One of the most terrifying things I’ve done recently is sit in front of an audience of high-energy physicists and point out that their model of the universe is wrong. I couldn’t tell whether the silence that greeted me (which I measured in seconds, but they measured in tera-picoseconds) meant I had offended them, or whether the cream cheese bagels were just particularly scrummy (we’d filled the room despite it being lunch-break).
One of my old pantomime directors once told me that if the audience didn’t laugh out loud it didn’t mean they weren’t enjoying themselves - “you can’t hear a smile”, he said. Mind you, you also can’t hear a portable proton accelerator being powered up, so at this point I didn’t know if my brain was about to be irradiated by an angry CERN operative.
This was the International Conference on High Energy Physics in Prague, and in this session we were discussing the difficulties of science communication, and how such an abstract area of study could compete for attention with seemingly more urgent areas like climate change, artificial intelligence, medicine and the like. I’ve made a few programmes about cutting-edge science, and they seem to have gone down well, hence here I was sat between two particle physicists who had both worked with the Large Hadron Collider, the biggest machine humankind has ever made, and the only one that has made me cry.
The problem is that this phenomenally expensive, massive machine is probing the secrets of the smallest things in the universe. Things we can’t see, in an area most people don’t understand, and therefore can’t fathom how it could possibly be relevant to their lives.
The point I was trying to make is that if this area of science is to compete for coverage, interest, and ultimately funding, against the James Webb Telescope’s beautiful deep space panoramas, and the vital development of cleaner greener energy, it has to have a hook, a headline.
The LHC undeniably achieved this back in 2012, when it confirmed the existence of the Higgs Boson - “The God Particle”, as no-one in this room was a fan of calling it.
But the reason it got such attention was mainly because it had such a great backstory -one that transcended science. There was the huge size and cost, and the fact that it broke down as soon as they turned it on. The (nonsense, but headline-grabbing all the same) claims that it may create a black hole that would destroy the planet. And, finally, the discovery of a particle first theorised sixty years ago, by a man who was in the audience, in tears, when its existence was confirmed. It reads like a movie. One in which the tiny Higgs Boson shall be played by Tom Cruise and Professor Brian Cox will be played by Mark Owen from Take That.
The problem the industry now seems to be grappling with is how to get another of those moments in the sun, given that it’s unlikely that the LHC will make another discovery of that magnitude.
Between me and the other journalist on the panel, the annoyingly handsome Czech TV presenter Daniel Stach, we had several suggestions.
Who cares? And why?
Many of the areas I cover have an obvious connection to ordinary people. It’s a new phone that can help you do a thing, for example, or a solar-powered generator that can keep the lights on in an emergency. But some things are harder to make people care about, and that includes smashing protons together to find out what’s inside them.
As Daniel said, you want people talking about it over breakfast, or over their first beer of the evening.
So you need to find the part of your subject that impacts people’s lives, and make that the hook.
For particle accelerators, it’s treating cancer.
Did you know that many hospitals now have mini-particle accelerators that shoot beams of radiation directly into tumours? And if those beams are made of protons, you can very precisely drop them onto the cancer without going too far into the healthy tissue in front or behind it?
Did you know that there are ways of attaching radioactive material directly to tumours, first to make them show up in a detector, and second to kill them at short range, again without damaging the healthy cells surrounding them?
And did you know that there is something called the Flash Effect which seems to do more damage to cancerous growths than to other, nearby parts of the body? Currently scientists don’t know why.
Most people have been directly or indirectly affected by cancer, so in my last visit to CERN, I chose to make this “why should we care?” film the lead story in the programme.
Once the audience was hooked, then I could show them the cool robots, and take them on a tour of the Antimatter Factory (yes, that’s its actual name).
Mess is best
I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve had to stop scientists tidying up their labs before we start filming. I want it messy. I want it to look like crazy brainy stuff is happening right in front of the camera.
The same goes for any company I film at. A meeting room has been booked for the interview, I’m told. You know, that one with all the blank white walls.
No. We want to film where the action is, and what you think looks messy will actually look really interesting.
The message is - there is a time and a place to be corporate. Mainstream telly isn’t it. Which leads nicely into…
Your best people are not the ones you think they are
The last time I filmed at CERN I chatted to Dr Clara Nellist - she’s a particle physicist who’s also all over TikTok, Instagram and Youtube. She’s exactly the type of person I want to put on camera, and, several of us on the panel agreed, exactly the type of person who will excite the next generation of minds into the field.
Highly technical press releases are still important to industry journals, but if you want more people talking about your work, you need to meet them where they are, on their level, on the platforms they go to.
Encourage your PhD students to vlog about their work - social media allows for quick, regular hits about what they’re up to. Yes, it’s unfiltered, yes, it looks messy and informal, but the algorithms love accounts that post frequently, which leads to your message going further, faster.
The same goes for the interviewees you put up - it’s logical that the most senior person on the team should be interviewed, but from these execs I’m looking for exciting soundbites. If you’re the boss, I want you to be visionary and passionate, not corporate. And after you, I’m looking for the young member of your team who’s doing the lab work, who’s at the coal-face. What’s it like being them, and what’s the most exciting thing that’s happened? I’m not after someone who can recite the technical facts into a camera - I’m after feelings, dwahling.
Something is wrong - embrace it!
The Large Hadron Collider is still doing sterling work, allowing scientists to get more and more accurate measurements and a finer and finer understanding of the way the universe works.
But the most exciting story I’m aware of, the one that I want to talk about, is the fact that our models of reality are wrong.
In the past hundred or so years, people with properly big brains have come up with different theories and formulae that describe gravity, time, fundamental particles, and many things in between. But we now know that they’re not right.
Stuff’s going wrong on the biggest scale - depending on how we measure the universe and how fast it’s expanding, we get wildly different numbers, suggesting we’re missing something important about how physics works.
Stuff’s going wrong on the smallest level - Einstein’s famous Theory of General Relativity goes haywire when we apply it to tiny things, while Quantum Physics doesn’t work when we apply it to big things.
Oh, and 95% of the universe is missing. We think it’s there, but we can’t see it. And we don’t know what it is.
When these kinds of thoughts are woven into news about scientific discoveries, they certainly make me sit up and pay attention. And if I was a student, deciding what field of science to study, this might lure me over to the dark (matter) side.
It’s all about telling stories
You probably don’t work in high-energy physics. But whatever your industry, you are a specialist in it. You know it inside out. And because of that, you may have two competing, almost opposite opinions of what you do.
On the one hand, you might think it’s fascinating and vital, and you can’t understand why everyone doesn’t get as excited about it as you do.
But on the other, you might also be so used to the day-to-day grind, so engrossed in the detail, that you have no idea how to explain it to the public. Every advancement might just seem like another small, non-newsworthy increment.
But I believe, and this applies to absolutely any area, not just particle physics, that anything can be made to be interesting. It’s all about telling the right story. What does your audience care about? Start with that. Hook them in. Add more detail later, once they care.
Daniel Stach made the point that when someone is under stress, you should talk to them like they’re a 12 year-old. Not patronisingly, just gently and steadily. And, he added, when you’re trying to explain high-end physics to someone, it’s almost certain that they are under stress.
As was I, under the glare of this audience, as I said that a great way to get coverage is to suggest that Einstein was wrong.