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This is, I think, a fascinating and mostly wise paper. It recounts and dissects the public reception of the famous 1995 Hubble Eagle Nebula picture, and how the "black-boxing" of the scientific community as an internally mysterious source of Truth, and the interpretation of highly massaged press-release images as unvarnished reality, contributed to the strange afterlife of the image as a religious artifact. It's less concerned with the well-known phenomenon of pareidolia than with the social processes involved.
(My one quibble is astronomical: the paper mentions that the image was rotated from its true orientation "from Earth's perspective", which is really meaningless since of course different places on Earth have a different vertical; the Hubble picture's orientation is as good as any other, though of course it was chosen partly for aesthetic interest.)
I've seen this "black-boxing" at work in many instances of public or fringe misunderstanding of science. The paper talks about a case in which the literal truth of the pictures is unquestioned, but another thing that happens is a sort of crisis of expectations: fringe criticisms of science often work from an implicit assumption that the public products of science are normally the unadulterated product of a truth machine, and then when the critic sees a little way into the black box and notices that there is something else going on, this is seen as a malfunction or deliberate deception.
I've talked before about the strange controversies over the color of Mars and its sky. This is a story with a 30-year history and it involves lots of things, but one of the most recent chapters involved uncorrected pictures from the Spirit and Opportunity rovers. Issues of infrared versus red filters aside (a whole other story), these photos are color separations that have exposures arranged on the color channels so that they all cover as much of the black-to-white range as possible, so that the most information is conveyed in the bandwidth available. The best-calibrated pictures of Mars show that both the sky and the soil are typically various shades of tan; there isn't so much blue light in these images, so in a separation into red-green-blue channels, the variations in the blue-light channel are usually less extreme than in the other two. Consequently, the normalization designed to max out the variation in each channel is going to exaggerate variations in the blue channel more than the other two. So if you take the raw images downlinked from the rover and put them together into an uncalibrated color picture, you'll usually get a blue-white or gray sky, and the ground will be reddish but littered with turquoise-blue rocks.
Uncalibrated pictures like these are actually useful for science and mission planning because they exaggerate the color variations in the surface and make them easier to see. They frequently appear in the Maestro application that the rover teams use to examine raw results and control the rover, and they also were often projected on the wall in early press conferences by the rover team.
This, as it happened, fed into the reasoning of the Mars-color conspiracists. They had a mental model of JPL in which pictures of Mars that showed Earthlike colors arrived directly from space probes (this part of the process was thought of as a truth-producing black box), and the conspiracy then deliberately altered the pictures to create the false appearance of a dead world. And now, they saw JPL showing pictures of Mars with a blue or gray sky directly to the media! Had they decided to come clean, perhaps fearing the impending revelation of the truth by independent European probes? Was a counterforce within the organization working to cancel the decades-long deception? Simplistic models just one step away from a black box fortified conspiracist interpretations of what was going on.
What made matters worse was that some of these people also had a similar black-box-truth-machine interpretation of the Adobe Photoshop Auto Levels feature. Suppose you take a picture from the surface of Mars, load it into Photoshop and hit Auto Levels. What happens? Why, the sky turns to various shades of gray or blue-white! The picture looks just like the uncalibrated images, since all Auto Levels does is scale all the color channels to max out the variation in each color channel, just like the normalization of the uncalibrated rover images. But if all you've got is a vague idea that Auto Levels takes a picture with messed-up colors and makes the colors better, you might well come to the conclusion that Auto Levels has undone the meddling with the true image colors applied by the conspiracy. And that was exactly what some conspiracists concluded.
One thing I really like about the Planetary Society is that, aside from their advocacy work, they act as a sort of independent, and often more intelligent, public-relations organ for government space exploration efforts. The Eagle Nebula paper mentions earlier research into how news reports typically closely follow the language of organizations' press releases when reporting scientific results. If the press release is vague or inaccurate (which they are distressingly often), all the news reports will be too, when they're not introducing further distortions in a sort of game of Telephone. The Planetary Society does some parroting of press releases, but they're also one of the few outlets that sometimes goes beyond the press-release language, interviewing primary researchers at length, asking them intelligent questions, and coming up with popular paraphrasing that is different from, and often better than, that done by internal public-relations groups. They also sometimes go after the space agencies for doing misleading things in press images; I remember that when the Magellan radar maps of Venus came out, they were all over NASA for emphasizing topographic images that had the vertical dimension exaggerated by large factors. They're working to open up the black box a little.
(My one quibble is astronomical: the paper mentions that the image was rotated from its true orientation "from Earth's perspective", which is really meaningless since of course different places on Earth have a different vertical; the Hubble picture's orientation is as good as any other, though of course it was chosen partly for aesthetic interest.)
I've seen this "black-boxing" at work in many instances of public or fringe misunderstanding of science. The paper talks about a case in which the literal truth of the pictures is unquestioned, but another thing that happens is a sort of crisis of expectations: fringe criticisms of science often work from an implicit assumption that the public products of science are normally the unadulterated product of a truth machine, and then when the critic sees a little way into the black box and notices that there is something else going on, this is seen as a malfunction or deliberate deception.
I've talked before about the strange controversies over the color of Mars and its sky. This is a story with a 30-year history and it involves lots of things, but one of the most recent chapters involved uncorrected pictures from the Spirit and Opportunity rovers. Issues of infrared versus red filters aside (a whole other story), these photos are color separations that have exposures arranged on the color channels so that they all cover as much of the black-to-white range as possible, so that the most information is conveyed in the bandwidth available. The best-calibrated pictures of Mars show that both the sky and the soil are typically various shades of tan; there isn't so much blue light in these images, so in a separation into red-green-blue channels, the variations in the blue-light channel are usually less extreme than in the other two. Consequently, the normalization designed to max out the variation in each channel is going to exaggerate variations in the blue channel more than the other two. So if you take the raw images downlinked from the rover and put them together into an uncalibrated color picture, you'll usually get a blue-white or gray sky, and the ground will be reddish but littered with turquoise-blue rocks.
Uncalibrated pictures like these are actually useful for science and mission planning because they exaggerate the color variations in the surface and make them easier to see. They frequently appear in the Maestro application that the rover teams use to examine raw results and control the rover, and they also were often projected on the wall in early press conferences by the rover team.
This, as it happened, fed into the reasoning of the Mars-color conspiracists. They had a mental model of JPL in which pictures of Mars that showed Earthlike colors arrived directly from space probes (this part of the process was thought of as a truth-producing black box), and the conspiracy then deliberately altered the pictures to create the false appearance of a dead world. And now, they saw JPL showing pictures of Mars with a blue or gray sky directly to the media! Had they decided to come clean, perhaps fearing the impending revelation of the truth by independent European probes? Was a counterforce within the organization working to cancel the decades-long deception? Simplistic models just one step away from a black box fortified conspiracist interpretations of what was going on.
What made matters worse was that some of these people also had a similar black-box-truth-machine interpretation of the Adobe Photoshop Auto Levels feature. Suppose you take a picture from the surface of Mars, load it into Photoshop and hit Auto Levels. What happens? Why, the sky turns to various shades of gray or blue-white! The picture looks just like the uncalibrated images, since all Auto Levels does is scale all the color channels to max out the variation in each color channel, just like the normalization of the uncalibrated rover images. But if all you've got is a vague idea that Auto Levels takes a picture with messed-up colors and makes the colors better, you might well come to the conclusion that Auto Levels has undone the meddling with the true image colors applied by the conspiracy. And that was exactly what some conspiracists concluded.
One thing I really like about the Planetary Society is that, aside from their advocacy work, they act as a sort of independent, and often more intelligent, public-relations organ for government space exploration efforts. The Eagle Nebula paper mentions earlier research into how news reports typically closely follow the language of organizations' press releases when reporting scientific results. If the press release is vague or inaccurate (which they are distressingly often), all the news reports will be too, when they're not introducing further distortions in a sort of game of Telephone. The Planetary Society does some parroting of press releases, but they're also one of the few outlets that sometimes goes beyond the press-release language, interviewing primary researchers at length, asking them intelligent questions, and coming up with popular paraphrasing that is different from, and often better than, that done by internal public-relations groups. They also sometimes go after the space agencies for doing misleading things in press images; I remember that when the Magellan radar maps of Venus came out, they were all over NASA for emphasizing topographic images that had the vertical dimension exaggerated by large factors. They're working to open up the black box a little.