Particle physicist Ivo van Vulpen argues for a more serious approach to science communication, his second field of study. On Friday, he holds his inaugural lecture in Leiden.
He can get quite annoyed by it, says professor of science communication Ivo van Vulpen: colleagues who think it is wonderful if someone plays the piano in his spare time, but think talking about science in the media is actually just a weird use of time. “Then you would have been better off working more on your physics, you can hear them thinking.”
Van Vulpen knows what it’s like. He is always willing to respond to media requests, partly in response to his successful popular science book The Melody of Nature about the particle world. “In an interview, I was once asked why I actually do the things I do. Little did I know, because I was asked. But then I did start thinking. Why science communication in the first place?”
For two years, Van Vulpen has been extraordinary professor of science communication in Leiden one day a week, in addition to his job as a particle physicist at the UvA and Nikhef, connected to the ATLAS experiment at CERN. His oration Friday will be about both his observations and his ambitions at the intersection of the two disciplines: physics and communication.
Your oration is not about particles, but about communicating about particles.
“I know all about particles and a little bit about communication, so it’s a bit of a dare. I mainly want to share my observations from two years of walking around in a field that is new to me.”
The title of your oration is “Multiplying by dividing / Vermenigvuldigen door te delen”.
“Of course, it’s a bit of a tease for all those alphas who claim not to understand anything about beta stuff. But I think it will only get more space for physics if we better tell what we are doing. Physicists think too easily that they are the centre of everything and that they will always have support and enough interested people.”
And they don’t?
“The paradox is that we always point out that everything and everything is physics and is in it, but that doesn’t immediately make the profession more attractive. Science communication should not only be about how clever we are, but more so about the special questions you can ask with it.”
What are good reasons for science communication?
“There are, free after my colleague Ionica Smeets, three reasons. Democratic: offering citizens insight to make better decisions. Cultural: serving human curiosity and imagination. And economic: showing what we do with taxpayers’ money, plus new technology, plus new knowledge talent.”
People might be a bit jealous of colleagues who keep appearing in the media?
“I’m sure that plays into it somewhere, but I think it says more about the overall stress in academia. I don’t want to be sour, but people have to fight for funding, and for young colleagues a serious question is how they can ever get a real job. Science is often idealised, a bit of pondering on your Chersterfield, but in reality it’s a rock-hard world.”
Then you don’t have time for media?
“It doesn’t pay off in the existing system. Look at research proposal reviews. In practice, that’s where your scientific ideas and achievements revolve. Communication doesn’t count structurally. But if you say something about communication in a proposal, it should also be serious and verifiable.”
Science communication should be taken more seriously?
“Much more seriously. And what I have discovered as a simple physicist in recent years is that there are serious tools for that as well. An institution like impactlab has shown that you can measure the extent to which a communication effort produces something. NWO can thus use that to assess proposals. So I also hope that the proposed Centre for Science-Academia Communication will really come about.”
What are your intentions as the new one-day-a-week professor?
“I would like to better map out which forms of science communication work and which do not, and above all: where are we leaving things. The starting point is always to do this scientifically, by measuring effect. But I also have an activist intention: to make sure that many more physicists understand that they owe it to society to tell good stories. And that it makes sense to make connections, for example also towards MBO like Rolf Hut at the Leiden Instrument-making School. Working as an academic is an enormous privilege, for which it is best to give something in return.”
Do it, then, science communication?
“Indeed: it is also essential within science itself. What I see is that, above all, people don’t want to be thought stupid. So you never say after a lecture that you didn’t understand a thing. The other day we did a session at the conference in Veldhoven with people we asked to give a talk to non-specialists. It was dramatic, everyone had completely lost each other after only three slides.”