MED3_Unit1_Grego 2013 on Hawking PDF

Susan Kermas/Thomas Christiansen (eds.) The PoPularizaTion of SPeCialized diSCourSe and Knowledge aCroSS CommuniTieS and CulTureS o f f p r i n t Bari 2013  ‘THE PHYSICS YOu BuY IN SuPERMARkETS’ WRITINg S...

Susan Kermas/Thomas Christiansen (eds.) The PoPularizaTion of SPeCialized diSCourSe and Knowledge aCroSS CommuniTieS and CulTureS o f f p r i n t Bari 2013  ‘THE PHYSICS YOu BuY IN SuPERMARkETS’ WRITINg SCIENCE FOR THE gENERAl PuBlIC: THE CASE OF STEPHEN HAWkINg kim grego (university of Milan) Abstract Between 1988 and 2010, the renowned British physicist Stephen Hawking wrote five popular science books aimed at bringing physics closer to a wider audience than the mere academia. The operation proved very successful – with his best-seller alone (A Brief History of Time, 1988) reported to have sold over 10 million copies1 (Paris 2007) – and made him into an ac- claimed popular author. This study considers the books Hawking wrote especially for popu- larizing purposes, presenting reflections on the relationship between specialized and popular discourse. It focuses in particular on Hawking’s first such work, A Brief History of Time, which was made into an even more popular adaptation titled A Briefer History of Time (2005). The chapter details how the subject has been adapted and transferred from a high into a popular (writing) and an even more popular (re-writing) level. This is done by comparing the works against the general features of specialized/scientific discourse, to single out their variation from – or conformity to – the established norms thereof, providing samples of textual analy- sis and highlighting relevant lexical and syntactic phenomena. An interpretation of such phe- nomena is proposed according to Critical Discourse Analysis methodology, i.e. considering language in light of the many social, cultural and economic variables informing this type of communication. 1. Research questions This chapter will examine Stephen Hawking’s popular writing, and it will try to il- lustrate some of its linguistic aspects from a Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) per- spective, i.e. focusing on language as a cause and the result of social, cultural and eco- nomic phenomena (Fairclough 1995, 2003, 2006). It will be looking, in particular, at the linguistic realization of its popularizing purposes, from an English for Special Purposes (ESP) viewpoint (Cloître and Shinn 1985; Swales 1985 and 1990; gotti 1991 and 1996; garzone 2006). Some of the questions that will be tackled are: was the disseminating aim of these texts achieved? If so, through which linguistic strategies? How is ESP used or adapted for dissemination? Was anything else achieved? What was the social impact of Hawk- 1 Paris N. 2007, Hawking to experience zero gravity, in The Telegraph, 26 April 2007. The PoPularizaTion of SPecialized diScourSe and Knowledge acroSS communiTieS and culTureS · iSBn 978-88-7228-697-5 - © edipuglia s.r.l. - www.edipuglia.it 150 kIM gREgO ing’s best-sellers on science popularization at large? The answers to the above ques- tions may contribute to shed some light on science popularization in the globalized era. 2. Topic and material Prof. Stephen Hawking (b. 1942) needs little introduction. A world-renowned physi- cist, he is also well known among the public for both his best-selling dissemination books and for his many appearances (once frequent, now less so) in TV and radio shows, series, cartoons, films, comics, and on several other media. Indeed, it is interesting to see how he is introduced by three different sources – all freely accessible to the pub- lic, yet not all ‘popular’. (1) Stephen William Hawking, CH, CBE, FRS, FRSA2 (born 8 January 1942) is a British the- oretical physicist and cosmologist, whose scientific books and public appearances have made him an academic celebrity (Wikipedia 2011). (2) Professor Stephen Hawking Career 1.2009 to Present: Director of Research, DAMTP3, univ. of Cambridge 2. 1979 to 2009: lucasian Professor of Mathematics, univ. of Cambridge 3. 1977 to Present: Professor of gravitational Physics, univ. of Cambridge 4. 1974 to Present: Fellow of the Royal Society Selected publications: 5. Technical […] 6. Popular […] 7. Children’s Fiction […] 8. Films and series […] (DAMTP 2010). (3) Stephen Hawking is the former lucasian Professor of Mathematics at the university of Cambridge and author of A Brief History of Time which was an international bestseller. Now Director of Research at the Institute for Theoretical Cosmology at Cambridge (Stephen Hawking - The Official Website 2013a). The first biography (1) is Stephen Hawking’s Wikipedia entry, perhaps the popular source by definition, open as it is to be authored and modified by any of its users. 2 CH: Order of the Companions of Honour; CBE: Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire; FRS: Fellow of the Royal Society; FRSA: Honorary Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts. 3 DAMTP: Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics. The PoPularizaTion of SPecialized diScourSe and Knowledge acroSS communiTieS and culTureS · iSBn 978-88-7228-697-5 - © edipuglia s.r.l. - www.edipuglia.it ‘THE PHYSICS YOu BuY IN SuPERMARkETS’. WRITINg SCIENCE FOR THE gENERAl PuBlIC 151 Wikipedia focuses on Hawking’s honorary titles and calls him, as well as a cosmologist and a physicist, an “academic celebrity”. Thus, it associates two apparently antithetic concepts stressing, in using “celebrity” as the noun phrase’s head, the scientist’s pop- ular role, rather than the opposite, as in – for instance – “popular scholar”. The second (2) is an academic source: Prof. Hawking’s official file on the webpage of his Depart- ment at Cambridge. Apart from the academic posts he has held and still holds and his academic publications, which could be expected to be there, his listed publications also include the sections “popular”, “children’s fiction” and even “films and series”. Finally, the last profile (3) is taken from Stephen Hawking’s own official website, in which he defines himself a professor and the director of his research centre, but also a best-sell- ing author. It is precisely Hawking’s science-disseminating role that this chapter will deal with, focusing on his major popular books.4 Between 1988 and 2005, Professor Hawking published five popular – both in the sense of ‘disseminating’ and of ‘best-selling’ – books. These are all paperback or pocket books, i.e. the kind of books that may be bought at the local supermarket: a) A Brief History of Time, 1988; b) Black Holes and Baby Universes and Other Essays, 1993; c) The Universe in a Nutshell, 2001; d) On The Shoulders of Giants. The Great Works of Physics and Astronomy, 2002; e) God Created the Integers: The Mathematical Breakthroughs That Changed History, 2005; f) A Briefer History of Time, 2005.5 The list includes original work in the form of long essays (a, b, f) or collections of va- rious essays (b), and edited scientific writings by other authors, with original intro- ductions and commentaries by Hawking (d, e). Among the original long essays, a), the world famous A Brief History of Time (1988) constituted a landmark in contemporary science dissemination. A briefer history of time (2005), (f), is its revisited and simplified version. This paper will consider, precisely, these two books. 3. Popularization: a model As a framework for describing, classifying and distinguishing popular texts, Cloître and Shinn’s 1985 model may be of use. The authors identify four levels of scientific exposition: 4 Previous research on aspects of Hawking’s popular works abounds, and includes Jenkins (1992), Rodger (1992), White and gribbin (2002), Mellor (2003). 5 This list does include co-authored books, children’s fiction and other genres. The PoPularizaTion of SPecialized diScourSe and Knowledge acroSS communiTieS and culTureS · iSBn 978-88-7228-697-5 - © edipuglia s.r.l. - www.edipuglia.it 152 kIM gREgO - intra-specialist exposition (from specialist to specialist in same field); - inter-specialist exposition (from specialist to specialist across fields); - didactic/pedagogical exposition (from specialist to non-specialist); - popular exposition (intended for the largest audience possible). Dated as it is,6 it is still a functional tool for describing the specialized to non-spe- cialized continuum in communication. The features of intra- and inter-specialist level scientific texts have long and thoroughly been identified and researched by many in ESP and genre analysis, including Swales (1971), gotti (1991, 1996), Halliday and Martin (1993), Halliday (1997, 2006), garzone (2006), Banks (2008), grego (2010), and may be summed up as follows: - lexical level: high word formation, borrowings, noun strings, abbreviations, latiniza- tion; - syntactic level: nominalization, high modality, passive voice, depersonalization; - textual level: thematization, schematization, cohesive conjunctions, hedging, omissions, crypticity (exclusiveness). The characteristics of the non-specialized or popular scientific texts are of course antonymic to those of specialized texts: - lexical level: few or no abbreviations, few or no noun strings, (over-)Anglicization; - syntactic level: little use of nominalization, little use of modality, personalization wherever possible; - textual level: schematization, exemplification, oversimplification, definitions, refor- mulation, explanations, multi-media elements (from visuals to interactive elements). A Brief History of Time (hereinafter Brief) and A Briefer History of Time (hereinafter Briefer) should, of course, be samples of popular exposition. The basic assumption, therefore, is that they should present the lexical, syntactic and textual features of pop- ular texts. However, even a surface reading of the texts reveals a discrepancy with the ex- pectations. let us consider the same passage from both books. The fundamental postulate of the theory of relativity, as it was called, was that the laws of science should be the same for all freely moving observers, no matter what their speed. This was true for Newton’s laws of motion, but now the idea was extended to in- 6 It is interesting to notice that A Brief History of Time dates from 1988: the early stages of aca- demic research into ESP and popularization and Hawking’s own popularizing effort began approxi- mately in the same years. The PoPularizaTion of SPecialized diScourSe and Knowledge acroSS communiTieS and culTureS · iSBn 978-88-7228-697-5 - © edipuglia s.r.l. - www.edipuglia.it  ‘THE PHYSICS YOu BuY IN SuPERMARkETS’. WRITINg SCIENCE FOR THE gENERAl PuBlIC 153 clude Maxwell’s theory and the speed of light: all observers should measure the same speed of light, no matter how fast they are moving. This simple idea has some re- markable consequences. Perhaps the best known are the equivalence of mass and en- ergy, summed up in Einstein’s famous equation E=mc2 (where E is energy, m is mass, and c is the speed of light), and the law that nothing may travel faster than the speed of light. (Brief: 21, bold added) As it appears by looking, even only graphically, at the excerpt above , Brief, right from the beginning, seems to suffer from a sort of ‘genre granularity’. A concept de- rived from web genre analysis and corpus linguistics (cf., e.g., Mehler, Sharoff and San- tini 2006), it indicates a hybridization phenomenon in which it is still possible to clearly distinguish two (or more) mixed genres – much like, in chemical terms, a suspension differs from a solution. Precisely, in this case, the mix is between the intra- / inter-spe- ! cialist and the popular levels of scientific exposition which, in Brief, alternate in this way: ! "#!!!$%!!!"#!!!$%!!!"#!!!$%!!!"#! ! ! In other words, the chunks of text containing specialized discourse (SD) are large, ! prevalent and are regularly-spaced by those including popular discourse (pd), which ! only function as short ‘bridges’ between them. Einstein’s fundamental postulate of the theory of relativity, as it was called, stated that the laws of science should be the same for all freely moving observers, no matter what their speed. This was true for Newton’s laws of motion, but now Einstein extended the idea to include Maxwell’s theory. In other words, since Maxwell’s theory dictates that the speed of light has a given value, all freely moving observers must measure that same value, no matter how fast they are moving toward or away from its source. This simple idea certainly explained – without the use of the ether or any other preferred frame of reference – the meaning of the speed of light in Maxwell’s equations, yet it also had some remarkable and often counterintuitive consequences. (Briefer: 32, bold added) Briefer also features genre granularity, but here its presence seems to be re- duced, the texture looks tighter, and the distribution of the levels of exposition has been reversed, resulting, visually, in a structure such as: !"#! # $%#! ! #!"#! #$%#! ! #!"#! #$%#! #!"#! #$%#! ! #!"# ! The question arises, then, of whether Brief and Briefer can (still) be considered pop- ular texts. The PoPularizaTion of SPecialized diScourSe and Knowledge acroSS communiTieS and culTureS · iSBn 978-88-7228-697-5 - © edipuglia s.r.l. - www.edipuglia.it 154 kIM gREgO In spite of the presence, especially in Brief, of much ESP exposition, it seems they can. The granularity phenomenon, indeed, is no novelty in science; in fact, it is nei- ther a modern nor even a characteristically contemporary phenomenon. Scientific exposition and genre granularity have been coexisting for centuries, creating a long tradition in Western culture. One European precursor of Hawking in adopting this technique was galileo galilei (1564-1642) – no less.7 In a recent paper (grego and lonati forthcoming), striking similarities emerged between contemporary and early modern scientific exposition. The result of expository granularity is that there appears to be a popular text within a specialized text – a sort of a book within the book. Even so, although the ESP sections in both Brief and Briefer may at first, in two best-selling paperbacks, sound unexpected, to use Hawking’s lexicon, they do not present any real “singularity”, i.e. “a point in the universe where the theory itself breaks down” (Brief: 50) compared with the tradition of Western scientific exposi- tion. Instead, as will be shown, both Brief and Briefer contain popular sections to a degree that allows considering them popular works and, indeed, they represent the most interesting sections in both books, especially in Brief, where they are less fre- quent and still very ‘granulous’, i.e. showing well-defined, clear-cut limits. Thus, it is precisely these popular ‘texts within the texts’ that prove the most interesting for the purposes of this research, and those that will be analyzed in the course of the next few paragraphs. 4. The discourse of popularization: a sample analysis The following analysis will explore a sample of discursive strategies selected as rep- resentative of scientific exposition. For practical purposes, they will be classified into a number of CDA-based and -oriented categories, all functional to constructing the dis- course of popularization: (a) (over)explanation / (over)exemplification / (over)simplification; (b) irony; (c) argumentation; (d) personal references; (e) (critical) social references. 7 Hawking closely identifies himself with galileo – no less – again, as he states in Brief: “I had no desire to share the fate of galileo, with whom I feel a strong sense of identity, partly because of the coincidence of having been born exactly 300 years after his death!” (Brief: 122). The PoPularizaTion of SPecialized diScourSe and Knowledge acroSS communiTieS and culTureS · iSBn 978-88-7228-697-5 - © edipuglia s.r.l. - www.edipuglia.it ‘THE PHYSICS YOu BuY IN SuPERMARkETS’. WRITINg SCIENCE FOR THE gENERAl PuBlIC 155 (a) (Over)explanation / (over)exemplification / (over)simplification Superlative magnitudes To illustrate the (over)explanation / (over)exemplification / (over)simplification strate- gies, excerpts will be reported from a subcategory conveniently labelled ‘superlative magnitudes’, meaning simply ‘extremely big numbers’. This strategy is very frequently employed by Hawking in both books. Whenever he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assages $ and are from the Acknowledgments (Brief) and the Foreword (Briefer) sections respectively, and are quite self-explanatory. in , Hawking declares that his aim in writing Brief was – concisely – to “attempt” to teach “people without a scientific education” how to “master mathematics”. Ambitious as it may seem, this was the intent he pursued in his first book – successfully, it seems, in the popular sec- tions, perhaps less so in the specialized ones, which come out as quite granular blocks hardly accessible to the layperson. is longer because it is a necessary expansion on : an apologetic description of what went wrong in the original book is firstly given (“few readers are seeking a lengthy dissertation befitting a college-level course in cos- mology”), followed by a new declaration of intent: leaving out “some of the more tech- nical content”, providing a “more probing treatment of the material that is at the heart of the book”, and “taking care to maintain its length and readability”. in this respect, Briefer seems to have more successfully reached its declared aim, in that it presents with less granularity, a lot of specialized information has indeed been left out, and the popular sections have been expanded and simplified. The same disseminating intention is repeated and reinforced at the end of the last The PoPularizaTion of SPecialized diScourSe and Knowledge acroSS communiTieS and culTureS · iSBn 978-88-7228-697-5 - © edipuglia s.r.l. - www.edipuglia.it ‘THE PHYSICS YOu BuY IN SuPERMARkETS’. WRITINg SCIENCE FOR THE gENERAl PuBlIC 167 chapters of both books ( and ), using the same words (“Only a few people can keep up with the rapidly advancing frontier of knowledge, and they have to devote their whole time to it and specialize in a small area. The rest of the population has little idea of the advances that are being made or the excitement they are generat- ing”), which sound soberly suited to the current years (Briefer was published in 2005), but were certainly very sharp and prophetic for the times – some 30 years ago – when they first appeared in Brief, in 1985. 5. Emerging trends Following the sample analysis of the language of popularization of Brief and Briefer presented in the previous paragraphs, it is possible to make at least a few informed con- siderations about the two books. Both feature hybridization phenomena. The non-specialized (popular) and the spe- cialized (ESP) levels of exposition (Cloître and Shinn’s 1985) mix in both texts, creating granularity. In Brief the degree of granularity is much higher than in Briefer. Not only, the proportions of specialized vs. non-specialized sections is unbalanced in favour of the former, with large chunks of ESP passages only linked by short popular sections (sometimes even just phrases) acting as bridges. In Briefer, the alternation is much more balanced, in fact tending towards a predominance of the popular from both a quan- tity and a quality viewpoint. The ESP sections are much reduced and do not go into such detail as those in Brief. The reason for this shift seems to be a different target audience for the two books. Brief’s features place it at the inter- (sometimes intra-) specialist to didactic level. It is definitely more didactic than popular, and often more specialized than didactic. In fact, Hawking’s admission in the Foreword of Briefer indicates that Brief sounded much like “a lengthy dissertation befitting a college-level course in cosmology” (Briefer: 1), so it could indeed have been based on the author’s own lecturing material, assembled and collected over the years. Probably, the discrepancy between the aim and the results of Brief derives precisely from a slightly distorted scholarly view of lecture-level material as being already quite popular. Actually, though, it proves mostly didactic, i.e. directed at users on the threshold of the community of practice, who should be – if not famil- iar – at least familiarizing with the specialized lexicon, genres and discourse of the com- munity in question. The book indeed promises a much more popular approach than it can actually provide, yet turning such didactic material into a supermarket paperback without much heavy editing resulted in a very granular hybrid, albeit a best-selling one. Of course, no matter how precise statistics on sales are (Brief is reported to have sold The PoPularizaTion of SPecialized diScourSe and Knowledge acroSS communiTieS and culTureS · iSBn 978-88-7228-697-5 - © edipuglia s.r.l. - www.edipuglia.it 168 kIM gREgO over 10 million copies, Paris 2007), no one can ever count how many books were ac- tually read. Also, perhaps due to Hawking’s having in mind an audience of university students or other informed readers, Brief is definitely more of an ‘adult’ book. It surely contains adult irony, which can only be understood by readers sharing certain grown-up expe- riences or notions (see excerpts to ). For the same reason, Brief is also more ideologically committed, in the sense that, for instance, it often refers to god in abstract or theoretical ways, especially when dealing with the universe (42 occurrences of the word ‘god*’ in its various acceptations). Finally, the presence of graphic elements in Brief is very scarce, with just a few black and white graphs and illustrations, all quite technical. Briefer, on the other hand, was purportedly intended to address a different public, belonging to the didactic to popular level. The didactic audience, however, is more likely to be understood here as a school- rather than university-level audience, thus also look- ing to include younger readers. In fact, only an attempt at reaching a different audience fully justifies a new edition of an already very successful book, involving a second au- thor, as the “updates on the latest research” promised on the cover of the book do not actually occupy more than a few pages in the final chapters. The result is a much less specialized text, and a much more popular one. Popular features include the larger for- mat, and the much-increased relevance of the iconic aspect: the many colourful illus- trations, the inclusion of humorous images and graphs all make the product more ap- pealing to its intended audience, if less scientific-looking. Considering the potential young readers, the type of irony is also different, with sometimes entire anecdotes and jokes removed. god is less frequently mentioned (33 times), with some particularly del- icate passages from Brief having been altogether omitted in Briefer. For instance, a sen- tence from Brief mentioning indeterminism (“The doctrine of scientific determinism was strongly resisted by many people, who felt that it infringed god’s freedom to intervene in the world, but it remained the standard assumption of science until the early years of this century”, Brief: 57), completely disappeared in Briefer, which thus proves more ideologically neutral. 6. Final CDA-based remarks Drawing some CDA-based conclusions, then, it is definitely possible to maintain that “Hawking’s Brief history shows that ‘scientifically correct’, ‘ideologically acceptable’ ‘ef- fective’ or ‘objective’ vulgarization of science is indeed a reachable ideal” (Cornelis 1998). Brief presents with some limits with respect to its intended popularizing aim, some of which are quite relevant, yet do not entirely prevent the book from reaching a much wider audience than that at the intra- and inter-specialist levels of specializa- The PoPularizaTion of SPecialized diScourSe and Knowledge acroSS communiTieS and culTureS · iSBn 978-88-7228-697-5 - © edipuglia s.r.l. - www.edipuglia.it ‘THE PHYSICS YOu BuY IN SuPERMARkETS’. WRITINg SCIENCE FOR THE gENERAl PuBlIC 169 tion. However, its strong orientation toward the (university) didactic level makes it so granular that it still looks like a very hybrid text, for which reason it is perhaps more suitable to view it in terms of pseudo-popularization. The actual popularization – as seen – only occurs in Briefer, but then the question arises of whether Briefer can be con- sidered a text of its own. After all, it is an edited version of Brief, with most of its text having been taken ‘as is’ from the earlier book. Additions are minimal, reformulations almost non-existing, though omissions abound. In other words, where Brief is for sure an instance of (more or less successful) popular writing, Briefer, to a certain extent, is a successful attempt at re-writing, or interpreting (see the presence of the second au- thor) an already existing text. A suggestion to make sense of the discrepancies and sim- ilarities could be to look at Brief and Briefer not as two separate works, but as differ- ent phases of one large popularization project. Indeed, the fact that it took their author twenty years to complete should not be surprising, given that the didactic (Brief) and the popular (Briefer) levels are not typical of Hawking’s community of practice (it even took a second author to edit Briefer to reach an acceptable level of populariza- tion). Following this view would have the further advantage of seeing Hawking’s entire scientific contribution as one and the same work, one single collection of material, mod- ulated into all the levels of exposition: the corpus of his specialized or academic pub- lications (intra-specialist), Brief (inter-specialist to didactic), Briefer (didactic to popu- lar). The popularizing aim of Hawking – not a disseminator by profession – could thus be said to have been reached in two stages, just like a professional disseminator might take as long to turn one of his works into an acceptable academic text. Also, luck- ily, Prof. Hawking did not only work on Brief and Briefer between 1985 and 2005; his other intra-specialist projects surely account for the 20-year gap between his two ac- claimed best-sellers. To conclude, since this is a linguistic study of Hawking’s popular exposition, here is one (the only) statement of his about language that gives linguists a lot of credit: [...] in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, science became too technical and math- ematical for the philosophers, or anyone else except a few specialists. Philosophers re- duced the scope of their inquiries so much that Wittgenstein, the most famous philoso- pher of this century, said, “The sole remaining task for philosophy is the analysis of language”. (Brief: 185; Briefer: 142, bold added) Not only, this assertion is also important in that it reinforces Hawking’s position in favour of science popularization, it represents an instance of critical social communication, and it looks to a not-so-distant past when science and philosophy were not separate. The PoPularizaTion of SPecialized diScourSe and Knowledge acroSS communiTieS and culTureS · iSBn 978-88-7228-697-5 - © edipuglia s.r.l. - www.edipuglia.it 170 kIM gREgO However, he himself sticks to the distinction between the ‘hard’ (scientists) and the ‘soft’ (philosophers) sciences that has characterized the contemporary era and has es- pecially grown in the 20th century. Well aware of his scientific worth, he makes it clear that he does not belong with the philosophers, but is one of those few lucky special- ists. So he also feels the need to add: What a comedown from the great tradition of philosophy from Aristotle to kant! (Ibid., bold added) In other words, it seems he would consider galileo-Newton-Hawking to constitute an ascending curve, and Aristotle-kant-Wittgenstein (the latter by implication) a de- scending one. To this, linguists could only reply that, to reach the wide audiences he did with Brief and Briefer, he too had to surrender to using language according to all the populariz- ing strategies required by the task (so to playing the philosopher) and that the task took him two books and over twenty years. It could also be argued that that unifying the- ory of gravity and quantum mechanics he and his fellow physicists have been after for about a century (and which he so well disseminated in his popular books) is not unlike the unifying perspectives scholars in many fields are looking for today (including linguists and, by definition, philosophers), and that a re-unification of the soft and hard sciences as they were in past centuries could be one step towards finding it. In this view, Aris- totle-kant-Wittgenstein can hardly be seen as a poorer sequence than galileo-Newton- Hawking, but rather as the way philosophy reflects the evolution of society, its con- tradictions, but also its needs and strengths. Just the same, the set of Hawking’s lifetime achievements – his academic work, Brief, Briefer and his other popular books – are not barbarizations of science but different expository levels of it and, like all in- novative research, a terrific demonstration of the potential of man – both the scien- tist and the philosopher. References Primary Hawking S. 1988. A Brief History of Time. Toronto and london: Bantam. Hawking S. 1993. Black Holes and Baby Universes and Other Essays. london: Bantam. Hawking S. 2001. The Universe in a Nutshell. london: Bantam. Hawking S. 2002. On The Shoulders of Giants. The Great Works of Physics and Astronomy. Philadelphia and london: Running Press. Hawking S. 2005. 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Expository practice: social, cognitive and epistemological linkages. In T. Shinn and R. Whitley (eds.), Expository Science. Forms and Functions of Popularization. Dordrecht: Reidel, 31-60. Cornelis G.C. 1998. Is popularization of science possible?, paper given at the Twentieth World Congress of Philosophy, in Boston, Massachusetts from August 10-15, 1998. Available at http://www.bu.edu/wcp/Papers/Scie/ScieCorn.htm, consulted on 25 March 2013. Fairclough N. 1995. Critical Discourse Analysis: The Critical Study of Language. London: Long- man. Fairclough N. 2003. Analysing Discourse: Textual Analysis for Social Research. London: Routledge. Fairclough N. 2006. Language and Globalization. London: Routledge. Feldman B. 2000. The Nobel Prize: A History of Genius, Controversy, and Prestige. New York: Ar- cade Publishing. Garzone G. 2006. Perspectives on ESP and Popularization. Milan: CUEM. Gotti M. 1991. I linguaggi specialistici: caratteristiche linguistiche e criteri pragmatici. 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Stephen Hawking: a life in science. Washington: Joseph Henry Press. Wikipedia 2011, s.v. “STEPHEN HAWkINg”, retrieved at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Hawk- ing, on 26 January 2012. The PoPularizaTion of SPecialized diScourSe and Knowledge acroSS communiTieS and culTureS · iSBn 978-88-7228-697-5 - © edipuglia s.r.l. - www.edipuglia.it  CONTENTS Susan Kermas/Thomas Christiansen: Introduction AN OVERVIEW OF POPULARIZATION Maurizio Gotti: The analysis of popularization discourse: conceptual changes and methodological evolution Christopher Williams: The ‘popularization of law’ and ‘law and Plain language’: are they two separate issues? THE POPULARIZING NATURE OF BOTANY AND THE MANIPULATION OF THE POPULARIZER Eleonora Chiavetta: “Gardening for the ignorant”: Mrs C.W. Earle and the popular-ization of gardening matters Daniela Cesiri: Botany texts and the popular terminology of plants during the Late Modern English period in Ireland Susan Kermas: A botanical search for the exotic and the dissemination of informa-tion from China THE INTRODUCTION OF NEW THEORIES AND PERSPECTIVES TO SCIENCE AND MEDICINE Elisabetta Lonati: Health and medicine in 18th-century England: a sociolinguistic approach Thomas Christiansen: Cohesive conjunctions and their function in the discourse of the popularization of science: Charles Darwin’s correspondence on evolution and related matters SCIENCE AND PHYSICS IN FICTION AND ENTERTAINMENT Kim Grego: ‘The physics you buy in supermarkets’. Writing science for the general public: the case of Stephen Hawking Barbara Berti: Comedy as an empirical science. The case of The Big Bang Theory Pietro Luigi Iaia: Humour strategies of scientific popularization: a case study on the American sitcom the Big Bang Theory THE DISSEMINATION OF INFORMATION IN EDUCATION AND ACROSS CULTURES Rita Bennett: The use of scientific texts from EFL, through ESOL to CLIL Silvia Sperti: A phonopragmatic approach to the popularization of medical discourse on FGM THE POPULARIZATION OF SPECIALIZED DISCOURSE AND KNOWLEDGE ACROSS COMMUNITIES AND CULTURES Richard E. Burket: Reconstructing expertise: the popularization of science and the definition of expert testimony in the US legal system Mariarosaria Provenzano: Hybridization processes in the popularization of technical discourse for the marketing of the ‘sneakers’ product THE POPULARIZING EFFECT OF THE INTERNET Elisa Mattiello: Initialisms & Co.: lexical and stylistic choices in scientific terminology Alessandra Vicentini: The Fukushima nuclear crisis e-coverage: a linguistic analysis of Sciencemag.org and ScientificAmeri- can.com Silvia Masi: Metadiscourse in English and Italian: an analysis of popular scientific discourse online NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS Edipuglia srl, via Dalmazia 22/b - I-70127 Bari-S.Spirito tel. (+39) 080 5333056-5333057(fax) - http://www.edipuglia.it - e-mail: [email protected]