There is no doubt that scientific information must be transmitted between scientists through peer-reviewed texts published in academic journals (if they are of the Q1 range, even better) so that the entire process transmits trust, reliability and accuracy.
But How can we convey some of these conclusions reached in a paper to the general public? Regardless of the nuance that we introduce in the answer to this question (and which has to do with our meaning of "popularization" and "vulgarization"), the truth is that 400 years ago the first scientists who wanted to make knowledge accessible were born. to the people (even if it was using some rhetorical and persuasive techniques).
Persuasive techniques
One of the first great popularizers and scientists in history was the German astronomer Johannes Kepler (1571-1630), key figure in the scientific revolution, and known primarily for his laws on the movement of the planets in their orbit around the Sun.
Kepler decided to put on the cover of his book stella nova (New Star, 1606) the image of a hen pecking the ground of a farm, with the motto ("searching in the manure, find a grain"), because he was committed to the work of searching for objective facts, but also in the work of transmitting them: for this reason, he adopted many of the rhetorical techniques that are currently used in the most popular disclosure:
- A story apparently verbose on irrelevant details but that contextualize and bring the reader closer to the narrated event (the burning coal with which he read his instruments on the night of February 19). This resource is what Roland Barthes called "the reality effect."
- The determination to report failures as well as successes as a way to show the process of trial and error, the epic background of reaching a summit.
- The insistence on involving the reader as if he were really present (here he even introduces us to his wife, as if we were visiting his house, and she replies to him on some occasions, as we can read in the following fragment, regarding the idea that the universe could be the result of random):
Yesterday, when I was tired of writing and my mind was full of specks of dust from thinking about atoms, he called me to dinner and served me a salad. With which I said to him: "If we threw the pewter plates, the lettuce leaves, the grains of salt, the drops of oil, vinegar and water and the glorious eggs into the air, and all these things remained there for all eternity, So would this salad fall together by chance? My beauty answered: "But not in this presentation, nor in this order).
In the 19th century, this type of narration became the ideal of the historian, but in the 17th century it was not the historian, but the scientist, which aspired to this kind of realism and proximity, with Kepler at the helm. Kepler was interested in telling this story in order to convince his readers that his measurements were accurate, rather than simply using mathematics or scientific evidence. He also tried to make the aridity of the data more digestible.
With everything, Kepler has not yet used humor, of laughter (although his wife's comment exuded a certain irony) in order to prevent rigor from becoming rigor mortis. Something that other great popularizers would emphasize later, and even groups of comedians like the Monty Python (and countless other people connected in one way or another with its members, as you can see in the following video):
So it no longer seems so singular that Somnium sive Astronomia lunaris Joannis Kepleri (The Dream or Astronomy of the Moon by Johannes Kepler) was a fictional novel written in Latin by Kepler in 1608, Considered by many to be the first work of science fiction in history, although both its title and elements of its plot coincide with those of a 1532 work by the Spanish humanist Juan Maldonado.
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The news
The literary tricks that Kepler used to become one of the first science popularizers in history
was originally published in
Xataka Science
by
Sergio Parra
.
