American Scientist

It’s not too often that we get a submission from an author who warns us that his manuscript might not be our usual cup of tea.

In our January–February 2011 issue, physicist Bruce Cameron Reed of Alma College in Michigan wrote about the role that silver played in producing uranium for the first atomic bomb (“From Treasury Vault to the Manhattan Project”). He has since published a textbook, The History and Science of the Manhattan Project. It is obvious that Dr. Reed knows his material and cares deeply about this contentious time in world history. So when he told us there was one aspect of the time period that he felt he always had difficulty getting students sufficiently engaged in, and that he was attempting a different method of communicating the issues, we were interested in hearing what he had to say.

Surprisingly, Dr. Reed told us that he never felt that students got deeply into the discussion of the ethics and strategic necessity of using nuclear weapons. All the facts and statistics were perhaps a bit too removed from them, he surmised. So in trying to find new ways to connect, he thought of using student voices, “to remind readers that behind the statistics and committees and meetings were real people with horrendous responsibilities making real decisions where no right or wrong answers were possible, all in awful circumstances.” Considering that the specter of nuclear war was stirred recently by the false alarms that were accidentally issued during a drill in Hawaii, a reexamination of the ethics seems particularly urgent and relevant.

Dr. Reed said that in developing his approach, he took some inspiration from Galileo, who in 1632 used a dialogue among two philosophers and a layman to discuss the merits of the Copernican system compared with those of the Ptolemaic system. Things did not go so well for Galileo after he wrote that book, but we hoped for a better outcome for Dr. Reed.

We are always looking for novel, but effective, ways to give science communication a wider reach, and there are plenty of instances in which collaborations between science and the arts have produced pieces that expanded the scope of both. In essence, that is what Dr. Reed presented to us, a dramatic dialogue among three students discussing the convoluted arguments for and against the use of nuclear weapons at the end of World War II (Perspective, “The Ongoing Story of Hiroshima and Nagasaki”). We put aside our preconceptions, read Dr. Reed’s approach, and found it engaging. So we’ve decided to give it a go, and we hope that you can see his reasons for taking this angle on the story and that it also makes you think—not just about the topic, but about how novel ways of telling a story could appeal to different audiences. Let us know your reaction.

Finding the right way to debate complex ideas is also a guiding theme in this issue’s Science Communication column (“Reasonable Versus Unreasonable Doubt”). Much as Dr. Reed’s article stresses that there aren’t necessarily any fully correct answers during a debate, the authors of this column, David B. Allison, Gregory Pavela, and Ivan Oransky, discuss the role that doubt should play both in research and in the communication of scientific results. The authors emphasize that a mindset of healthy skepticism is a productive one for scientists, but they also point out that this doubt can be coopted by those who wish to discredit the science, whether for financial or ideological reasons. In pushing back against this illegitimate use of doubt, the authors argue that scientists and other advocates must be careful not to demonize doubt itself, because such tactics can be turned back on them.

Some research suggests that a “backfire effect” occurs when people with strong beliefs are presented with data contrary to their views: They tend to choose to stick with their beliefs rather than be swayed by the data. But Dr. Allison and his coauthors state that other studies haven’t been able to replicate this result. Do you have your own experiences with this effect? We’re always interested in more data.

—Fenella Saunders (@FenellaSaunders)