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| www.dreamstime.com |
Why science should be retold (4).
Returning to the picture with “the boy who collects shells on the seashore”, we could say that, at this moment (2012), humanity is leaving the seashore behind and is right on the verge of entering the "ocean".
An “ocean” that is an almost entirely new and unknown environment, a "place" where we will probably encounter or do things which have never crossed our mind before.
It is a fact that, due to the actual speed of the technological progress, the future seems already present:
Returning to the picture with “the boy who collects shells on the seashore”, we could say that, at this moment (2012), humanity is leaving the seashore behind and is right on the verge of entering the "ocean".
An “ocean” that is an almost entirely new and unknown environment, a "place" where we will probably encounter or do things which have never crossed our mind before.
It is a fact that, due to the actual speed of the technological progress, the future seems already present:
- science already teleports photons ;
- the first living bacteria artificially created in a lab has been obtained;
- the cloning of animals already has a short history;
- the human-like robots are already in place;
- due to the Internet and to the mobile phone devices & services, the global network of interconnectivity is already established;
- the dark matter, the Higgins’ boson and the strings theory suggest that we are very close to taking a look at the unseen side of the Universe;
- the industry of outer space tourism has already got its first bookings ;
- the images of some certain exoplanets have already been captured on camera.
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| www.dreamstime.com |
Yeah, ok, …the future is here... but how will we deal with it all ?
In the Ancient World, the Middle Ages and even during the Renaissance it was not very difficult for a student or other keen scholar to understand science because the amount of information at that time was relatively limited. But nowadays knowledge is growing exponentially and innovation seems like a snowball rolling at a speed almost impossible to keep up with.
For this reason, in a perfect contrast with the situation that existed a few hundreds or thousands of years ago, at present, understanding the research conducted in one field of science is difficult even for those who are experts in other related fields of knowledge. From this standpoint, Science seems to become more and more a kind of "magic" which is accessible only to “those most initiated among the initiated ones".
But what about the “civilians”, i.e. the overwhelming majority of laymen who do not have any specialized knowledge on science ?
The only chance for all these people to grasp something from what is happening or is going to happen in the field of Science is directly proportional with the ability of mass-media to explain these evolutions by means of news reports, websites, books, films and photographs which document all these developments.
For this reason, we will here try to see how the universe of mass-media displays this tsunami of science which is rolling towards us on a daily basis.
And this will be done because, due to the present context, any effort to "translate" the message of science into the “ordinary everyday language” is an action of stringent necessity for the proper functioning of human civilization.
In the Ancient World, the Middle Ages and even during the Renaissance it was not very difficult for a student or other keen scholar to understand science because the amount of information at that time was relatively limited. But nowadays knowledge is growing exponentially and innovation seems like a snowball rolling at a speed almost impossible to keep up with.
For this reason, in a perfect contrast with the situation that existed a few hundreds or thousands of years ago, at present, understanding the research conducted in one field of science is difficult even for those who are experts in other related fields of knowledge. From this standpoint, Science seems to become more and more a kind of "magic" which is accessible only to “those most initiated among the initiated ones".
But what about the “civilians”, i.e. the overwhelming majority of laymen who do not have any specialized knowledge on science ?
The only chance for all these people to grasp something from what is happening or is going to happen in the field of Science is directly proportional with the ability of mass-media to explain these evolutions by means of news reports, websites, books, films and photographs which document all these developments.
For this reason, we will here try to see how the universe of mass-media displays this tsunami of science which is rolling towards us on a daily basis.
And this will be done because, due to the present context, any effort to "translate" the message of science into the “ordinary everyday language” is an action of stringent necessity for the proper functioning of human civilization.
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| www.sxc.hu |