Cory Doctorow notes that the UK science minister wants to use SF shows to teach science. Cory is kind but skeptical:

I like the idea, but his examples are very weird – like using R2D2 to teach about robots. R2D2 is a classic example of science being subordinated to storytelling – after all, he exists in a technological universe with faster-than-light travel, is artificially intelligent, but has not been outfitted with a $0.50 voice chip. It makes him great comic relief, but dumb science.

I think Cory is being too kind. The idea of using SF to “teach” science is old news. The Science of Jurassic Park is a decent book, but it’s ten years old. The Science of Star Wars exhibit has come and gone from our science museum. Has the UK science minister been living under a rock?

Compared to our everyday lives, most of SF is old news. We have pocket-sized instantaneous global communications. We routinely use robotics for everything from donut manufacturing to floor sweeping. Unmanned exploration of space is proceeding nicely. Manned “exploration” of “space” is more than merely routine - it’s boring. (I certainly don’t bother to keep track of how many humans are in low-Earth orbit at any given moment.) In a few years, the world’s entire collection of published works will fit on an iPod. Archaeologists have been discovering entire unknown civilizations. Genetic engineers can build viruses from scratch. Affordable sequencing of your own genome is on its way. Anyone who is more excited by the science of Doctor Who than by any of these things isn’t going far in science.

Jurassic Park makes a decent prop with which to start a discussion of actual sciences, like genetics or ecology. But it’s still just a prop. I don’t think people are resistant to learning science because the props are too boring. I think they resist because much of science is genuinely difficult to understand, because there are too few gifted science teachers, because scientific thinking doesn’t seem relevant to their lives, and because genuine science - as opposed to press releases about science - is very difficult for its fans to follow. How many college students in the sciences - let alone high-school students - have read even one scientific paper? Most modern scientific papers are written in specialist jargon, are aimed at postgraduates, and are published in subscription-only journals that cost a small fortune to read. A subscription to the UK’s best scientific journal, Nature, would cost me $199 a year. Maybe the UK science minister should stop wasting time with SF and try to figure out how to turn Nature into a freely available public resource.