Telling stories in science, while being true.

In this lengthy Science Friday discussion about science and its portrayal to the greater general public, Ira Flatow sits down with cosmologist Lawrence Krauss, theoretical physicist Brian Greene, and author Ian McEwan to talk about "how to spin a yarn about string theory or the Big Bang without hyping or distorting the science."
The reactions on Twitter to the story are interesting, such as @QuantumCowboy's tweet saying "@scifri Among the greatest scientist-storytellers: Neil DeGrasse Tyson, Carl Sagan. #scifrichat"
The link to the story is here.

One of the things that perennially swims through my mind is, "Why are there so many 'celebrity' physicists, cosmologists, and biologists but no 'celebrity' chemists?" What is it about our field that doesn't lend itself to the level of publicity and media wonder that astronomy gets? Why do people even bother listening to ideas on string theory that really doesn't do justice to how complex the field really is? Granted, Astronomy and Biology offer some stunning pictures- but what about the possibilities offered by the other sciences? Speaking of Carl Sagan and his career in cosmology, I highly recommend his series "Cosmos" that was released in the 70's but has just as much illustrative power now as it did then. You can find it on Netflix.
In case you haven't seen it, this all reminds me of a great film I saw back in High School that helped teach (and remind) me about the powers of ten and its power. Morgan Freeman narrates
"Cosmic Voyage". You can find "Cosmic Voyage"  here. It's about a half-hour long.

Maybe we just need to be better storytellers. We don't have to invoke hyper-symmetry like string theory, nor work with ideas uncommon to every-day life and yet we barely get beyond a few segments in Bill Nye.

UPDATE: 4pm Tuesday, Apr 2;
Part of the way through the ScienceFriday podcast one of the guests confirms my suspicion that chemistry has been underrepresented in the public view of science. It's waiting for its "Shakespeare or Mozart" to really shine.

+Joseph Meany