Teaching scientists to see with the eyes of a journalist

HERE they were, two men with a four-legged, round table on an uneven floor, trying to find a position where it would stand without wobbling. A familiar problem for many a householder, but could it be done, they asked. It could. The table was eventually levelled. The trick was to keep two opposite legs in contact with the floor all the time and slowly to rotate the table until all four legs stood firmly on the floor.

This was not a re-run of a 1960s Barry Bucknell do-it-yourself programme, but an Open University mathematics programme last week on the "intermediate value theorem". The theorem says that provided you have no steps in the floor you need never resort to pieces of folded cardboard under one leg because there is always a position of no wobble.

Here was an apparently abstract piece of mathematics being demonstrated in such an appealing way that even those who pride themselves on their dislike of maths and science could not have failed to be entertained.

So why am I telling you all this? The reason is that I have been having fun pretending to be a real journalist with this newspaper as part of a scheme to promote "the public under­standing of science."

Nine individuals — known as media fellows — working as scientists in universities, industry or government de­partments are spending a few weeks with the press, radio or television to experience the way in which they handle scientific issues. The scheme was set up by the British Association for the Advancement of Science on behalf of COPUS, the Committee on the Public Understanding of Science.

The media takes a lot of stick from scientists who complain about their work being distorted or misrepresented. Some of this may be justified, but the fault does not always lie with the journalist. Michael Kenward, the editor of New Scientist whose idea it was to launch the scheme, thinks there are far too many academics pontificating about the media who do not have a clue about how it works. "It seemed to me," he said, "that the best way to teach scientists about the media was to give them a chance to work alongside journalists."

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