The Island of Doubt

Having worked as a communications officer for more than one scientific outfit, I can sympathize with the outreach guys at the University of Leicester. But methinks they took their attention-grabbing-headline lessons a bit too seriously. A story making the rounds of the science PR wires today asks:

What do Racquel Welch and quantum physics have in common?

The answer is not a whole heckuva lot.

The research they're trying to interest journalists in writing about involves zero-point energy, that mysterious quality of even a vaccuum to hold a measurable level of activity at the subatomic level. Trying to sell the story by employing the imagery of a buxom 1970s movie star is a sign of desperation. When they say "sex it up," they don't mean that literally. Not unless you're studying sex, that is.

The first problem with the Raquel Welch analogy is one of scaling. While both the film Fantastic Voyage, in which Raquel and a handful of less-attractive scientists are shrunk to the size of mitochondria in order to navigate a dying colleague's bloodstream and destroy a clot in an otherwise inaccessible region of his brain, and the research at issue deal with the tiny, the scales are way off. The fantastic voyagers are shrunk only by a dozen or so orders of magnitude, to the nano level. Zero-point energy operates at a scale smaller than that by another 20 orders of magnitude, maybe more.

The second problem is generational. I remember Raquel Welch and Fantastic Voyage. But I'm the far side of 40. Do today's 20-something and early-30s science journalists? I doubt it.

What I would have done differently? Much of the material in the press release is far too dense to interest most editors. But there is one line that is intriguing: "possible uses include the ability to rebuild damaged human cells at the molecular level." This is where someone decided to call on Raquel.

My solution would go something like this:

"Scientists at the University of Leicester are exploring the possibility of repairing human cells by extracting energy from nothing..."

and go on to concede that, not, they're not trying to violate the first law of thermodynamics -- they're exploiting the weird behavior of the subatomic world, etc. etc.