This evening I attended a Science Cafe organized by the Adventure Science Center and held at Fido. I wasn't super enthused about the topic (cicadas), but I was interested in seeing how something intended to share science with the public worked. I came away with some ideas about how I think it could better show how science really works.
I think it accomplished what the organizers were going for-- people (including lots of kids) asked a scientist questions. But that setup to me sort of enforced the idea that this scientist represents all scientists-- that you only need to talk to one to get a representation of what's known and unknown. I think I came to this conclusion because I got the sense that the professor answering questions wasn't really explaining the most recent work on the most interesting question about cicadas. That question-- why do huge groups of cicadas all emerge at the same time-- came up lots of times, and every time he said something to the effect of "we just don't know." When I asked whether communication among cicadas was involved, he did say that he felt it probably wasn't, but didn't explain why. I think since another scientist familiar with the same field probably wouldn't have said there's nothing known about why cicadas emerge all at once, it would have shown that there's differences in opinion among scientists on topics where the evidence doesn't yet fit together. I understand why there was only one-- there probably isn't more than one person in town who studies cicadas. But surely there are topics on which you could find two or three experts.
I also thought it would help if the scientist(s) explained how we know what we know instead of just giving information. Tonight's scientist did this for at least one question: he said that we know how deep underground the cicadas live because people have filled the holes through which they burrowed out with plaster. It would have been awesome if he'd done that for all,or at least most, of the questions, since that would show how scientists learn totally new things. It might have been a matter of what questions were asked-- a lot of them called for description rather than explanation, but there might be a way to turn them into "why" questions.
I'm not sure whether I'll go again-- it seemed pretty kid-oriented. I think that also bothered me a bit-- not that there's anything wrong with providing a way for kids to interact with scientists. It just seems like lots of those opportunities already exist-- camps, science museums, visits to schools. There aren't as many chances (at least that I'm aware of) for non-scientist adults to do that, unless they happen to know one. But I do wonder how many of the adult attendees were non-scientists-- I saw a lot of familiar faces from Vanderbilt.
