Writing Science for Lay Audiences

Re “Science and the Art of Storytelling,” Opinion, June 17: Russ Rymer states, “Never has our dominion over nature been as spectacular as it is about to become, and never before will nature have reduced us to such spectacular inconsequence.” This may seem like a minor semantic point, but if mankind is not of nature, what are we? Alien non-binary chopped liver?

Rymer alludes to the waning influences of religion and politics on our collective consciousness, but is it not Judeo-Christianity that posited that man was somehow separate from nature (and separate as well from the third player, the creative source of the universe), and is it not an imprinted tenet/ghost that informs the “dominion over nature” political attitude of dominance and submission? Would “Science” with a capital “S” ever suggest that there is a single item in the universe that isn’t “of it”?

Frank Armstrong

Los Angeles

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I agree with Rymer that we need scientists who can speak to and write for laypeople, but holy smoke! Rymer needs an editor. The only way one might consider his article “comprehensible to a lay audience” is if this lay audience had just spent a quarter reading Beowulf.

This article on accessibility reads more like academic literary criticism, which is just as obscure to the layman as a dissertation on genetic engineering.

Charles Bragg Jr.

Pacific Palisades

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Caltech’s new requirement that juniors be capable of writing about science in a manner comprehensible to a lay audience would not have seemed at all strange to many important scientists of the past. In the 17th century, Galileo, the great Italian physicist and astronomer, chose to write his most notable books not in the arcane Latin of the universities but in common Italian, a language read and understood by a much wider audience. These were, arguably, some of the most important scientific writings in history, and yet they are so entertaining that they are still read in dozens of languages solely for their literary merit.

Galileo knew that he had a duty to inform the public of his discoveries if he was to successfully challenge the status quo.

David R. Axelrod

Los Angeles