SciOnline - keynote speech

This is the second instalment from the SciOnline 2011 conference in North Carolina, USA written by Lucas and Hannah.

Lucas

Science on the Radio

I might have been a little bit too optimistic in my choice of beverages. At least now I know that two beers are enough to make your head spin when you just got an 11 hour flight, a short sleep and an 8 hour drive behind you. I was lucky that when the keynote speaker Robert Krulwich began his talk on this first night of Science Online 2011, my head started spinning in exactly the opposite direction, canceling out my jetlag, tiredness and intoxication.

For those of you who don't know Robert Krulwich (like me, before tonight's lecture): > together with Jad Abumrad, Krulwich hosts a radio show and podcast called Radiolab. From the samples Krulwich played during his lecture, I soon discovered Radiolab is unlike other science shows that I know. Radiolab is the kind of science show even your mother would love to listen to. Really!

Krulwich explained that at the heart of every episode is a simple question. A question a five year old could have asked. 'What is time?', 'Why do humans lie?', or 'Where does music come from?'. These questions eventually lead deep into the realms of science, but by asking them in their purest form, anyone can see their beauty and appeal.

Krulwich and Abumbrad explore the answers to these questions with a playful naivety. A show about probability and statistics starts with Jad Abumrad telling a story about a a little girl named Laura Buxton who releases a balloon. That balloon traveled to the other side of the country where it landed in the garden of another girl named Laura Buxton. The importance of mathematics? Krulwich plays a song where Johnny Cash sings about a prisoner counting down to his execution. Every episode sounds like a busy playground where science, humour, sound and music are running around and having fun. No science or scientists is considered holy. Scientists are tickled and provoked ("Do you really think that"?) until they tell their story as if they were standing in a pub, instead of holding a condescending lecture.

It is this simple approach that makes Radiolab tick. The pacing is perfect, not because it is just right, but because it is a little bit too slow. No listener gets left behind this way. Since most listeners will be ahead of the presenting duo, they become impatient for Krulwich and Abumrad to continue the train of thought that have set in motion.

But Krulwich and Abumrad don't just make a popular, well-crafted, entertaining science show. They capture that special feeling of wonder and surprise about the world in which we live, and what science can teach us about it. They are rehabilitating awesome. If this lecture is a sign of things to come, this will be a great conference.

Hannah

A radio voice coming out of a human body - Robert Krulwich on Radiolab at Science Online 2011

Over the past year, I've had countless non-scientists recommend one podcast to me: Radiolab. I had never listened to podcasts seriously before, but after enough nagging, I decided to give it a try. For a full month-long experiment in the lab, locked in the microscope room, I dedicated myself to the dulcet tones of Robert Krulwich and Jad Abumrad.

It became a bit of an obsession, and I soon found that I had become a nagger myself. Someone mentions a parasite: "OMG Have you heard the Radiolab episode on parasites? YOU HAVE TO LISTEN TO IT." Or I'd talk about the Soviet experiments on foxes and dog domestication and then add, "...but you really have to listen to the guys on Radiolab tell it." It got to the point where, when I was thinking about how to explain science, my interior monologue took on Jad Abumrad's voice and inflection.

Whenever I recommended the program, friends asked why exactly it was so good and I could never quite pinpoint it. Lame answers like "They make science FUN!" or "It sounds really pretty!" followed. Fortunately, at ScienceOnline 2011 I got the chance to hear from Robert Krulwich himself about what he thinks makes Radiolab so successful.

The soundscape Robert shared in the next hour set a theme for the conference: science writing as storytelling.

The idea of science as a story comes up frequently in the lab. When discussing research and trying to formulate a paper out of data, my boss always insists, "just tell your story" A good scientific paper follows a clear plotline of how you stumbled upon an interesting question, the follow-up experiments, what you learned, and why it matters.

But somehow, these stories of scientific research often get lost in translation. This could happen during the actual writing of the paper, when it gets muddled in poor writing or jargon. Or in the retranslation by the media of a scientific paper into "news" that erases any trace of the process and instead focuses on the "big discovery." But that's not how science works: scientists ask questions and make small discoveries that add up to form a larger idea.

And it's this process that Radiolab captures so well. Robert and Jad ask questions about an overarching theme incrementally, interviewing scientists and other experts to find answers, and then question those answers. They tell the stories as people trying to understand the world around them - just like scientists.

This form of storytelling - of inserting themselves into the act of questioning - encapsulates the joy and wonder of discovery. It makes Radiolab more than a science show, simply highlighting the coolest science. It forces the listeners to ask questions and make the discoveries themselves, and to feel the excitement of learning something new about the world.

Although Robert and Jad work on the radio, there's no reason that writers can't learn from their success. We should try to tell stories as thinking people, not as scientists preaching from some lofty tower of truth. We should try to tell stories about questions: why we care about this question as well as the "answer." We shouldn't be afraid to take risks in form; sometimes we'll fail, sure, but a different perspective can be illuminating.

After Robert's talk, sitting in my suite with my co-bloggers at the Southern Fried Science Network, I already feel overstimulated and energized, like I will leave this conference with many new ideas to apply to my writing. But, of course, it's still Thursday! Let me tell you: based on this night alone, Science Online 2011 has already been worth it.