SCIENCE FILE : MIND OVER MATTER / K.C. COLE : It Doesn’t Cheapen Science--or Music--to Popularize It

I was sitting in the bleachers at the Hollywood Bowl recently, listening to Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue,” when an irritating thought shattered the serenity of the evening. “I can’t listen to that anymore without thinking of United Airlines,” I whined to a friend. Advertisers shouldn’t be allowed to hijack great music to sell things.

My friend, however--someone highly placed in classical and opera circles--quickly put me in my place. “I think it’s great. It exposes people to classical music.”

Ouch.

Truth be told, I’ve responded the same way when people complained about “popularizing” science. In fact, my ill-considered complaint about using Gershwin to get people flying reminded me of the interviewer who once asked me if I wasn’t uneasy about making math and physics accessible to the masses.

“Isn’t that cheating?” he asked. “Don’t you think it’s wrong for people to want to learn about math without doing all the work?”

It’s a curious point of view. After all, we’re a nation of voyeurs. People who never get off the couch spend long hours absorbed in basketball, football, hockey, golf. We take vicarious pleasure in everything from the seedy secrets of Hollywood stars to the sex lives of presidents. We drive cars and surf the Internet, even though few of can change a tire or create a Web site. We listen to Gershwin, even though we can’t play a note.

Is participation without mastery cheating? Is enjoyment without “work” legit?

Art, like science, seems to be of two minds on the subject. On the one hand, outreach is the order of the day. If more people aren’t brought into the tent, classical music, like physics, may wither for lack of enthusiastic young supporters.

On the other hand, experts worry that making their subject accessible to the hoi polloi strips it of its depth, tarnishes its delicate beauty. Like substituting plastic flowers for the real thing, taking Latin out of the liturgy or teaching physics without math.

In science, these worries about the perils of popularization have surfaced as the so-called Carl Sagan syndrome. Sagan’s classic TV series “Cosmos,” along with his many popular books, brought forefront physics and astronomy into millions of homes. He not only allowed people to cheat, he encouraged it. And by most accounts, he did an excellent job.

Yet Sagan paid a steep price. He was dismissed by many colleagues as a mere popularizer, and shut out of the prestigious National Academy of Sciences.

Other scientists fear the same will happen to them. Rather than take the chance of getting crucified for playing to the crowd, they’d rather, as Marie Antoinette might have put it: “Let them eat calculus!”

Of course, it’s rather silly to think experts can keep either science or art locked up as private treasures, privy only to those with the proper credentials, safe from the great unwashed. Novelists, playwrights, composers and painters routinely appropriate ideas from modern science. Tom Stoppard based his hit play “Arcadia” on chaos theory. Brazilian composer and singer Gilberto Gil incorporates quantum theory into his work.

Yes, there is a danger here. The ideas that appeal to talents like Stoppard and Gil are also fodder for outright flakes, or simply slipshod treatment. When science slides down this sometimes slippery slope, it can lose the very rigor that makes it solid ground from which to explore everything from alternate universes to the physical basis of consciousness.

And yet, the alternative seems equally unacceptable. The idea that amateurs shouldn’t dabble in science has led to a terrifying situation, according to Harvard physicist and historian Gerald Holton. It’s not only that the man and woman in the street know almost nothing about science, he writes in his new collection, “Einstein, History, and Other Passions.” Almost all of our intellectual and political leaders are equally ignorant.

“All too many find themselves abandoned in a universe which seems a puzzle on either the factual or the philosophical level,” he says in the book. “Of all the effects of the separation of culture and scientific knowledge, this feeling of bewilderment and basic homelessness is the most terrifying.”

Perhaps all this seems a tad self-serving, coming, as it does, from a professional peeping Thomasina like me.

But if we can enjoy spectator sports, why not spectator science and art?

Perhaps people will become so enthralled by what they see on the surface that they’ll want to dive in more deeply.

And next time someone hears the United Airlines theme song, they’ll think of Gershwin. Instead of vice versa.