Word: piel
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...today, Gerard Piel '37, publisher of Scientific American, will deliver the Phi Beta Kappa oration in Sanders Theater. The annual literary exercises, open to the public, will follow the election of new members and the march to the theatre, led by the traditional fife and drum. Playwright Lyon Phelps will give the Phi Beta Kappa poem...
Save Beadle himself, of all contenders for honors in the sciences Gerard Piel '37, publisher of Scientific American (and a member of the 25th Reunion Class) appears the strongest...
Education is the only possible bridge to this gap. This is the essence of Piel's conclusion, as it was Snow's before him. But since Snow's Two Cultures, science in America has received tremendous popularization, on television and in magazines and newspapers. Piel finds most of this popular work distressing in its approach. "The principal appeal in the popularization of science is still the one-note siren song of utility...
...misrepresentation is not confined to scientists. Stylized representations of all professions, generally grossly inaccurate, flood our media. Our T.V. cowboys bear no more resemblance to real post-Civil War cowboys than Perry Mason and Nicholas Cain bear to real lawyers, or Peter Gunn to a real private detective. Piel's unkind, thinly disguised cut at Frank Papp's Bell Telephone science series completely ignores first the unusual accuracy and clear presentation of the programs, and second the fact that they were prepared primarily for young children...
...inherent in the nature of a book like this that it poses more problems than it answers. For most of the questions Mr. Piel raises, there are no easy solutions, only imperfect compromises. But he is right to argue that unless we find better solutions for the problems of communication in the sciences as they affect citizens, scientists, and the government, then the democratic assumptions of an informed citizenry may soon be in grave danger...