extent, Collins were treated as heroes for their daring mission. But missions to space did not stop there. Largely due to the success and popularity of the moon landings, NASA had the funding and ability to send out unmanned aircraft out into deep space. By the mid-seventies it was launching Space Probes, some that explored planets like the Mariner program, or the Viking 1, which is the first object humans have safely landed on Mars. And in 1977, NASA launched it’s most ambitious Probes to date: Voyager 1 and Voyager 2. Together they have taken pictures of distant planets and moons, making study of these distant planets ever easier, allowing us to learn about our planetary neighbors. After almost four decades in service, they just crossed into interstellar space, making them the first man-made objects to leave the Solar System.
One of the most ardent proponents of space exploration was Carl Sagan. He worked with NASA often, telling them what they should be looking for on these missions; even helping to create a sound disk to be put on the Voyager spacecraft just in case it happened upon any life. This, of course, is the famed Golden Record, and it includes greetings in dozens of languages, world music, and even “Johnny B. Goode” by Chuck Berry.
As an already well-established scientist by the time Voyager was launched, Sagan was preparing a documentary that would forever change the landscape of Science Storytelling: Cosmos: A Personal Odyssey. The show, which he co-wrote with his wife Ann Druyan, would go on to become one of the most famous institutions in science.
Over the course of thirteen episodes, Sagan took the viewers on a journey through the universe, explaining Special Relativity and giving us inside peeks at the surfaces of distant planets along the way. He also told the stories of the great scientists, Kepler, Ptolemy, and Einstein. The show would skyrocket him to new levels of fame, increased by his frequent appearances on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson where the infamous phrase “billions and billions” came from.
Perhaps due to all the looking at the stars, Sagan also championed the search for extra-terrestial life elsewhere in this universe. He worked with and promoted SETI, who devoted a center to him after his death. Using the Drake Equation (click the link for an interactive model), they estimate that even with the most skeptical estimates there is a great chance we are not alone in the universe.
Carl Sagan also co-founded The Planetary Society, with the express mission to “empower the world’s citizens to advance space science and exploration,” and is now chaired by one of his former Cornell students: Bill Nye. And just as Sagan was the face of science in the seventies and eighties, Nye has earned his moniker as “the Science Guy” for children of the nineties.
In 1993 he premiered the eponymous kids show, Bill Nye The Science Guy. His iconic look, including a light blue lab jacket and an ever-present bow-tie, and enthusiasm for science is what made the show so popular. Like Cosmos, it focused on “pure science,” a piece of advice Nye took straight from Sagan himself. Unlike Sagan’s documentary style, Nye’s show was a modern take on Mr. Wizard’s World, which ran in different iterations in the fifties, seventies, and eighties.
But Nye wasn’t the only person on TV in the nineties to adopt a laboratory style science show; Beakman’s World debuted in 1992, a full year before Nye’s show. Both shows attempted to make science fun, removing some of the seriousness of Mr. Wizard (which he sometimes took too far), and adopting a frantic pace typical of the Ritalin years. That soon wore out with the public and after about 100 shows apiece, they were both taken off the air in 1998.
Perhaps, once again, science was taking off in the form of fiction. Instead of looking through the telescope with Nye or Sagan, we looked to Mulder and Scully of The X-Files for our interstellar needs. But just as Sagan would inspire Nye’s generation, Nye would inspire what became known as millenials, and would see his star rise again a decade later.
After Nye left the air, the Public Scientist Laureate* position was left open with no rightful heir to the throne. Yet, this was a time of great need for a public scientist. By the early 2000s, the internet was becoming more and more a part of our everyday lives; in a post 9/11 world, reason seemed to be waning in influence. So, without a single figure championing science, we looked for causes to champion, and one of the first to emerge was Global Warming.
The most well known champion of sustainability and climate change realist isn’t a scientist at all. But he spent eight years in the public eye as the Vice President of the United States under Bill Clinton. Al Gore, after losing the election in 2000 to succeed Clinton, went on to make An Inconvenient Truth, a movie version of a powerpoint presentation he had been giving to raise awareness of the dire situation our planet is in.
Despite a seemingly dull premise (who knew powerpoint could be so moving?), the movie is disturbing in its message; wholly accurate in its factuality. In the eight years since the movie premiered, science based evidence has only increased, proving that Gore, and the scientists he cited, was right all along. But unfortunately for generations to come, climate change deniers have stalled efforts to stop the flow of CO2 gasses into the atmosphere. Further studies have shown that it might already be too late to sufficiently stop it.
Those deniers have yet to be reasoned with. But it wasn’t for lack of reason. In fact, one group in particular attempted to reason people out of a lot of their beliefs, including their belief in god. The Four Horseman, as Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris, and Christopher Hitchens, came to be known, sought to disabuse the general population of their bronze age beliefs. As Atheists, they advocated for a reason based society, and disbelief in science was one of their main foes.
Led by Dawkins, they ruthlessly promoted Darwinian Evolution, they denied Young Earth Creationist’s talking points, and advocated for a scientific understanding of the Universe. He was later joined by Lawrence Krauss for a speaking tour that was turned into the movie, The Unbelievers. Although it has yet to be released, many of their discussions centered around fact-based learning, as opposed to faith-based learning.
From the big screen to the little screens, we’ve had a surplus in scientific entertainment this past decade. Starting with our familiar tv screens, advents in new technology has seen a staggering increase in picture quality. As High Definition, or HD, screens became the standard in households, Nature documentaries have been the standard bearer of quality. 2006's Planet Earth cost $10 million dollars to make, and it put the money to good use. They adopted Hollywood techniques that allowed them to get better footage, and the HD cameras for incredible definition.
That was followed three years later with Life, a nature documentary whose crew went above and beyond even what Planet Earth had shown. They filmed the mating habits of birds that had never been captured on camera, a heat-run of Humpback Whales, and an Elephant Seal hunted by a Killer Whale. The astonishing footage was not only groundbreaking, but beautiful, and proved that we humans are certainly not on this planet alone.
On the even smaller screens of our computers, we’ve had an even greater leap in internet quality that allows us to take science courses, watch lectures, and follow the latest trends all from our homes. TED talks, a sort of mini-lecture, offer insights into exciting new ventures, the depths of the human mind, or the perils of stagnation in the sciences. Bill Nye recently reentered the public’s eye due to social media (the kids that grew up with him are coming of age), and he’s been fighting for increased attention to science.
One of my personal favorite internet applications is Brian Greene’s upstart, World Science U. As of right now, it offers two classes on Special Relativity, for those who want to get the basics without being pinned down to taking them at a university. The beginners class gives a “conceptual overview” (full disclaimer: this is the one I took, so far), that provides a more than adequate introduction to many of the core ideas of Einstein’s Special Relativity. I enjoyed learning about the weird rules that govern our universe so much that I’m going to take the advanced class, which gives full mathematical proofs of the laws of Special Relativity and E=MC².
Neil DeGrasse Tyson said that “it’s the adults that need the science literacy, the kind of literacy that can transform the nation practically overnight.” And it seems like that job has fallen squarely on his shoulders. Tyson is the new Science Star, and has been explaining everything science from why Pluto isn’t a planet to why the stars were wrong at the end of Titanic. Most recently he’s been the subject of a profile in the New Yorker, interview in the Atlantic, and most notably, host of the new Cosmos, picking up where Carl Sagan left off.
Tyson rallies support for the sciences, no matter what medium he is talking in, wearing something that has stars or galaxies on it. Possessing extraordinary wit and knowledge, he can wax philosophical on almost any of the natural sciences. He is such a powerful advocate for the sciences that some have asked where the humanities’ Neil DeGrasse Tyson is. His ease with his newfound celebrity is impressive, it’s almost as if this were always meant to be.
And even he thinks so. He ended the first episode of his Cosmos by holding up Carl Sagan’s calendar, showing his name written on that calendar. The purpose of their meeting was to convince Tyson to go to Cornell. It didn’t work, Tyson went to Harvard, but it shows his ambition. And taking science to the masses, trying to instill lessons of the universe, is no easy task. With every passing episode of Tyson’s Cosmos, more and more science deniers come out of the woodwork expecting equal time for their pseudo-science. To that Tyson has a quick retort: “The good thing about science is that it’s true whether or not you believe in it.”
This is why it is more important than ever to have public scientists telling the story of science. As each of these scientists have triumphed, so has our understanding of the world. No one in this day and age doubts E=MC² without trying to back up their beliefs with hard scientific evidence. These same rigors must go into defending evolution and climate change, because until another theory does a better job of explaining why we’re here and what we’ve done to the planet, these are the best we have. And new evidence, garnered from the scientific method, supports them every day.
Recently, there has been a major breakthrough in the Big Bang Theory. Up until new data confirmed it, Inflation was just a good idea about how the universe expanded in the first fraction of a second. As Lawrence Krauss puts it: “by comparison, the Cosmic Microwave Background—which, until today, was the earliest direct signal we had of the Big Bang—was created when the universe was already three hundred thousand years old.” Now, the theorized gravity ripples have been found, and scientists can continue to study them.
And who knows what we’ll find out. But it’s important that we keep learning, and to do that we need teachers, especially the ones not in school. Like Neil DeGrasse Tyson said, it’s the adults that need science lessons. We need it to save this planet, to explore the cosmos, and ourselves.
Carl Sagan famously asserted that the human race was a way for the Cosmos to understand itself. “We are made of star stuff,” he said. Each atom in our body is an atom that was created in a star that died, collected randomly to form a water-covered planet that sat in a relative region where it could spawn life. That is the story of science. It is the greatest story ever told: ours.
