People often see science as a world apart: cool, rational and untouched by persuasion or performance. In this view, scientists simply discover truth, and truth speaks for itself.
But history tells a different story. Scientific theories do not simply reveal themselves; they compete for attention, credibility and uptake. U.S. Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. once suggested that “the best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market,” a line that helped popularize the metaphor of a “marketplace of ideas.”
In this view, science is not outside the market, but inside a public arena where claims vie for audiences, resources and belief – and where power, persuasion and social position shape which ideas are heard, trusted or forgotten.
As a marketing scholar trained in economic sociology, I study how institutions that are supposedly above or apart from market logics – such as science, religion, medicine and education – use marketing tools to sustain credibility and build or keep moral authority.
When I tell people that one of the areas I study is the marketing of science, they are often surprised at the concept. Yet persuasion is an integral part of the scientific process.
From Isaac Newton’s followers and their coffeehouse demonstrations of physics wonders to today’s TED Talks and TikTok explainers, scientists have long relied on storytelling and demonstration to make invisible truths visible. For scientific theories to supplant other plausible theories, to challenge existing theories and win acceptance, they must be correct – but they must also be convincing.
People didn’t need to read Isaac Newton’s indecipherable Latin or understand his incomprehensible mathematics; they could just watch the live demonstrations, as in this depiction of an 18th-century nighttime scientific lecture on pneumatics.
Joseph Wright of Derby/Science & Society Picture Library via Getty Images
The original science influencers
In the early 1700s, Isaac Newton’s followers turned abstract theory into public performance and cultural fashion.
At the time, Cartesian philosophy dominated intellectual life. Newton’s 1687 book “Principia Mathematica” proposed a new worldview of gravity, optics and motion, but the mathematics was so dense that few could grasp it.
Although Newton himself was a recluse, a circle of zealous Newtonian men of science, described by historians as devoted disciples and even evangelists for Newton’s natural philosophy, took his new theories on the road. These itinerant lecturers performed experiments and spectaculars in London coffeehouses and aristocratic salons, demonstrating Newtonian physics. They sold tickets, pamphlets and even branded scientific instruments so audiences could reproduce these marvels at home.
Historian of science Jeff Wigelsworth showed that Newton’s evangelizers built what today…
