WRITTEN COMMUNICATION / JULY 2003 Lone Geniuses In Popular Science The Devaluation of Scientific Consensus DAVIDA CHARNEY University of Texas at Austin Popular accounts of scientific discoveries diverge from scholarly accounts, stripping off hedges and promoting short-term social consequences. This case study illustrates how the “horse-race” framing of popular accounts devalues the collective sharing, challeng- ing, and extending of scientific work. In her best-selling Longitude, Dava Sobel (1996) depicts John Harrison’s 18th-century invention of a marine chronometer, a ground- breaking precision instrument that eventually allowed sailors to calculate their longi- tude at sea, as an unequal race with Harrison as beleaguered hero. Sobel represents the demands of the Board of Longitude to test and replicate the chronometer as the obstruc- tionist machinations of an academic elite. Her framing underreports the feasibility of the chronometer and its astronomical rival, the lunar distance method, which each satisfied different criteria. That readers accept Sobel’s framing is indicated by an analysis of 187 reviews posted on Amazon.com, suggesting that popular representation of science fuels cynicism in popular and academic forums. Keywords: rhetoric; 18th century; popular science; science journalism; scientific discourse; history of science The way in which scientific research is represented to the public has become an increasingly important topic for rhetoricians, sociologists, and historians of science, as well as for those who train professional communicators and journalists (Myers, 2003). Information about sci- ence flows back and forth across at least two contested boundaries: one between the domain of science and the domain of public media, 215 Author’s Note: I acknowledge with thanks the UT College of Liberal Arts for a Dean’s Fellowship in Spring 2001, the collegiality of the Department of History and Philosophy of Science at Cambridge University, and the hospitality of the Newnham College fellowship. WRITTEN COMMUNICATION, Vol. 20 No. 3, July 2003 215-241 DOI: 10.1177/0741088303257505 © 2003 Sage Publications