# Tag Archives: Media

## Mercury

For some reason, the summer months always seem to get a little busy, and this summer has been no exception. I hope to write part 2 of the fluctuation-dissipation post soon, but in the meantime, here are a couple videos that I came across recently showing the rather strange properties of mercury.

Pretty weird, huh?

## DIY Garage Work

Recently, I heard about a string of YouTube videos where Ben Krasnow of the Applied Sciences YouTube Channel makes a series of scientific instruments in his garage. One of the particularly impressive achievements is his homemade Scanning Electron Microscope, where he constructs a pretty decent instrument with approximately \$1500. This is definitely outstanding from an educational viewpoint — \$1500 will probably be affordable for many high schools and will enable students to see how to image objects with electrons.

Here are a couple videos showing this and another one of his projects where he uses a laser and a couple optical elements to construct a Raman spectroscopy setup:

Lastly, I’d like to point out that Christina Lee has put together an excellent set of Jupyter code (i.e. IPython Notebook code) to solve various condensed matter physics problems. It’s definitely worth having a look.

## Do you ever get the feeling that…

…when you look at science today that things seem blown way out of proportion?

I get the feeling that many press releases make a big deal out of experiments/theoretical work that are not groundbreaking, are not going to cause an upheaval in anyone’s way of thinking and frankly, are humdrum science (not to diminish the importance of humdrum science!).

In all honesty, really great scientific works are rare and sometimes it takes a long time to recognize the importance of a great leap in understanding. There are many examples of this, but here’s one: Gregor Mendel, who I would refer to as the discoverer of the gene, died before his work was recognized as truly path-breaking, which took about 50 years.

A lot of good science happens all the time, but let’s not kid ourselves — the science is not as revolutionary as a lot of press releases make it seem. Of course, most professional scientists are aware of this, but to the young graduate student and to the public at large, press releases can easily be mistaken for groundbreaking science and often are. How many times have you come across someone from outside of science excited about an article they read online that you know is either extremely speculative or actually pretty mundane? It is hard to respond to reactions like this because you don’t want to dampen someone’s excitement about a subject you care about!

I don’t know what is driving all of this — the media, funding agencies, university rankings or some other metric, but to be perfectly honest, I find much of the coverage on sites like Phys.Org ugly, cynical and detrimental.

While it can be argued that this media coverage does serve some important purpose, it seems to me that this drive to “sell one’s work” may have the adverse effect of exacerbating impostor syndrome (especially among younger colleagues), which is already rampant in physics departments as well as in other academic fields (i.e. you feel like because you need to “sell your work”, and because it gets blown way out of proportion, that you have manipulated people into thinking your work is more important than you really know it to be).

If you just went about your business, trying to do science you think is worthy (without the citation-counting and the excessive media coverage), my guess is science (and more importantly scientists!) would probably be healthier.

I know this viewpoint is pretty one-dimensional and lacks some nuance, so I would like to encourage comments and especially opposing opinions.

## An Excellent Intro To Physical Science

On a recent plane ride, I was able to catch an episode of the new PBS series Genius by Stephen Hawking. I was surprised by the quality of the show and in particular, its emphasis on experiment. Usually, shows like this fall into the trap of giving one the facts (or speculations) without an adequate explanation of how scientists come to such conclusions. However, this one is a little different and there is a large emphasis on experiment, which, at least to me, is much more inspirational.

Here is the episode I watched on the plane:

## Science and Hype

In the last few years, the media have picked up on a few physics stories that were later shown to be incorrect. Prominently, in the last couple years, stories of superluminal neutrinos and evidence for cosmic inflation at BICEP2 flooded the internet. Premature media coverage of high-temperature superconductivity in $H_2S$ and the Higgs boson also occurred, but these findings stood up to the peer review process. Most recently, a rumor was started about the detection of gravitational waves at LIGO. There is an interesting take on these events, focusing on the already-infamous LIGO tweet, in a Physics Today piece by Stephen Corneliussen. I recommend reading it.

It is my personal opinion that the aforementioned scientific discoveries should not have been reported to the media until they stood up to the peer review process. This point of view is not meant to blame the media; we physicists are in fact more responsible for alerting the media than they are for reporting the findings. (Do you really expect a reporter not to report a story? They are just doing their job after all!) Of course, the peer review process is itself far from perfect (just think of the absurd case of Schon for instance) but at least it provides an extra layer of assurance concerning new results.

This is not a cut-and-dry issue, and I wholly acknowledge this, but I do think that we can do better than the current state of affairs.
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