The LBT on the Discovery Channel

The LBT was recently featured on the Discovery Channel's show "Really Big Things." The LBT, or Large Binocular Telescope, is a, well, really big telescope Ohio State is helping build on Mount Graham in Arizona. It's got two 8.4-m (that's 9.1 yards) diameter primary mirrors—for perspective, in the picture below, the mirrors are the two round shiny things.

But this post isn't actually about the LBT at all. It's about the Discovery Channel's depiction of science while attempting to be "funny."

What really angers me about this episode is the attitude of the show's host/interviewer "Matt," and thus the editors, etc. of the entire show. Whenever the conversation would drift towards science—you know, the reason this telescope is being built—the host would start trying to crack jokes about how confusing it is and how he doesn't understand it. Yes, the LBT is an amazing feat of engineering, and, yes, it's really big, and yes, we (as astronomers) will be able to do mind-boggling awesome things with it. But that doesn't mean that the driving science behind building it can't be explained—in fact, I think the scientists and engineers they interviewed did a fantastic job of explaining why astronomers want large mirrors and high resolution ("like an HDTV").

What gets me is how the host was obviously pretending to be stupid/ignorant and then trying to make a joke out of it. For example, at some point he asks if the telescope will be able to be used to look "back in time"—obviously he knows the answer is yes, and I highly doubt that someone would be able to even get a job hosting a show like this without having some proclitivity towards scientific thinking. The fact that looking far out in space is like looking back in time because it takes a long time for the light from far away to reach us is a standard explanation for astronomers, and I think the astronomer doing the explaining explained it well given the time constraints. And then the host was like, whoa, I'm in a time machine, that's too much for me.

Seriously? I applaud the Discovery Channel for trying to reach a different demographic (i.e., not "nerds"), but are they now implicitly supporting the idea that "science is hard" and "normal people will never be able to understand science"? Let's get this straight once and for all: science is nothing to be afraid of. Sure, there are levels of understanding which the average person won't be able to reach after a brief explanation—there are reasons why people spend so many years in school studying this stuff, after all—but that doesn't mean there isn't some level at which they should be able to understand how their computer works or why we know the universe was once a hot, dense, goupy soup of fundamental particles. This is part of what it means to be an educated individual in today's society—or at least what it should mean. I'm not saying that everyone should already have such&such knowledge and understanding, but rather, have the willingness to learn more instead of being afraid of the everso slightly mathematical unknown.

At least the Discovery Channel has the "hey, this is really cool" aspect figured out... but I am disappointed that they are also playing around in the "let's make ignorance and stupidity look funny" field.