When it comes to grabbing headlines and getting mileage out of your PR, few descriptions can top “biggest in the world.” People love superlatives, and this one captures imaginations like no other. Which is tremendous, since most people have no clue how it works…or what it does.
Later this month, Geneva’s CERN will once again crank up the Large Hadron Collider. Particle physicists will get back to attempting to solve the Rubik’s Cube of life and the origin of the universe. Do they have a shot? Who knows? They have already used this technology to unveil the Higgs boson particle, the elementary particle that unlocked many of our universe’s most elusive secrets. Next on the agenda? Unpacking the mystery that is dark matter.
All of this sounds incredible and amazing, but most folks have literally no idea what these scientists are doing and how they are doing it. That general ignorance is an important nut to crack in today’s world of PR-driven funding. Like the space race and the moon shot before it, the Large Hadron Collider has taken on a meaningful myth in the media. This myth – a combination of interesting storylines and words Joe Public can understand – is vital to the dissemination of complex technical information.
For example, early reports have suggested the LHC has been updated with cool stuff such as new magnets, better and more powerful energy beams and a tighter vacuum. Now, each of these things has a more technical name and specific scientific purpose, but these aspects might be inscrutable to those for whom the LHC is more magic than science. This concept of simplifying science for the general public is not always something science has been good at. This failure has led to all sorts of unfortunate disagreements, misunderstandings and endless reams of partially correct or outright misinformed news releases.
It’s a PR lesson that transcends science. If you want people to care about what you are doing, they need to be able to connect with it…and they can’t do that if the language fails to explain while it mystifies.
