Being like Mike Jones
Mike Jones was a lecturer when I was an undergraduate student: and as with many of my lecturers, later became a friend when I went on to a PhD.
Mike taught me statistics: or failed to - I should say I failed to learn statistics from Mike, because he was a compelling and diligent lecturer who provided clear and copious notes. He had amazing handwriting - a beautiful copperplate italic style - and he hand-wrote his notes. I used to weep - literally - over my failure to understand statistics, and Sarah would be unable to understand why: "but he has such lovely handwriting".
Like other people in my life and career, I think of Mike often as someone who helped me learn a valuable and important lesson - just not one about statistics. Twitter recently reminded me of Mike, and of what I learned from him: first, by talking - as one does in these times of Covid - about statistics (which I do now understand); second by the annoying habit some Twitterati have, of dismissing contemptously people who are not expert; and third, by raising the topic of science communication as a conversation.
One day while I, a PhD student, was in the staff coffee room at university, a man came in from the outside world. He was probably a rough sleeper: dishevelled, a bit shambling. He said he had a question, about science. I, along with most of us, tried to pretend not to have noticed him - to blank out and ignore the non-science person intruding into our academic domain. Mike did not ignore him - Mike was a very nice man - he asked what his question was.
I remembered this many years later, at a different university, during a workshop led by the Vice Chancellor on 'public engagement'. Everyone was proposing ways to 'engage' with the public - seminars, open lectures, demonstrations - and I remembered Mike and the dishevelled man who came into the coffee room, and suggested we might make one table in the coffee room open to the public, so staff who wished might sit there and be open to questions from the interested public. You could have heard a pin drop. My suggestion was not well received, so we moved on to discussion of more formal formats. I still think just being open to the public - open as in people being accessible, willing to engage, not just as in buildings being open - is one of the most effective ways for science to engage with the public.
Well, the man's question turned out to be about Einstein's Theory of Relativity. The man had been sitting on a children's playground roundabout, idly spinning, and had noticed that when he went fast it seemed to him that time went slow. He had experimented - spinning faster, slower, observing how time seemed to slow more, the faster he went. Was this an example of Relativity, he asked, and could anyone help him to better understand it? Indeed, Einstein's Theory of Relativity does say that time goes slow if you go fast: it is called time dilatation - di-la-tation - but Americans, and us English through being beaten down by Americanisms, now call it time dilation which is shorter but less lyrical. But time dilatation becomes significant - which probably means noticeable - only if you are going close to the speed of light, which is 300 million metres a second - much faster than you can feasibly spin on a child's roundabout.
At this point, almost everybody made an excuse and left - and I nearly did too, it being clearly a ridiculous question. But Mike Jones didn't. Patiently, carefully, and with no hint of condescension, he led the dishevelled man through some basics of Relativity, explaining that indeed, by spinning fast he would be experiencing time dilatation but not so significantly as to be noticeable.
At the same seminar on public engagegement, at the different unversity years later, there was much dicussion on how to 'engage' with the public: what was to be our narrative, what story were we to tell, how were we to tell it? And this too is why Twitter reminded me of Mike Jones, because Twitter opined - or rather, some people engaged with 'science communication' twitter opined - that scientists should have training in how to tell their science stories - how to shape the science narrative.
In my own life I have gone through an evolution in how I talk in what might be called 'public engagement'. When I was a PhD student I was terrified by public speaking: my first slide show presentation was, in my eyes, a disaster of trembling hands, stuttered apologies, and upside-down slides (these being the days when a slide show was, literally, slides, projected and at the risk of having been put in the slide carousel upside down).
Later I became proficient at it - teaching in industry (and very much later back at a university), proficient at producing PowerPoint slide shows, familiar with my material, shaping my narrative arc, telling the scientific story, on message, clicking through the points. This is The Scientific Narrative: it is the eighth of Christopher Booker's 'Seven Types of Story': the academic narrative, that we all learn in science at school - Aims, Methods, Results, Conclusions - authoritative, confident, certain, organised. It is a peculiar type of narrative: Christopher Booker's seven types of story are drawn from fictional narratives, and all involve 'dramatic tension' - the hero is challenged, often stumbles only to rise and overcome - and without dramatic tension the narrative is, frankly, undramatic. The Scientific Story is told with the narrator as authority and the story as one of steady, planned, successful completion by godlike omniscient figures. Not much science is like that really - it is all about failure, mistakes, backtracking, challenges, with success a rare jewel plucked from the jaws of defeat - but it is rarely told like that because the Scientific Narrative is required: it masquerades as objective, dispassionate, authoritative, unchallengeable, gospel truth. And it's boring.
Later still my teaching in industry evolved, necessarily, into discussion: clients rarely employ a trainer just to learn what the trainer plans to teach them - they usually want to be trained because they face a problem, often an intractable, maybe impossible, problem that neverthless they have contracted to solve but have failed at so far despite their diligent, well informed, well resourced, best efforts. So they often want to discuss with the trainer possible approaches, or solutions, to their problem: and if it was easy they would have solved it and wouldn't have booked the training, so the trainer is faced with the hard problems, on the fly, without the benefit of a carefully planned Scientific Narrative arc. What ensues is a discussion, not a question-and-answer session, sometimes an argument, always with information and understanding flowing in both directions as each side informs and learns from the other: what is called a 'conversation'. I deployed this style when I started to teach graduate students at a university, as a part time lecturer: a conversation with the students, not a lecture: I found it greatly enjoyable and hope it proved also effective. Science as a conversation is very enjoyable, and hugely informative.
What Mike Jones had with the dishevelled man who entered the staff coffee room was a conversation - he listened as well as talked, he conversed rather than lecturing, he respected the man even though it was plain that their education and experience in the field was vastly different.
And that is the third way in which Twitter reminded me about Mike Jones: by raising the still unusual, but very essential, idea that engagement should be a conversation.
In recent years I have had the pleasure of 'organising' our town's Cafe Sci: literally, science talked in a cafe (or wine bar since we are soft English southerners). It's a wonderful thing: I get to hear speakers on all sorts of topics, in a casual informal environment where we also make friends and acquaintances. At its best there is a dynamic to-and-fro between 'speaker' and 'audience' - a fascinating interchange of question and answer, clarification, sometimes challenge, that brings science to life. Recently, during isolation, we went online and, being one of the first Cafe Sci to do so we were lucky enough to have Ann Grand, the International Organiser of Cafe Sci everywhere, to introduce our first session. And Ann reminded me, in her introduction, that Cafe Sci at its best is a conversation.
All of which reminded me of Mike Jones, of why science should be a conversation, and of why I've always wanted to be like Mike Jones.
Mike taught me statistics: or failed to - I should say I failed to learn statistics from Mike, because he was a compelling and diligent lecturer who provided clear and copious notes. He had amazing handwriting - a beautiful copperplate italic style - and he hand-wrote his notes. I used to weep - literally - over my failure to understand statistics, and Sarah would be unable to understand why: "but he has such lovely handwriting".
Like other people in my life and career, I think of Mike often as someone who helped me learn a valuable and important lesson - just not one about statistics. Twitter recently reminded me of Mike, and of what I learned from him: first, by talking - as one does in these times of Covid - about statistics (which I do now understand); second by the annoying habit some Twitterati have, of dismissing contemptously people who are not expert; and third, by raising the topic of science communication as a conversation.
One day while I, a PhD student, was in the staff coffee room at university, a man came in from the outside world. He was probably a rough sleeper: dishevelled, a bit shambling. He said he had a question, about science. I, along with most of us, tried to pretend not to have noticed him - to blank out and ignore the non-science person intruding into our academic domain. Mike did not ignore him - Mike was a very nice man - he asked what his question was.
I remembered this many years later, at a different university, during a workshop led by the Vice Chancellor on 'public engagement'. Everyone was proposing ways to 'engage' with the public - seminars, open lectures, demonstrations - and I remembered Mike and the dishevelled man who came into the coffee room, and suggested we might make one table in the coffee room open to the public, so staff who wished might sit there and be open to questions from the interested public. You could have heard a pin drop. My suggestion was not well received, so we moved on to discussion of more formal formats. I still think just being open to the public - open as in people being accessible, willing to engage, not just as in buildings being open - is one of the most effective ways for science to engage with the public.
Well, the man's question turned out to be about Einstein's Theory of Relativity. The man had been sitting on a children's playground roundabout, idly spinning, and had noticed that when he went fast it seemed to him that time went slow. He had experimented - spinning faster, slower, observing how time seemed to slow more, the faster he went. Was this an example of Relativity, he asked, and could anyone help him to better understand it? Indeed, Einstein's Theory of Relativity does say that time goes slow if you go fast: it is called time dilatation - di-la-tation - but Americans, and us English through being beaten down by Americanisms, now call it time dilation which is shorter but less lyrical. But time dilatation becomes significant - which probably means noticeable - only if you are going close to the speed of light, which is 300 million metres a second - much faster than you can feasibly spin on a child's roundabout.
At this point, almost everybody made an excuse and left - and I nearly did too, it being clearly a ridiculous question. But Mike Jones didn't. Patiently, carefully, and with no hint of condescension, he led the dishevelled man through some basics of Relativity, explaining that indeed, by spinning fast he would be experiencing time dilatation but not so significantly as to be noticeable.
At the same seminar on public engagegement, at the different unversity years later, there was much dicussion on how to 'engage' with the public: what was to be our narrative, what story were we to tell, how were we to tell it? And this too is why Twitter reminded me of Mike Jones, because Twitter opined - or rather, some people engaged with 'science communication' twitter opined - that scientists should have training in how to tell their science stories - how to shape the science narrative.
In my own life I have gone through an evolution in how I talk in what might be called 'public engagement'. When I was a PhD student I was terrified by public speaking: my first slide show presentation was, in my eyes, a disaster of trembling hands, stuttered apologies, and upside-down slides (these being the days when a slide show was, literally, slides, projected and at the risk of having been put in the slide carousel upside down).
Later I became proficient at it - teaching in industry (and very much later back at a university), proficient at producing PowerPoint slide shows, familiar with my material, shaping my narrative arc, telling the scientific story, on message, clicking through the points. This is The Scientific Narrative: it is the eighth of Christopher Booker's 'Seven Types of Story': the academic narrative, that we all learn in science at school - Aims, Methods, Results, Conclusions - authoritative, confident, certain, organised. It is a peculiar type of narrative: Christopher Booker's seven types of story are drawn from fictional narratives, and all involve 'dramatic tension' - the hero is challenged, often stumbles only to rise and overcome - and without dramatic tension the narrative is, frankly, undramatic. The Scientific Story is told with the narrator as authority and the story as one of steady, planned, successful completion by godlike omniscient figures. Not much science is like that really - it is all about failure, mistakes, backtracking, challenges, with success a rare jewel plucked from the jaws of defeat - but it is rarely told like that because the Scientific Narrative is required: it masquerades as objective, dispassionate, authoritative, unchallengeable, gospel truth. And it's boring.
Later still my teaching in industry evolved, necessarily, into discussion: clients rarely employ a trainer just to learn what the trainer plans to teach them - they usually want to be trained because they face a problem, often an intractable, maybe impossible, problem that neverthless they have contracted to solve but have failed at so far despite their diligent, well informed, well resourced, best efforts. So they often want to discuss with the trainer possible approaches, or solutions, to their problem: and if it was easy they would have solved it and wouldn't have booked the training, so the trainer is faced with the hard problems, on the fly, without the benefit of a carefully planned Scientific Narrative arc. What ensues is a discussion, not a question-and-answer session, sometimes an argument, always with information and understanding flowing in both directions as each side informs and learns from the other: what is called a 'conversation'. I deployed this style when I started to teach graduate students at a university, as a part time lecturer: a conversation with the students, not a lecture: I found it greatly enjoyable and hope it proved also effective. Science as a conversation is very enjoyable, and hugely informative.
What Mike Jones had with the dishevelled man who entered the staff coffee room was a conversation - he listened as well as talked, he conversed rather than lecturing, he respected the man even though it was plain that their education and experience in the field was vastly different.
And that is the third way in which Twitter reminded me about Mike Jones: by raising the still unusual, but very essential, idea that engagement should be a conversation.
In recent years I have had the pleasure of 'organising' our town's Cafe Sci: literally, science talked in a cafe (or wine bar since we are soft English southerners). It's a wonderful thing: I get to hear speakers on all sorts of topics, in a casual informal environment where we also make friends and acquaintances. At its best there is a dynamic to-and-fro between 'speaker' and 'audience' - a fascinating interchange of question and answer, clarification, sometimes challenge, that brings science to life. Recently, during isolation, we went online and, being one of the first Cafe Sci to do so we were lucky enough to have Ann Grand, the International Organiser of Cafe Sci everywhere, to introduce our first session. And Ann reminded me, in her introduction, that Cafe Sci at its best is a conversation.
All of which reminded me of Mike Jones, of why science should be a conversation, and of why I've always wanted to be like Mike Jones.
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