Unpopular Science
This year’s £10,000-plus-huge-publicity Aventis Prize for popular science writing has been scooped by David Bodanis for his book Electric Universe: How Electricity Switched On the Modern World.
“It’s such a treat to win—it is a genuine surprise,” he told the BBC News website.
“Many people take electricity for granted, but there’s electricity everywhere: there’s electricity in our brains; there’s electricity in our planet; there’s electricity powering our civilisation; the Sun burns by electricity.
“With the book, I wanted to open up the door and show what’s actually there.”
Let’s read that again.
“It’s such a treat to win—it is a genuine surprise,” he told the BBC News website. “Many people take electricity for granted, but there’s electricity everywhere: there’s electricity in our brains; there’s electricity in our planet; there’s electricity powering our civilisation; the Sun burns by electricity. “With the book, I wanted to open up the door and show what’s actually there.” (from Electric book wins science prize, BBC News)
Now, I can think of no conceivable way in which it is possible to say that the Sun burns “by electricity”.
The Sun is powered by nuclear fusion, which is a process where small nuclei bash together and stick, making larger nuclei and emitting energy in the process. The nucleus is the small, highly massive positively-charged lump at the centre of an atom and, in fact, electrostatic repulsion slows down the process significantly because like charges repel and thus two positive nuclei need far more energy to get close enough together to stick than they otherwise would.
There is one practical upshot of this: without the reduction in rate of reaction brought about by the reduced probability of a collision happening, stars would burn far, far faster and presumably ‘life as we know it would not exist’, or some other such suitably grandiose conclusion. Judging by the rubbish in the blurb about what would happen if electricity entirely ceased to exist, this may well be his point. However, it is both a ridiculously tenuous way of connecting stars to electricity, and utterly fatuous, in that of course the Universe would be different if you entirely removed one of its four fundamental forces.
It’s rather like saying “cars are powered by friction”: friction does do a number of important jobs for the motor industry, allowing tyres to grip the road and giving brakes the ability to slow them down, but to claim that it was what powered the car is patently ridiculous. It is even true that cars as we know them would not exist without friction, and perhaps an interesting (if pointless) scientific discussion might ensue around the point, but a lot of eyebrows would be raised if you condensed this notion into the crude phrase “cars are powered by friction” and then told that to the BBC.
Thus, it is true (but not very catchy) to say that “the rate of solar nuclear reactions is significantly modulated by electrostatic repulsion”, and perhaps even tenuously go on to say that this is an important fact, but “the Sun burns by electricity” is semi-sensical science made into an empty sound bite which is utterly unscientific.
Science certainly does need simplifying if it’s to be engaging to people who haven’t had years of formal training. However, I don’t think that the winner of a popular science prize should be turning interesting and comprehensible science into horribly misleading dumbed-down nonsense.
Chair of judges Nick Ross said “This book is wonderfully accessible—it’s a huge canvas but it reads like a novel, with twists and turns that would make a fiction writer happy to have been so inventive; and opens up a universe of facts that would scarcely be credible in an imaginary tale.”
I just hope that his book really is more than scarcely credible having read this rather too inventive sound bite.
May 19th, 2006 at 07:57
Try http://www.electric-cosmos.org/sun.htm for an explanation of the “Electric Sun Hypothesis”. Don’t pretend to understand it meself, but then I’m a philosopher, so I’m meant to take shots at scientific theories without knowledge or any relevant grounding whatsoever.
May 19th, 2006 at 08:44
I hope that he’s not advocating that bizarre theory. I actually spent about ten seconds reading about the “Electric Universe” hypothesis when I searched for “Electric Universe” on Wikipedia, just after having read for ten seconds about a band called “Electric Universe” and before finding the article about the book whose author I lambast above, which was what I was looking for in the first place.
I suspect he isn’t, because I don’t think it’s in any way mainstream science.
I can see why it’s not mainstream science, with the first “problem with conventional astrophysics” on that page (the solar neutrino flux issue) being regarded as a pretty-much solved problem, the idea that the Universe is filled with a plasma of ions flying in the face of the fact that light appears to be able to travel through space (photons from distant stars would be scattered by the free electrons before they reached us if travelling through plasma), that this crazy electric Sun thing could never explain stellar evolution (why would a star blow up into a red giant later in life?)…I suspect the list goes on.
I’m pretty sure this won’t be what he’s getting at, because the book is largely a history of electricity and key figures in its development, probably with a few throwaway remarks at the beginning, end or in the popular press to explain to people why they should care, and, most importantly, care enough to add to the £10,000 prize money by buying the book…
May 20th, 2006 at 14:10
Why is it that these websites advocating dramatic alternative theories of science are always published by people who blatantly have little understanding of the other scientific theories that they’re railing against?
I don’t give a crap if he has a Masters and Bachelors in Electrical Engineering - I’m studying for a Masters in Engineering and I know the crap that Engineers are taught/have to learn in order to engineer things. It’s a million miles removed from the things that Physicists and Mathematicians and people in theoretical fields have to learn and it doesn’t give him any more credibility that he studied for a PhD (again, in the field of engineering.)
It’s like all those bloody advocates of Intelligent Design who spent years studying Philosophy or Theology or Mechanical Engineering as is the case of the head of Mechanical Engineering at Bristol, who is a world-renowned ID supporter apparently… hmm, another engineer talking bollocks. We don’t seem to be very good at this sensible scientific theory thing. Maybe we should stick to making stuff rather than theorising about it.
I digress. Though now I’ve forgotten the point I was originally trying to make.
Never mind, you get the picture.
May 21st, 2006 at 19:53
It is quite worrying to find people getting prizes for things which are not worthy. How can the layman distinguish between what is and what is not true, especially when a scientific organisation award a hefty prize. I am rather worried about the future. How can this sort of thing actually be challenged in a meaningful way?