ABSTRACT
At 10:00 a.m. on Thursday, April 23, 1992, David Whitehouse from the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) Radio News informed his listeners that a NASA satellite, the Cosmic Background Explorer (COBE), had detected “ripples” in the universe’s cosmic background radiation (CBR) and that this finding would provide conclusive evidence that the universe as we know it today began with an enormous explosion known as the big bang. On the following morning, all of the U.K.’s serious newspapers (The Independent, The Times, The Guardian, and The Daily Telegraph) and some of the tabloids featured front-page stories on COBE. For several weeks, the topic was one of the hottest around, at least in the British media, and became the subject of editorials, commentaries, and humor pieces. George Smoot, the physicist leading the COBE team, was offered several million dollars to write a book about the discovery (Smoot & Davidson, 1993; see also Chown, 1993; Rowan-Robinson, 1993). Widespread publicity was given to Smoot’s remarks that he and his colleagues had found the oldest structures ever seen in the early universe: “primordial seeds of modern-day structures such as galaxies, clusters of galaxies… If you are religious, it’s like seeing God” (Miller, 1994, p. 449). These and other comments, such as those by Stephen Hawking, who claimed that the finding was “the discovery of the century, if not of all time” (Hawking, 1992, p. 6; see also Hawkes, 1992a, p. 1), and by cosmologist Michael Turner, who believed that “they have found the Holy Grail of cosmology” (as quoted in Miller, 1994, p. 450), doubtless attracted public interest in the discovery and fed a more general debate about science, religion, and their mutual relation in the human quest for truth. What was the story all about? Was it just another case of sensational or spectacular science as exemplified by Stanley Pons and Martin Fleischmann’s precipitate public claim to have discovered cold fusion (for background see Bucchi 1996a; Lewenstein, 1992, 1995; Sullivan, 1994)? Not really. Although Smoot and his team skillfully managed contact with the public arena through press releases and press conferences from the very outset of the COBE enterprise, nobody ever charged them with fraud or blamed them for hastily seeking publicity before the scientific community had had time to review the findings carefully. (Smoot and
his colleagues did, however, hold a press conference without having an official publication of their final results at hand-just as Pons and Fleischmann had done-just a few hours after briefing the American Astronomical Society in Washington, DC. How did a rather esoteric, abstract finding having no apparent practical significance make it so big in the media? Explanations have been proposed that emphasize the role of media practices and the element of public resonance (e.g., Miller, 1994). According to such explanations, the attention given to COBE by the media, particularly those in the United Kingdom, stems from the fact that the media is already sensitized to such issues by ongoing debates about science and its achievements. While I acknowledge the importance of these factors, it can be easily argued that the role of scientists in making science public is, from that perspective, largely considered unproblematic. Media dynamics are seen as the only available explanation for the communicative relationships between science and the public.
