Journalists want to tell stories--because people want to hear stories--and science is pretty much the anti-story.
The vast majority of research is simply not story-friendly. Stories are a tool for making facts meaningful to readers, and except for those in the field, "significantly faster and more robust way of registering two images" or "new limits on the 17 keV neutrino" or even "some genetic markers of this form of cancer vs that" simply aren't meaningful[#]. People will get up in the morning tomorrow knowing those things and live their lives as they did the day before.
The average number of meaningful conclusions from an experiment is much less than one. To get meaningful conclusions you need to put a lot of experiments together. This is why theorists get so much press, because their work often covers a great deal of experimental history. Unfortunately, theoretical work is also often nonsense, or over-stated, or wrapped up in a story that makes the theory of the Higgs Boson look like the work of one person rather than four or more (Higgs himself has been quite clear about this.)
Bridging this gap between story and science--if it can be bridged at all in an honest and effective way--is one of the great unsolved problems of the age of science.
My own contribution to this problem is a novel--Darwin's Theorem--which curiously enough is based on some highly speculative ideas about the mathematical foundations of evolutionary biology: http://www.amazon.com/Darwins-Theorem-TJ-Radcliffe-ebook/dp/...
[#] all examples from my own work, some of which has ultimately had moderate real-world consequences, particularly the image-registration stuff, but even there it took 20 years for anything very interesting to happen.
Comments
Journalists want to tell stories--because people want to hear stories--and science is pretty much the anti-story.
The vast majority of research is simply not story-friendly. Stories are a tool for making facts meaningful to readers, and except for those in the field, "significantly faster and more robust way of registering two images" or "new limits on the 17 keV neutrino" or even "some genetic markers of this form of cancer vs that" simply aren't meaningful[#]. People will get up in the morning tomorrow knowing those things and live their lives as they did the day before.
The average number of meaningful conclusions from an experiment is much less than one. To get meaningful conclusions you need to put a lot of experiments together. This is why theorists get so much press, because their work often covers a great deal of experimental history. Unfortunately, theoretical work is also often nonsense, or over-stated, or wrapped up in a story that makes the theory of the Higgs Boson look like the work of one person rather than four or more (Higgs himself has been quite clear about this.)
Bridging this gap between story and science--if it can be bridged at all in an honest and effective way--is one of the great unsolved problems of the age of science.
My own contribution to this problem is a novel--Darwin's Theorem--which curiously enough is based on some highly speculative ideas about the mathematical foundations of evolutionary biology: http://www.amazon.com/Darwins-Theorem-TJ-Radcliffe-ebook/dp/...
[#] all examples from my own work, some of which has ultimately had moderate real-world consequences, particularly the image-registration stuff, but even there it took 20 years for anything very interesting to happen.