History of science is essential to science communication

In the twenty-first century, the wealth of any society is closely tied to the degree that its people understand and support science. Whether in the United States or the People's Republic of China, it is important to educate as much of the population as possible on the nature of science, its methods, goals and ethos, and on the pervasive role science plays in our lives. This starts with science education in schools but should continue throughout life through science communication and popularization. As scientists, historians of science, or science communicators and popularizers, we share the goal of helping others understand not only the scientific content but also how scientists work, why they value new knowledge, and how their work impacts society.

We recognize that many high-level works in our fields do not fit the needs of a broader society. While often well-executed, these histories or professional publications may involve complex abstractions, theories or controversies internal to a professional group. Historians might tell a story that requires prior knowledge within their field, without giving the general reader enough context to understand the point of the story. Science communicators might discuss abstractions or generalizations known mainly to their peers, and science popularizers might include both science analogies and fictional stories to grab the attention of the reader, inadvertently hindering an accurate understanding of science. All of us who bring science to the public bear the responsibility to be scientifically and historically accurate, while avoiding unnecessary and tedious details.

Be true to the data, whether you are a scientist, a historian of science, or a science communicator or educator. When any of us tells a tale, performs a narrative or reconstructs a story about scientists and their research, we may each focus on different events or hold different perspectives. However, our narratives must rest on the historical record, free from embellishment or glorification. The days of weaving fanciful and glorified hagiographies of science should be replaced by popular science writing and popular biographies of scientists that avoid exaggeration of importance, uniqueness, difficulty or achievement. When we want to reach beyond our professional colleagues, we should take care to expose readers gradually (if at all) to our more abstract concerns. Just tell the story. Science is exciting without embellishment, and narratives that are direct and convey advanced concepts gradually (such as historiography or the methods of science) are more accessible to a non-specialist audience.

As indicated, a central question of this special issue of Cultures of Science addresses the relevance and utility of the history of science and technology to science communication and science education. This question is particularly apt for me to reflect on, as I look back over a career of more than fifty years in physics and history of science, including a quarter-century as a professor and over a decade as the Spencer Weart Director of the Center for History of Physics at the American Institute of Physics (AIP). As a historian of science with extensive experience in professional and scientific societies (such as the American Geophysical Union, Geological Society of America, American Association of Physics Teachers, and the American Physical Society), I have also maintained long-standing affiliations with the History of Science Society and the International Union of History and Philosophy of Science (IHPST). I have been a council member of IHPST and an active participant in its congresses and commissions for decades, although I am now involved at a slower pace.

In most American and European universities, the history of science is separated from science communication, science journalism, and science teaching. Especially at large state universities, these activities can be housed in different administrative units. Institutional obstructions can impede collaboration. I was fortunate in my teaching experiences at the Universities of Toronto, Winnipeg, and West Virginia University (WVU). In all of these universities, my students came from across the academic spectrum. At WVU, where I taught from undergraduate to doctoral students, I sat on doctoral defence committees for EdD candidates in science education and curriculum and instruction, as well as for PhD candidates in US history, public history, and the history of science and technology. While we lacked a science journalism programme, these cross-disciplinary committees provided ample opportunity to confront professional differences across disciplines. We joked that we sometimes needed a special decoding machine to understand one another, but these experiences underscored how, unless prodded by outsiders, we tend to communicate solely within our professional circles. We all need to make a conscious effort to refocus on how we communicate with the wider public.

My experience beyond the university environment has amplified my conviction that the history of science is an essential underpinning of effective scientific outreach. Just as we need accurate physics when discussing topics like gravitational waves, we also need accurate history. Both cases may require simplification, but neither can just make things up. There are numerous examples of popularizations or textbooks for schools that tell not only simplified but also verifiably incorrect histories. There is nothing wrong with fiction, so long as it does not pretend to be true.

In mid-career, I transitioned from academia to AIP, a move which provided a series of opportunities for me to explore (in collaboration with new colleagues) the relations of science, science outreach and education, and the history of science. AIP, together with the American Physical Society and the American Association of Physics Teachers, sponsored a monthly roundtable discussion on the practical question of how to increase the participation of women and other underrepresented groups in physics. Participants included curriculum specialists, researchers in PER (Physics Education Research), science writers and one historian—myself. Our objective was to address this problem across the entire trajectory of a physics career, from student to doctoral candidate, professional and retiree. To attract, support and retain women and minorities in physics, actions are needed at all life and career stages. While many of the ‘best practices’ in science teaching and in the professional lives of scientists apply to all regardless of gender, race or language group, there are other factors to take into account for these groups that have been studied especially in PER.

What could the history of science do to help solve problems with such deep social and cultural roots? I decided to focus on one aspect of this complex issue: how history could enhance science education. When I joined AIP in 2010, the Center for History of Physics already hosted the innovative ‘History of Science Web Exhibits’, ¹ such as ‘Albert Einstein: Image and Impact’, ‘A Cosmic Journey: A History of Scientific Cosmology’, ‘Marie Curie and the Science of Radioactivity’, and several others. We knew from our web statistics that these exhibits saw a surge in visitation every school year when essays were due. Students were finding our web exhibits, which were and are based on solid science and solid history.

The exhibits, however, were not calibrated to capture the attention of younger students, particularly girls and students in minoritized groups. With the exception of Marie Curie, the exhibits centred on ‘dead White guys’. Although that is not entirely true, there were few women and fewer Blacks and Latinos (or any other minority groups) in these stories. Why? It certainly was not because women and, for example, African Americans had never included scientists. That just was not true. Our ignorance of the stories did not mean the stories were not there. If we wanted to reach K12 students and undergraduates, we would need stories of female astronomers and data scientists, and Black and Latino scientists working in industry and government agencies.

To address this gap, we decided to develop a series of lesson plans or teacher guides that would bring these stories to life. We did this for both pragmatic and programmatic reasons, as these guides were more targeted and easier to complete than new exhibits. We developed a methodology employing the history of science graduate and undergraduate students in the Summer Internship Program organized by the Society of Physics Students (SPS, a part of AIP focused on undergraduate physics students). Each summer, over the course of about ten years, the students researched and wrote a few new lesson plans. One year, we had a physics education major who brought all of the lesson plans into alignment with ‘the five E's’: Engage, Explore, Explain, Elaborate and Evaluate—a widely used framework in US schools. We also addressed how each lesson fits national teaching standards in science and history to encourage teachers to incorporate these materials in their lessons.

More than fifty lesson plans are now available on the AIP website. ² Each lesson provides students with a basic story, primary sources, discussion questions, suggested readings, and more. We made a particular effort to broaden lessons about women's contributions to fields like astronomy, seismology and nuclear physics. The teaching guides also discuss African American and Latino contributions to astronomy, astrophysics, the Manhattan Project and computer technology. Our guiding principle is simple: students become more interested in and accomplished in science when they see role models who resemble them. Girls and boys should look at these stories and think: science might be for kids like me.

The methodological motivation for the teaching guides in the history of the physical sciences was to bridge the gap between the academic history of science and the teaching of science, especially at the earlier levels. The deeper motive, however, is to redress the historical disadvantage often experienced by non-male, non-White students in the US. To recruit enough scientists and engineers for future generations, the US will need to draw from a diverse group. In China, lesson plans might examine other examples and themes to increase scientific literacy and cultural goals.

Teaching guides like these can be envisioned on many topics related to the practices and norms of science. For example, there could be case studies of different observational methods in fields like astronomy or physics as a means to teach Chinese students about the diversity of methods in scientific research. Lesson plans could look at specific researchers from China, not only as role models but as relatable figures who have achieved success. Additionally, topics like the Chinese space programme or industrial physics could be explored.

If the history of science provides a firm basis for science communication and science education, it rests itself on the bedrock of historical data: the collections of archives, the libraries of publications, oral history interviews, and so on. Without the work of archivists, librarians and oral historians, we cannot tell trustworthy narratives that might inspire future generations. The Niels Bohr Library & Archives at AIP, for instance, preserves and makes accessible these essential research materials. AIP's online catalog of Archival Collections (under International Catalog of Sources) indexes archives in the history of physics in hundreds of archives globally. ³ The Science History Institute holds an extensive manuscript, book and interview collection in the history of chemistry and life sciences. ⁴ Archives in the United Kingdom are collectively indexed at Archives Hub. ⁵ Ultimately, one wishes that a universal search will be possible, whatever language the sources use.

In China, a host of historical data are cared for at the Project of Collecting Historic Data of Scientists’ Academic Life (PCDS), directed by Professor Yang Zhihong from the National Academy of Innovation Strategy (NAIS). PCDS was established by joint action in 2010 of 11 organizations, including the China Association for Science and Technology (CAST), the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), the Chinese Academy of Engineering (CAE) and the Organization Department of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China.

In 2020, Wang Liyuan presented an example of a kind of oral history project that can be based on this resource in the article ‘Collecting and compiling the oral accounts of Chinese scientists trained in the Soviet Union in the 1950s and 1960s: Practice and reflection’ (Wang, 2020). Using PCDS materials, Wang carefully explained how subjects were selected and outlined how the material was presented to include both individual and collective experiences and to present a model of the sorts of stories that can be documented drawing on the thousands of documents and videos and hundreds of oral histories of individual Chinese scientists. If historians and science writers can use the PCDS material to portray as many kinds of science and technology lives/careers as possible, and if they can rigorously interrogate this material, many factual and yet inspiring stories can be told. These stories can be told in different ways for museum audiences, web audiences, school children and others. But all of these narratives must rest on the archival collections of PCDS.

In 2019, I was honoured to receive an invitation from Dr Huai Jinpeng (Academician of CAS, Executive Vice President of CAST) to speak at the First World Science and Technology Development Forum in Beijing, sponsored jointly by CAST, CAS and CAE. This forum provided a unique platform to engage with academics, entrepreneurs, government officials and NGO officers on topics such as the universality of science, the transmission of science across cultures, and how national scientific cultures preserve their identity while aspiring to the ideals of international science. The forum brought together contemporary challenges with historical and cross-cultural perspectives.

Zhang Meifang has presented the contrasting views that scientific culture has existed since antiquity in different forms in different cultures, and that scientific culture came with the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century (Zhang, 2022). Zhang chooses the former and argues that ‘we cannot use the criteria of one scientific culture to review and measure the value of another scientific culture’. She also advises that, instead to capture what is unique in the Chinese stories, we should ‘respect the plurality of scientific culture and trace the past with equality, reviewing and acknowledging the contributions made by different nations and cultures to science’. Archival collections like PCDS or those at AIP provide the ultimate bedrock of all of our efforts to improve science outreach and science education, whatever country we live in.

In that vein, the capstone to my journey to Beijing was to meet with my colleagues at NAIS, who hosted my stay and who introduced me to the amazing extent of the PCDS collections and how much work has already been done by interpreting and using this material for reinforcing scientific culture and educating the young and old. I encourage both the continued expansion of oral histories, archives, films and digital collections, and the increased support for science historians, science writers, and science educators to make use of this material. These archives are treasure troves, capturing the stories of Chinese scientists and engineers, and are invaluable for inspiring future generations.

Having said this, I wish to emphasize the critical importance of the work of archivists and librarians. Scientists cannot do science without data; historians and science writers require data, too: the papers of scientists, their publications and professional presentations, their oral history interviews. All scholars who bring science to a wider audience have an obligation to base our narratives on verified and trustworthy sources. For that wider audience to trust us—and help us achieve our goals—we must be careful and critical of our sources, our histories and our science.