From ABC Radio’s AM on March 3:

TONY EASTLEY: Scientists say the Chilean earthquake was strong enough to affect the day-to-day lives of everyone on earth, by making each of those days a tiny fraction shorter. The quake was violent enough to shift the earth on its axis, which means the planet is spinning faster.

A short time later….

DR DAVID KERRIDGE: Inevitably there will be some change in the earth’s rotation rate, an associated change in the orientation of the axis. But these are very, very tiny effects… It’s nothing that’s going to affect anybody in daily life, but it’s something that just follows from the basic physics of how rotating objects behave.

What is it that makes a science story newsworthy?  I have a rule of thumb:

1) anything to do with dinosaurs, evolution or space;

2) anything else that will impact the “person on the street”.

Everybody likes a good dinosaur story or artist’s impressions of exploding stars. If it lies outside category 1, however, it has to involve a technology or idea that could change you life by, for example, making your phone smaller or curing a disease. There is no room in most Australian media for stories that are interesting because they tell you something about the way the universe works.

The transcript from AM is a good example of what happens when a story fails to fit into either of the two categories: the journalist will wedge it in there. In this case it is easy enough for a media consumer to pick up the contradiction. Everyone has a pretty good idea that a day is 24 hours long and later in the AM story it was revealed the day shortened by only 1.26 millionths of a second, making the change inconsequential. Tony Eastley didn’t really mean it when he said that “day-to-day lives” would be affected, and most people probably understood that.

On other occasions, when the subject matter is more abstract, such inaccuracy can cause confusion. Over the past decade there have been several “quantum teleportation” experiments that hooked some media interest. The point of this bit of physics is to prove that it is possible to transfer a quantum-state without being penalised by Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle. In most cases the quantum-state was transferred between particles of light that came out of a laser.

This story was levered into category 2 by connecting quantum teleportation with sci-fi style transport devices. The media set about selling this high-tech story that “could bring Star Trek tech to life”. How realistic is this angle? Quantum teleportation does go some way towards demonstrating there is nothing in the laws of quantum mechanics that forbids perfect disembodied transport in the Star Trek sense, but the complexity involved in teleporting a human instead of particles of light is well over 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 times greater.

I suspect that most people who consumed teleportation-related news stories were mislead because accuracy was sacrificed to sell copy.

So who is to blame for this sort of problem? Certainly the media deserves a lot of flak; commercial imperatives seem to trump accuracy and nuance. An editor is likely to judge that an article about quantum state transfer will attract only a limited audience and instead they go for the (slightly misleading) sci-fi angle.

This kind of science reporting also sends a strong message to researchers, namely “give us a hook (in categories 1 or 2) or we will ignore you”. Consequently, and especially with more esoteric parts of research, scientists will sometimes drop their normal standards of rigor and say things that are far-fetched because without it, no matter how interesting the work, the media will ignore them.

The obvious question is whether any of this matters. From the point of view of a research physicist, it is endlessly disappointing. Surely out there somewhere there are people who would be interested in research that illuminates the way the universe works, even if it won’t  result in a new app for a mobile phone.

On another level, the most important science story in the media right now is climate change. How does the relationship between science and media play out in this debate? For one thing, the black and white eyes of the media seem totally incapable of reporting this issue with the nuance that is required.

Very little space is devoted to the basic physics behind the problem — to actually explain why CO2 is an issue and what evidence we have so far. Mostly we seem to be overwhelmed by the easy-to-write stories about emails leaked from East Anglia or the horse-trading over the ETS. At some point people get sick of the whole issue and the reason behind it all — that we might be permanently altering the climate of the planet — is lost.

Some scientists do speak out, but editors seem unable to tell the difference between informed comment and quackery. Inevitably, those with the simple, easy-to-sell message get the most oxygen, frequently leaving the debate hollowed out through lack of rigor. Worse still, the people who get the most space to comment on this issue are professional opinion writers for whom climate change is just another plaything they can use to stir up controversy.

Perhaps this whole problem is a reflection of how ill-prepared Australians are to be informed and understand issues related to the natural sciences.

We are bombarded nightly with professional comment on stock prices and exchange rates. Why?  Because these things do, at some level, impact our livelihoods by changing the cost of mortgages and holidays. Now, for perhaps the first time, humans are faced with an issue of physics that could affect our livelihoods. The lack of expertise in the media, politics and the general public seems to be preventing a sensible understanding of climate science.

I, along with many other people who work in the natural sciences, can only watch from the sidelines and despair.