The Same Science Story Can Tell Multiple Stories
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If the proverbial and probably stereotypical saying "men come from Mars and women come from Venus," is at least a bit true, then where do scientists come from? Probably from Mercury. The planet bears the name of the god of commerce and science, after all. The other name of Mercury, however, was Hermes. In this version, the god was also the patron of all things mysterious and hard to figure out. A "hermetically closed" object refers to something impossible to open, as is a "hermetic book" hard to comprehend. Scientists are born hermeticists. They tend to lock the meaning of their work in stories that only make sense to themselves and to the people who know as much as them. That's why it takes sometimes an amateur to tell or even use a great science story effectively. Let us follow the story of Marconi who invented the functional wireless radio by paying less attention to what other scientists said and more to what people understood and needed.