If you go

What: Conference of World Affairs panel on "Losing Faith in Science"

When: 9 a.m. to 11:20 a.m. Monday

Where: UMC East Ballroom, University of Colorado campus

More info: colorado.edu/cwa

Vivian Siegel is the director of communications at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. Formally trained as a scientist, she has spent much of her career working on how science is communicated and pioneering open access to scientific journals.

She has served as the editor of several scientific journals and was the founding executive director of the Public Library of Science. She also founded and directed the Center for Science Communication at Vanderbilt University.

This is her third Conference of World Affairs, and she will appear on the panel "Losing Faith in Science" on Monday.

Q. Do you agree with the premise embedded in the title, that the public is losing faith in science?

I believe the title comes from a study done about a year ago that looked quantitatively at attitudes toward science from 1974 to 2010. The only group that has actually lost its faith in science is conservatives.

That raises some questions about what that means. Do they not trust the scientific method? Do they not trust scientific institutions? Do they have political agendas that don't align with the results of scientific research?

But for the panel, I wanted to branch out a bit. Faith is sort of the opposite of science. Can you have faith in science? Do scientists have faith?

There's a challenge as a scientist of explaining the results of science to the public.

There's a tendency to say, when things get complicated, to say, "Trust me, I've done the science." You can't assess it yourself. At the end of the day, you have to have faith that they're showing representative data, that they're not hiding data that is unfavorable to their hypothesis. Scientific fraud has become big news. There are people among us who are not perfect people.

Q. What are the differences between science and faith?

A faith-based belief would say, "I like this feeling, so it must be true," or, "I read it in a book that I trust," whether that's the Bible or a science book.

A scientist would say, "How do we test this idea or hypothesis? What are other possible explanations and how can we distinguish between these various options?" A lot of times you can't prove things, but you can disprove them.

In the scientific method, you try to come up with a way to test your idea. From that experiment, the results influence what you think is true. There's a cycle of experimentation until you're left with the only idea you can't disprove as the most likely explanation.

I think there is also a faith system that scientists have. We dismiss ideas that we can't test. It doesn't mean that they're not true, but I don't want to waste time thinking about them.

Q. Do scientists need to change how they talk about their work to the public?

Journalists need news and scientists are very hesitant to turn things into news. Journalists themselves need to understand science better, so they can take their talents in making complicated stuff understandable and get it right more open.

And scientists themselves need to get better at getting out of the vernacular, the jargon and understand their audience. They need to express the passion of science and tell stories that engage their audiences.

Scientists tend to bury their presentations in data, and it can get difficult pretty quickly even for someone in the field to follow it.

Q. What's at stake?

I hate to give a "the world is ending" doomsday scenario, but the health of our planet is at stake.

-- Erica Meltzer