Science, art and communication

Imagine:

A world without science posters.

Imagine
How

Wonderful

That would be.

If we left the communication to the communicators,

Let some things be,

Untainted,

By overzealous scientific pedantry.

Get involved, by all means, but -

Listen,

Don’t judge,

You’ll see

How meaningful science

Could actually seem

To a real, tax-paying, layperson:

Science:
The fascinating story of life,

The universe

And our miniscule,

Infinitesimal place

To wonder

Among its wonders.

So how do we tell it so badly?

So badly that hardly anyone even reads half the papers that are written about it anyway.

Even science doesn’t care about science.

Hey, Dr. Scientist!

What’s on your reading list?

The Guardian,

Twitter,

And non-fiction…

...some sci-fi at a stretch…

...Nature reviews,

Perhaps the latest science news.

Then,

Back to twitter

To vent your views

On Brexit,

Or spread

Some much

Not needed

Pedantry,

Laced with jargon.

Twitter 101:

Be damned if you dare even suggest, nevermind share, an innocently left handed DNA helix.

All the while, little Felix

Is reading his pamphlet

On quite how ring like

Our flat earth donut

Has become.

Sucking his thumb,

Sore bum,

Red raw with mumps,

Mum says vaccines are for chumps.

Vote Donald Trump.

THUMP!

Creationism is sold as science.

Conspiracies are reached down lines of loose

But loosely evidenced

Enquiry.

Science cannot hide behind science

When it is being so brutally flaunted:

Taunted,

To perpetuate myths.

How do we suppose

Does half the world hate GMOs?

Or oppose

Gene edited crops.

Who knows,

Why people still believe in UFOs?

A demon haunted world

Superstitious of crows.

Homeopathy,

Rocks for your yoni....

Or just go Gwyneth Paltrow:

Full on vaginal steaming.

Titanic

Bullshit

Pervades.

But we’re never going to change that

By telling people they’re wrong.

Us and them,

As pink floyd said:

After all

We’re only ordinary men...

And women.

So where do we start?

Science,

Explained through art?

A picture tells a thousand words,

And a poem can paint them in succinct verse.

Stephen Hawking condensed the universe

Into a brief history of time,

Minus any unnecessary equations -

And he made it sublime.

The beauty in nature can be explained

by physics, chemistry, biology, maths.

It can only be truly described

Through art;

  The stroke of fine horse's hair

  or a sharpened feather

  fine and fair.

And whether intrinsic or learned

the artist's guile is guided by maths.

A shrewd eye shapes and forms a scene

as a lucid mind equates.

 The stroke of fine horse's hair

  or a sharpened feather
fine and fair.

With art we can open doors,

And open access.

With rhyme,

We can inspire more minds

To explore and play,

Try a little DIY...

Bio at home,

Now that we can sequence

A genome

Quite comfortably in it’s comforts.

PhDs, though oversubscribed

And still yet overabundant

Soon, perhaps, to become redundant.

Science, like the world

It seeks to explain

Must move with the times.

Bio by design,

Synthetic,

Not necessarily aligned

To stifling institutions,

Over hours,

Underpaid.

Innovation,

Not anathema to academia,

But made more swiftly possible

With time to play.

Tinker, tailor,

Start-up maker.

Writer, painter,

Storymaker.

Engaged and engaging;

Science told the proper way.