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Every year around this time, the Nobel Prize in Physics is announced, along with similar prizes in Chemistry, Literature, and that Noblest of Nobels, the Peace Prize. As The Prompt’s resident science guy, and lover of all things physics, I figured it was my duty to read about the Physics prize and then give our readers a quick summary. Because the more you know, you know? But as I read the articles published by other media outlets I became distracted by something else: after reading many of these popular science articles I was left feeling like I still didn’t understand the topic any better.
So rather than try to explain the Nobel Prize in Physics in 500 words or fewer, I’m going to instead discuss here why I think that our expectation that every topic (be it science or politics) should be amenable to explanations that can be shoehorned into a few tweets, is misguided.
Let’s start with those articles on the Nobel Prize topic. Now to be fair, the prize committee in Stockholm didn’t do the media any favors by awarding the Physics prize “for theoretical discoveries of topological phase transitions and topological phases of matter.” Try pitching that at your next editorial meeting. Further complicating the reporting is the fact that most experts expected this year’s physics prize to be awarded to the discovery of gravitational waves (remember those?).
So it’s understandable that many science writers were left a bit flummoxed about how to explain topological phases of matter to their readers (and themselves) on a short deadline. The problem is that instead of admitting that this was a topic too esoteric to be explained in a nice little bite-sized piece, they forged ahead with bite-sized pieces anyways.
The results were often an article that went something like following.
First the author says something like:
“The Nobel was awarded to physicists who studied some very zany properties of matter – because you know, quantum mechanics is cray cray…“
Then, they go on:
“The scientists found that the zaniness of the matter could be explained using a branch of mathematics called Topology…“
If you read “topology” and were like WTF?!, no worries, they have you covered:
“Topology is…[insert standard explanation of topology using donuts, coffee mugs, etc. as found on Wikipedia or any popular level explanation of Topology ever].”
And so finally we arrive at:
“Cool, right? Isn’t it crazy that topology [a thing you’d never heard of until a few sentences ago] explains matter’s rascally behavior [behavior that we never discussed in any detail, btw]?”
At the end of a piece like this, you might feel like you have a new appreciation for topological phase transitions, because, you know, “topology” and “donuts” and “quantum mechanics,” or whatever. But have you really learned much besides a few new buzzwords?
In science writing, or writing on any technical subject really, there are a few different ways to fail the reader. The most obvious way is to just write a bunch of nonsensical or false information. Another way to fail the reader is to use faulty analogies. The pieces I read on the Physics Prize didn’t suffer as much from these particular issues.
Instead, many of these summary articles suffered from what I’ll call here the Non-Sequitur Problem. By this, I mean an explanation that simply throws a bunch of concepts at the reader without giving any real sense of how the different concepts are related. It’s a subtle fault — because it feels like you learned something, and you did, technically. But mostly, you just learned a bunch of disparate tidbits of information — fractions that still don’t add up to a whole number.
Look, some Nobel Prize-winning topics may be amenable to a 500 word piece. A short piece on Gravitational Waves might be OK because most readers are already familiar with both gravity and waves. But a 500 word piece on topological phase transitions that actually explains much? If you honestly think that can be done, I have Seven Bridges in Konigsberg to sell you.
One thing you can do is devote a lot more words (and thus time) to the topic. For example, over at Forbes, Ethan Siegal has a post with a pretty good explanation of the Physics Nobel. But providing a better explanation comes at a cost: the article is longer than many of the bite-sized pieces put out by many major media outlets. And it requires a lot more thinking than just reading buzzwords about how donuts (i.e.,= topology) are related to matter behaving badly (i.e., = phase transitions). No doubt there are other pretty good explanations on the web, ranging from “somewhat complicated and somewhat interesting” to “super complicated and absurdly boring.”
Now, if you write for the sort of publication that can’t afford to turn away 95 percent of your readers who have no interest in devoting more than 2 ½ minutes to “understanding” the subject of the Physics Nobel — which is a totally reasonable position — then just be honest with your readers. This topic is too complicated/niche for us to waste your time writing much about it here.
In fact, that’s more or less what WIRED did in their article covering of the physics prize: “Nobel Prize in Physics Goes to Another Weird Thing Nobody Understands.” They don’t even try to go into any detail on the topic, and mostly just bemoan the failed attempts by someone on the Nobel committee to explain the science using a donut and a pretzel.
Here at The Prompt, we’re taking this one step further. Here’s a preview of our upcoming article Nobel Prize in Physics Explained in Just Six Words:
Topological Phase Transitions? I. Can’t. Even.
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