Public suspicions of knowledge reliability
Thanks for Simon Singh's essay "The pop star controversy" (symmetry, February 2006), which in my view nicely respects the difference between what's serious and what's not, and between what's art and what's earnest fact–distinctions that I'm not always confident scientists and science handle as effectively as they might. I'm glad Singh found a constructive, friendly way to convey a point about a pop song's misrepresentation of the reliability of certain cosmological knowledge. Maybe he, or someone, will figure out some comparable way to defray a comparable problem: public suspicions about the reliability of climate-change knowledge.
Steven T. Corneliussen, Jefferson Lab
Newport News, Virginia
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