I was hoping to get an interesting post on applying Gödel's incompleteness theorem to physics up sometime last week, but it turned out to be quite difficult to make my arguments rigorous, and so that little essay has been placed on the back burner. In the meantime, I'd like to comment on Sabine's post regarding science reporting and media coverage. While the post spans a great deal of interesting material, the latter half deals mainly with the thesis that public discussion of physics should not be thought of as relevant by physicists themselves. I agree with this in almost all instances, but there is one point where I think the public discussion and media coverage does matter. Since it's a worthwhile point, and also ties in to another upcoming post, I thought I'd spend some time on it here.

A Story

I think it'd be best to start off with a little story from my past, regarding how I became interested in physics research. Until rather recently, say three years ago, I was mostly committed to becoming a mathematician. I'd always thought—and mostly, still do—that there wouldn't be much point in doing physics research unless my research program was part of an overall drive toward a theory of everything. And unfortunately, the only path toward a theory of everything that I knew about was string theory.

You see, at the time I was beginning to contemplate career paths, string theory was at one of its heights of popularity. Brian Greene's The Elegant Universe had been on my shelf since seventh grade, and I re-read it periodically. My parents had rented the PBS television adaptation, which we all watched together as a family. A lot of media coverage was spawned from these, and so whenever I picked up a copy of some popular science magazine in the school library, the physics content would almost always mention some connection to string theory (baby universes… from string theory! the big bang… from colliding D-branes! etc.). So it was pretty clear that if I was going to be doing physics research, it would end up taking me toward string theory.

Now, even then, with what little mathematical knowledge I had, I could see that string theory was pretty… messy. Far from the simple diagrams and thought experiments in Greene's book, once I started looking through the way that they formulated some of the problems, or even just checking out the consequences of supersymmetry, I could see that this wouldn't be very much fun to work in. My prejudices also caused me to be displeased by the fact that general relativity was supposed to emerge as a low-energy limit, instead of being incorporated from the beginning. So at that point, I had decided that pure math would be a lot more fun.

Then, in my senior year of high school (or perhaps a little before), I found Lee Smolin's book Three Roads to Quantum Gravity. This bypassed all the media hype about string theory as the only approach to quantum gravity, and showed me that there were actually alternatives to be found: loop quantum gravity being the foremost competitor. Now that I knew where to look, I discovered the physics was not nearly as homogenous a research field as I had thought: people were working on all kinds of interesting paths toward a theory of everything. And thus, to cut a long story of reading and discovery short, my enthusiasm for physics was re-kindled, and I find myself where I am today.

Think of the Children

The point of our story, if you hadn't guessed, is to show exactly why working physicists might want to care about the media coverage of physics: because it effects the up-and-coming generation of physicists. If string theory had continued to be unfailingly popular, how many others like me might have abandoned physics? You might think that I'm a special case, but I've got a lot of anecdotal evidence that says otherwise (and I'll be writing a post about that shortly).

But more generally, if the media portrays physics as stagnant, you might not attract many young physicists looking to make some exciting progress. If the media portrays quantum physics as inextricability connected to mysticism, then we might scare off those who are in to serious science, or even attract those who are more interesting in consciousness than in wavefunction collapse. And if the LHC is going to settle everything in a few years, then why bother getting into fundamental physics at all? Or even worse, if Garrett Lisi has a theory of everything already, what is there left to do?

And I'm not talking about those "young physicists" who are knowledgeable enough to see the big picture. Yes, if you're in graduate school, you obviously can figure out that the LHC isn't going to settle anything, and that if string theory doesn't seem like your cup of tea then you'll be able to find something else. (I personally know two graduate students who have taken the latter path.) Those people will be fine; they know enough to realize that the media coverage of their field isn't worth basing decisions on.

I'm talking about the kids for whom media coverage and popular science books are all they know of physics. The gifted high school student with nobody to guide him toward the right books, or show him the arXiv's broad spectrum of research areas, or point out the flaws in popular science articles. The middle schooler whose mom buys him The Dancing Wu Li Masters for his birthday, instead of A Brief History of Time, since she's heard that the former is a seminal work in the field. Or the college freshmen who oscillates between courses at registration, not sure whether she should go into physics based on what she's heard so far, or stick with something like business that she knows will guarantee her a job.

If we don't manage to steer the popularization of physics toward the kind of balanced sanity that Sabine discusses, then these people will be affected negatively, and in turn, so will our field. So I think that in this aspect, at least, media coverage does matter.