The Problem With Science Communication
On December 1st, 2022, the journal "Nature" published a cover story about a holographic wormhole. It was purportedly created inside a quantum computer to probe the intersection of quantum mechanics and gravity. The story kicked off a frenzy of tweets and news headlines.
Nobody has seen the wormhole. Nobody has produced one.
Well, we'll take the world's best quantum computer and see if we can map that into building the wormhole.
The wormhole becomes traversable; it opens. You really can go through.
Bull (beep). (host laughing) (magnets clicking)
This video is sponsored by Shopify. The problem was, of course, that no wormhole had been created.
It feeds on itself, right? When one story starts, then other media outlets grab hold of it and so it spreads very, very quickly.
What actually happened is that a super, a quantum computer is built, and within this quantum computer, you can do some calculations. Calculations that can be done with my iPhone because all the most powerful quantum computers today, at most do calculations that can easily be done on my iPhone.
You basically have something that represents the mathematics of a wormhole. But the way the story was sold, of course, is that in doing this, whatever calculation they did, they had created the wormhole.
They say so in the same sense in which I could say, "Look, my children have built a rocket that goes to the moon." Say, "Wow, what kind of child do you have? Yeah, here it is." And I show you a little sketch on a piece of paper when there is a drawing of a rocket going to the moon and say, "Look!" So what the quantum computer has done is exactly that. There's a little sketch of what could be perhaps a wormhole in some hypothetical theory, which is probably wrong.
Is this interesting? Yes, it is interesting because the fact that with quantum computers you can do these things mean that quantum computers, a little bit, sort of begin working. So people get excited about that, and then they go out and tell the world, "Oh, we've created a wormhole in a quantum computer," overemphasizing the wormhole, which probably doesn't exist, the theory being used of that, which probably is wrong, and the utility of quantum computers, which is not yet there.
So that's an example of bad communication, very bad communication. I was embarrassed; I was angry with my colleagues who did that.
To me, it looks like the source of this problem is bad incentives. Scientists need to secure funding for their research, and increasingly that depends on attracting public attention to their work.
It's just become part of the culture of science that it's expected that you will have some sort of media attention, and to get that attention, you have to sell your science, and often it's not the result of the science that is the story; it's something else.
Universities seek to promote themselves to attract students and bolster their reputations.
And nowhere in the scientific method is, and you release a press release, but it's just become part of the norm now.
Press releases simplify and may overstate the research, and journalists just want to get as many clicks on their stories as they can. The end result of this incentivized game of telephone can be oversimplified sensationalized headlines, science that is just plain wrong.
Now, I myself have been guilty of over-hyping a science story. Back in 2014, I made a video about the BICEP2 experiment. So this is one of the hugest discoveries in science of all time. Researchers reportedly detected polarization in the cosmic microwave background radiation. Allegedly, it was caused by gravitational fluctuations just a fraction of a second after the Big Bang. The result was considered the first real evidence of the quantum nature of gravity and a smoking gun for inflation theory. Experimenters even surprised Andre Lind, one of the founders of inflation theory, with the news.
Let's just hope that it is not a trick. I always leave with this feeling: what if I'm tricked? What if I believe in this just because it is beautiful?
Unfortunately, further observations showed that it was likely just dust in our own galaxy rather than primordial gravitational waves that created the polarization in the CMB. So I took down my video, and to this day, I am wary about making videos about breaking science news.
Like any type of breaking news, there is a high probability that early reports will turn out to be wrong. Just a few months ago, a paper was uploaded to the Archive Pre-print Server claiming to have discovered the first room-temperature ambient pressure superconductor. This again triggered a flood of media attention.
[Reporter] A monumental breakthrough: room-temperature superconductor LK99.
One of the most important scientific breakthroughs of the 21st century.
If the discovery were real, it would've been a big deal.
The room temperature superconductor stuff, of course, is such a dream 'cause if it worked, it would revolutionize everything, right? Transmission of energy, that kind of stuff. The world would be different if it worked.
But even before attempts to replicate the material and its properties failed, there were clear signs that the claim was false. In the only published plot showing resistivity versus temperature, the resistivity did not drop to zero as you'd expect at the supposed critical temperature. Instead, it continued to decrease below this value.
Plus, the resistivity scale was given in units of 10 to the minus two ohm centimeters. On that scale, any ordinary conductor would appear to have zero resistivity. Copper's resistivity, for example, is on the order of 10 to the minus six ohm centimeters.
A video showed the material apparently levitating above a permanent magnet in a supposed demonstration of the Meissner effect. But in that same video, the material also sticks to the magnet, something a superconductor would not do.
And finally, there is this plot showing that over the past hundred years, scientists have found new materials with progressively higher critical temperatures. But as of now, all the highest temperature materials only superconduct at very high pressures. For an ambient pressure room temperature superconductor, we would need a jump in critical temperature of around 125 degrees Celsius.
That's a lot, and this brings up the point that it is the most unexpected and surprising results that get the most attention, but it is also these very same results that are the most likely to be false. In social science, it's been shown that studies that later fail to be replicated receive on average 153 more citations than studies that can be replicated.
Similar buzz surrounds faulty research in the physical sciences.
The Italians, I'm Italian, came out announcing to the world some time ago that the neutrino was faster than light, and then measured it, and it turned out to be a plug that was not fitting well, and so the entire machine was not working well.
When the truth is discovered, it rarely gets as much attention as the original finding.
The fallout where everybody was going, "Oh, well this doesn't work and this doesn't look right and there's no way this material can do what they say it's doing." That sort of fizzles in the background; it doesn't get the same media attention.
There is the apt saying: "A lie can travel around the world while the truth is still putting on its shoes." But that saying might need to be updated in the age of social media when lies now have an even greater advantage.
Do you think it's a bigger problem now than it used to be?
I must admit that I think it's getting worse. I think there's a feeling that you've got to change the world to be noticed by the media.
Over-hyping science discoveries can give people a false sense of how science works. If that latest discovery I hear about turns out to be false, what else could be untrue?
People keep telling me that cosmology's in crisis and all this kind of stuff because that's the kind of stories they hear in the media. Eventually, people will say, "Well, why are we funding these things if it's always just turmoil?"
Making bold, unsubstantiated claims also reduces trust in scientists.
So we are enlarging a little bit. The conversation here is not just single pieces of news. I think there are entire fields which are hyped.
Wait, entire fields of science that are-
Yes.
Hyped.
Yes.
But aren't really legit or just they're all hot air or...
Oh no, no, they're not hot air.
[Host] Fusion, fusion's big in the news. People think it's close, right? There's startups; there's people getting billions of dollars.
Exactly, I don't know where we are there. Again, it's not my field, but there was one particular announcement, what is it? One year ago or something.
[Host] I remember this announcement.
Scientists have produced a nuclear fusion reaction that created more energy than was expended, a breakthrough to tap into the same kind of energy that powers the sun and the stars.
Simply put, this is one of the most impressive scientific feats of the 21st century. (audience applauding) Right? (audience applauding)
Which is bull (beep) again because it was in the context of military research, nuclear energy, basically for weapons in a way of doing it, which at the present has no visible way of how to become an industrial way of producing energy.
[Host] Yeah, there's no way to scale.
There's no way to scale it up.
[Host] This is just lasers at a pilot.
Just a little thing, and you compress it enormously, and then it's basically it explodes because it's a mini, mini nuclear explosion, and then you have more energy than the actual pressure energy that was needed to compress it. That's correct, but you need a huge amount of excessive energy for doing that. That was sold as a big step toward solving the energetic problem of the world, but it's not.
Back in '87, fusion, already people were talking about it like it's around the corner. We just need 20 years more work, and we'll crack it. And we have exactly the same story today with the current experiments.
Something that is not overhyped is this video sponsor, Shopify. And I would know because I've been personally using Shopify for eight years. You know something a lot of people don't know about me is that before I was a YouTuber, I worked as a science teacher at a tutoring company in Sydney. But I was always frustrated by this misconception students had that bonds store energy; they don't.
So I decided to make a better version of the traditional ball and stick model of molecules. One where the atoms snapped together magnetically. I came across these little ball magnets, and in my first prototype, I pushed them inside little styrofoam balls, and I learned about plastics and injection molding, ultrasonic welding, and I brought my invention Snatoms to life. (magnets clicking)
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I highly recommend Shopify to anyone who's thinking about starting a business, and for a free trial of Shopify, go to shopify.com/veritasium. And now back to science hype.
Science is interesting in that you can divide it up into basically two categories. One is an established body of knowledge, and the other is speculations, things that might be true, but we don't really have any solid evidence for them yet.
And because there can be an infinity of bad ideas and only one truth, most of these speculations are likely wrong. But the way certain topics are discussed in the media, it may be impossible to tell if they're part of the established body of knowledge or just very fanciful speculation.
There are too many books out there saying, "We have understood that the world's made by strings and string theory." It's not true, not at all. We have not understood that the world is described as string theory. We have a very interesting tentative theory, which is string theory, which has had some success and some failures, and that's interesting.
If you want to tell about this research, do tell about this research, but don't tell people that it's what we have learned about the world.
One question I have is, how do we get past the over-hyping of science? Because it seems like the system is set up to reward over-hyping. It rewards the journalists 'cause they get the clicks. It rewards the scientists; they may get the money or the attention. So I don't know; I'm kind of curious whether a solution is possible.
Yeah, I think there is one, and it's exactly what you're doing. By talking about the fact that there is a risk of overhyping. If I can go out and say, "Oh, my quantum computer produced a wormhole," and nobody says anything, that's a problem.
If we talk about the risk of over-hyping, if we talk about the risk of presenting ideas, theories, radical results, which are very, very tentative, as solid, then we sort of immunize ourselves against this danger.
Science is not presented on the news like sport is presented on the news. At the end of the news, you get 10 minutes of sports where they will talk about the fact that somebody kicked a ball around in a field, and it's not that particularly important.
So you get the full rundown of lots of bits and pieces of what's going on. But to get a science story, it has to be Earth-shattering kind of thing. It has to be a big story.
What many scientists would like is this larger picture of the fact that the entire enterprise is moving forward. That there are lots of things happening, and we definitely know more tomorrow than we do today, but that's not the way that it gets picked up by the media.
Well, ultimately, almost everyone is incentivized to sensationalize scientific findings. So I think it's important to remember that anytime you hear a science story on the news, surprising, unexpected results that have not been independently replicated, they are more likely than not to be wrong.
But despite this, I remain convinced that science is the best way to get at the truth. I mean, sure, in the short term, some may seek the spotlight by rushing the data analysis, overstating results, or circumventing peer review, but in the long term, that is not going to win you the Nobel Prize.
The bold claims, mistakes, and dead ends, they will fade into oblivion, and only sound science that is vigorously tested and independently validated, that is what makes it into the accepted body of knowledge. (magnets clicking)