The world is full of hidden mechanisms that humanity is understanding and explaining to itself. How does the atmosphere work? What are the intricacies of statistics. What happens inside a cell. How what is smaller than an atom behaves. What do the mites that live on our face look like? What happens to the forests. How long until the human species self-destructs. Science is all about this and, therefore, the genre of scientific dissemination that is, together with journalism, the most popular and effective way of disseminating this knowledge.
“Scientific dissemination, especially in book format, is experiencing a particularly good moment: there are many new voices and the topics are more diverse than before,” says journalist and popularizer Antonio Martínez Ron, author of something new in the skies (Criticism). Disclosure can be seen as the finishing touch to the science process. Not only is it enough to issue hypotheses, verify them through experimentation, make predictions or find technological applications, but the circle closes when all this, which often happens out of focus and is inaccessible to the layman, is explained to the public.
“That is where the research process ends, when it communicates with the public, be it other researchers, the general public, students or children: scientific knowledge is an eminently social product, and the university is becoming aware of it. ”, said María Isabel Cabrera, president of the Union of Spanish University Publishers (UNE), at a round table at the Madrid Book Fair. The fair event is dedicated this year to the intersection between books and science.
Popular books are produced by university publishers, such as those that make up the UNE, and by general stamps, as it is a genre that is in good health. In recent years, social interest in the scientific-technical has increased for various reasons, for example, the continuous presence of technology in our lives, the trickle of new scientific findings, or events of historical impact such as the pandemic. That interest is fueled by the media and publishers. At the same time, within the scientific community there is a growing conviction that disclosure is another obligation for researchers, especially if they work with public funds, as a form of return to society. On the downside, the frenzy of research and the constant need to publish papers to build prestige means that researchers, often on the verge of precariousness, cannot dedicate the time that would be desirable to dissemination.
According to the latest data from the National Institute of Statistics (INE) on editorial production, from 2019, the topic that captured the largest share of the market was “literature” with 26.7%. But in second place would be the grouped sciences: pure (2.9%), applied (6.5%) and social (9.3%), which together means 18.7%. This percentage would include popular science books and non-popular scientific books, for example, university manuals. But also, according to the report domestic book tradeprepared by the Federation of Publishers Guilds of Spain (FGEE), general disclosure was the largest non-fiction subgenre in terms of turnover in 2021: it totaled 168.4 million euros, with an increase of 7.2 % Over the previous year.
Exploring the link between science and society
“We believe that the paradigm based on the specialization of knowledge has been overcome for a long time and we are clearly committed to interdisciplinarity and the link that exists between science and society,” says Daniel Moreno, editor of Captain Swing, dedicated to nonfiction in several lines. including scientific dissemination. Among some of his latest titles are The art of statisticsby David Spiegelhalter, or The rainbow of evolutionby Joan Roughgarden. “There are no longer two cultures, humanist and scientific, the humanities are also practical sciences, just as the sciences can become contemplative,” adds Moreno.
The topics that are most popular in current dissemination have to do with the environment and biology, given the climate crisis in which we find ourselves involved, or food, but also disciplines that have always garnered interest such as physics, astrophysics , neuroscience, or everything related to technology and artificial intelligence, also for temporary reasons. Some titles that are now on the news tables are The harmony of cells (Discussion), by Siddhartha Mukherjee, living nanotechnology (Harp), by Sonia Contera, The fundamental ideas of the universe (Harp), by Sean Carroll, the fantasy of flying (Ariel), by Richard Dawkins, or The nanoworld uncovered (Paidos), by Anna Morales. “What is not so clear is that the proliferation of dissemination proposals is equated to a greater number of readers: some small publishers are having a hard time and are even closing,” observes Martínez Ron, who, yes, is satisfied with the repercussion of his books: in September he brings out another. The publishing house Volcano Libros, dedicated to nature issues, closed in January.
![Carl Sagan, in a NASA image.](https://imagenes.elpais.com/resizer/5kISsXBUwjJCAv0uRKNR3MV6jWA=/414x0/cloudfront-eu-central-1.images.arcpublishing.com/prisa/7JXTYK55Y6SMPSEUBCTB7T5TYQ.jpg)
The popularization genre also has its canon, which has astonished generations of readers and aroused countless vocations. Cosmosby Carl Sagan. The selfish geneby Richard Dawkins. history of timeby Stephen Hawking. A short history of almost everythingby Bill Bryson. EITHER the elegant universeby Brian Greene. Among others. Even high disclosure, not so suitable for the layman, as The Emperor’s New Mindby Roger Penrose, or Gödel, Escher, Bach, the eternal and fragile loopby Douglas Hofstadter.
Without forgetting that dissemination does not have to be limited to hard science, but can also operate very successfully in the field of humanities: this is the case of sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari, which has sold more than 20 million copies worldwide. The humanities, in fact, have a particularity: since they do not use a language as specialized as science (which is developed on mathematics, chemical formulation or computer programming), on many occasions avant-garde authors do not need the stage of disclosure to reach readers: they do it directly. “A history book can be accessible to the public without the need for a disseminator,” Cabrera exemplifies.
Not just for laymen
Although when we talk about popularization we imagine books by scientists for non-scientists, this is not necessarily the case. “Scientists also consume disclosure: there are many branches of science in which our knowledge is not deep and we need that kind of translation, like any other person,” says paleontologist Juan Luis Arsuaga. Although Arsuaga has won a Princess of Asturias award for his work, he surely needs to read popular science to find out about the latest advances in organic chemistry: to stay up-to-date on physics, he says he reads the Italian Carlo Rovelli, who publishes his works in Anagrama. Science today is very broad and specialized, incomprehensible, and the expert in one field is profane in another. Arsuaga himself, in the company of the writer Juan José Millás, has had great success with his divulgation in dialogue, about life and death, published in Alfaguara: The life told by a sapiens to a Neanderthal and the homonymous book for death.
It is curious, but parallel to the growing interest in science, pseudoscientific beliefs are increasing: flat earthism, the anti-vaccine movement or climate change denial. Disclosure is a retaining wall against delusional thoughts. “It is a great scourge,” says Pura Fernández, assistant vice-president for Scientific Culture and Citizen Science at the CSIC and director of its publishing house, “the fake news they have an enormous speed of diffusion against which it is difficult to fight. We try to work above all with young people, not only through books and our dissemination collections, but with workshops, exhibitions, conferences or our TikTok program. We must educate where to look for quality information and how science produces reliable knowledge”.
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