Which is It?

Commenters Paul Sutherland and Daniel Fischer and I had a lively discussion in the comments in my last entry about the Kepler mission results, and thanks to them I had a little food for thought for this entry.  The issue is “hype” and when it gets applied to science announcements.  The science community is understandably cautious when announcing new results. Anybody who was around during the infamous “cold fusion” announcement days will understand why — those were results that WERE hyped by a self-serving research institution that didn’t look well enough at the results before applying the hype.  It was a fiasco.

Yesterday’s announcement about the Kepler mission observing atmospheric characteristics of a distant planet was an exciting one.  It wasn’t the announcement of a planetary discovery — it went well beyond that to show us that the instrument, even when doing calibration studies, is capable of returning good, useful data. This is important because Kepler is supposedly the NASA mission that will help scientists find Earth-like planets.

One of my commenters applied the word “hype” to the announcement, and I don’t think that term really applies.  Hype would apply if the press conference participants were making claims that weren’t backed up by solid science. I didn’t see any evidence of that, nor do I think they were saying things that weren’t true. They were excited by the many thousands of good, clean light curves that Kepler returned — and, I think, excited as any scientist would be, at the solid potential for discovery as Kepler goes about its mission. The data coming from Kepler — as well as any other mission doing similar work — will be a treasure trove for future scientists around the world.

No legitimate scientist deserves the term “hype” to be applied to diligently performed science — I don’t care if they’re from NASA or Europe or Japan or Russia or India or wherever good astronomy and space science are being done.  Certainly NASA comes in for its share of criticism of “over-promoting” stories, but as I pointed out to my commenters, I’ve also seen it done by institutions outside of NASA.  No one country’s science community has a monopoly on breathless prose.

I get a number of press releases each week from around the world, and there have been occasional stories come out with breathless reportage that doesn’t always do justice to the story being promoted.  It’s not a problem unique to any one country or institution — and actually, I think that a certain amount of breathlessness is understandable in the media environment we all face.  Hell, it’s human to be excited about what we learn, isn’t it?  Or, should we have all our scientists get up on podiums with long faces, white lab coats, skinny ties, and talk to us in Greek symbols?  I don’t think so…

My main point yesterday is that the mainstream media just doesn’t report on science as it should — and so to get attention, I suspect that public information officers sometimes get a little excited in their writing.  I think that I’d rather see a little excitement in press releases and stories than the alternative — dry, cold facts without a shred of the human interest that makes science the exciting endeavor that it is.  Note that I’m not excusing the kind of “hype” that brought us the cold fusion disaster — not at all.  There’s a happy medium, but given a choice, I’d rather read excitement in someone’s prose.  What do you think?

Note: both correspondents brought up another issue about the lack of mentions of prior discoveries about exoplanets by non-NASA missions. This is a fair discussion point — however, my reading of the situation is that (as I mentioned in my replies to them) the purpose of a press conference IS to talk about what the given spacecraft/telescope/instrument has observed. Given the time constraints of press conferences, that may be all that the scientists have time to talk about.

However, as I (and Daniel and Paul) know, those references to prior work ARE mentioned properly in the professional papers that are published from the data.  I’m not sure how one solves the problem of mentioning all related work in a press conference — and I invite discussion on that point.  I’ll share one anecdote from a press conference I attended once at a meeting.  One scientist was going to talk about some of his team’s work on a particular observatory’s instrument and wanted to mention another team’s work as a reference point for the observations they had done. The first scientist talked to the second scientist about it and was accused of trying to steal the second team’s thunder.  That wasn’t really what he wanted to do, but in fairness to the second team, he refrained from mentioning their work — and was then accused of ignoring other observations!  So, there may be political considerations as well as time constraints in these press conferences. We of the press (and outside the science teams) don’t always know the story behind the story being told and how it was put together. But, at least we have the papers to read to find out the fullness of any given research effort and the influences upon it.