Tumblr's For Scientists, Too

After reading Adam Frank's essay "Welcome to the Age of Denial" in the New York Times, found here, I can't help but wonder why everything he says just strikes a nerve in me.

I suppose it has something to do with the presentation of his argument. Frank is a bit rude in his treatment of creationists, calling their belief system "silliness" and giving no second thought to their viewpoint. This is the opposite of open-minded, something all scientists should strive to be.

Deeper than his presentation, however, is the argument itself, full of transparent holes and little support from credibility. The very first paragraph's shocking statistics could have been pulled from thin air for all we know--and by the look of them, I would be inclined to think this is the case. In my personal experience, Americans today are skeptical of everything, religious ideas even more so than science. If the number of creationists in this country has increased by two percent over the past thirty years, I'll go without wi-fi. Seriously, if you prove that stat to me, I'll stay off of Tumblr for two whole days.

There's the rub, though; when Frank asserts that today's culture is "less engaged with science and technology" than in the past, one thing comes to my mind. What about all of those "science Twitter feeds and blogs" that exist, like this one? I can't tell you how many times I've come across a Tumblr post about the awesomeness of Carl Sagan or how "f***ing incredible" the cosmos is. (It's especially great when sci-fi fandoms bring real science into the picture, like with this particular post.) Pictures of nebulae and amazing insects and technologies blow our minds, and young people, at least the ones on Tumblr, eat all that up. To say that science in modern society is "broken and lost," as opposed to full of wonder, is simply a lie.

That's not to say that we don't sometimes need reminding of the amazing world we live in. This is one point on which Adam Frank and I can agree. Keeping science from the general populace is idiotic. The most prudent way to get people interested in science is to show them how their smartphones and medicines and cars work, not to mention cool discoveries like a planet where it rains glass.

I've rambled quite a bit here, and I'm gonna bring it to a close. But remember: just because science isn't in the forefront of politics, doesn't mean it's not important to American culture in the 2010s. Frank says that "science is a way of behaving in the world. It is, simply put, a tradition." As any young person of any era would probably say, traditions should change--and they will. That's probably the only real tradition that exists.