Science, and the ‘as you know, Bob’ fallacy trap.

One of the problems of creating fiction is how to impart technical information to the audience. The most derided of these is the oft called ’as you know, Bob’ infodump, where characters talk to each other in a way they wouldn’t do naturally. The reasoning behind this is that people familiar with a subject don’t explain things to each other. But when it comes to scientific concepts, how true is this?

[image error](not actually me)

For a bit of background, when I’m not trying to write books, I’m a professional scientist. Over the last 25 years I’ve worked at all levels: from technician to postdoc to principal scientist, lab worker to management and back again, and from academia to industry. And if there’s one thing I’ve learnt from all that, it’s this: people explain basic concepts to each other all the time, and for good reasons.
But before we go more into that, let’s explore the infodump a bit more. All the following examples are from movies because I don’t read enough books to remember good analogies (sorry).

Ways of imparting knowledge

Explaining backstory or technical issues to the audience is often performed in the following ways:

1) The raw infodump

The infodump can take various forms: the beginning text (Star Wars, Blade Runner), a prologue (Lord of the Rings, Dark Crystal series), or dialogue within the movie (Prince of Persia – now there’s a guilty pleasure!). Regardless of the mechanism, the action usually stops (or doesn’t start) so a chunk of exposition can be imparted to the audience.
The ‘as you, Bob’ concept usually belongs to this category, for example the Prince of Persia explaining family connections:

“But since our wise father isn’t here, the decision rests with me. I’ll have one last counsel with my noble uncle, and my two brothers, trusted Garsiv, and… Where’s Dastan?”

I’m pretty sure the guy he’s talking to knows the names of the Princes of the Realm!

If handled correctly, though, you can perform the most naked infodump possible and no one will care. Morpheus explaining the Matrix to Neo is full of movement, revelations and makes for a riveting experience. Another great, albeit sedate, example of this is Jurassic Park’s cinema scene, where the characters sit through a video of how they make dinosaurs. As far as I can work out, this works because a) dinosaurs are awesome, b) genetics is awesome and c) Steven Spielberg is a genius.

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2) The everyman, student, or ‘fish out of water’



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Here, one of the characters is either new to the situation or a hanger-on to the main character and becomes a conduit for the audience. A RedLetterMedia review of one of the Star Wars prequels went into this with plenty of good examples (e.g. The Last Starfighter and Twister), so check them out (warning, NSFW) if you have a few hours to kill. are examples they bring up. The character of Ariadne in Inception is also a good example.

3) The charlatan



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Another variant on the everyman archetype. Here an expert isn’t actually one at all and needs to have details explained to them. Peter Venkman in Ghostbusters is a great example of this (see the scene in the prison), or Gracie Hart in Miss Congeniality.

4) Not explaining anything and let the audience work it out



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I remember, many years ago, going to see Twin Peaks Fire Walk With Me without seeing any of the Twin Peaks series beforehand. I had no idea what was going on at any time, but I loved the film in any case. Another good example are the early episodes of Game of Thrones, where we are just plonked into a living, breathing world with little explanation of who anyone is or how they fit together, other than the map at the beginning titles. How tempting must it have been to put a 10 min prologue in there at the start of episode one?
Sometimes this goes the other way, though. I’m still waiting for Rick from The Walking Dead to ask ‘hey, where’d all these zombies come from?’

All the science!

Anyway, back to science.
Turns out, science is a pretty huge field of knowledge but there’s often only room for one scientist character in the cast list (as opposed to engineers, where there are whole departments running about talking to each other and explaining things to Riker, the ‘everyman’ of the TNG universe). Consequently, in shows like Star Trek the science character is often an alien (Dax, Spock), android (Data), or a child prodigy (whatever the guy in that Stargate series that got cancelled was called) who has expert knowledge on pretty much anything the plot needs them to have. At least Dax had several lifetimes to accrue it all…

[image error]Dax – paying attention in class for 300 years

There is, therefore, a general conceit that scientists know ‘all the science’, but in reality, we tend to be very specialised. In my current job, I’m a molecular biologist surrounded by analytical chemists, and I have absolutely no idea what they’re talking about half the time. I need basic concepts explained to me, as do they when I’m rambling on about something I find interesting. Even when I worked with other geneticists, we often had different expertise, and talking to the transgenics team often needed quite a bit of interpretation.

As someone once said, science is all about knowing more and more about less and less. It’s also about collaboration, and often involves experts from multiple disciplines. You can’t sequence thousands of human genomes without a huge amount of computing and informatics / analysis support, and you can’t create new ways of gene editing without the knowledge of chemists, structural biologists, and molecular geneticists. We all talk in our own dialects, full of shorthand and acronyms, and entering a new field usually requires reading a lot of review papers and recursively looking up terms to understand the first thing you looked up.

[image error]Where’s your safety specs???

The result of all this specialisation is ‘as you know, Bob’ type conversations happen a lot more than you might expect. It acts as a framing device for what you actually want to talk about and doesn’t assume the person at the other end knows all the specifics (unless, of course, they definitely should do). The downside is that it can come across as ‘mansplaining’, but personally, having been on the receiving end of fellow scientists assuming I know everything about the minute specifics of their experimental designs, I usually appreciate it. It’s all relative, of course, and a basic term for one person is gobbledygook to someone else.

Writing the emotion, rather than the technicalities



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So, going back to the original point, I think there’s a lot more leeway for explaining concepts between characters than is usually accepted, although this might need to be highlighted in the text on why this is happening. Dammit, Jim, I’m a PCR specialist, not a protein chemist!

That’s all well and good, but how to write conversations with people who really should know what each other are on about? Personally, I think it’s all about balance and finding a middle ground. Here’s a fictional molecular biology scenario between a grad student and a postdoc:

GS: “My ligation reaction failed again? What went wrong?”
PD: “As you know, Bob, the ligation reaction joins two pieces of DNA together, and the enzyme has to be stored at -20 otherwise it degrades. You left it out on the bench all weekend last time you used it, and that’s why it didn’t work.”

Might be better written as:

PD: “You left the enzyme on the bench all last weekend and it went off, so your DNA didn’t stick,”

which explains what happened and sounds a bit more natural.
In reality, the response would probably be more like:

PD: “You left the enzyme on the bench all last weekend…”

which assumes that the perpetrator understood why that was a bad thing, and what the ligation reactions do, but the readers might not.

When imparting technical information, it’s easy to go into epic amounts of detail, but ask yourself what’s important and what needs explaining. Do the audience need to understand the specifics of the student’s ligation reaction other than they performed an experiment? Is it vital to the plot, or is it mainly to show the relationship between the two scientists? One made a mistake, and the other knew that but let them fail anyway. Why would they do such a thing, and what’s the story behind that decision? Now that’s intriguing.