![[IOP]](http://images.iop.org/cws/icons/themes/phw/colophon-small.png){kind=icon}
Jim Parsons and UCLA alumna Mayim Bialik from The Big Bang Theory TV show. (Courtesy: Warner Bros Entertainment Inc.)
By Tushna Commissariat
It’s not often that one can say that watching TV may help your future career as a scientist, but today, after the hit US TV show The Big Bang Theory announced a scholarship for STEM students at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), it may be possible. The show, revolves around a group of young scientists – mainly physicists, but also an engineer, a microbiologist and a neuroscientist – making it a science-heavy show. Indeed, we at Physics World have delved into the secrets of the show’s success and talked to one of its scientific advisers. Now, the sitcom’s co-creator, cast and crew have announced a scholarship fund at UCLA to provide financial aid to undergraduate students pursuing degrees in science, technology, engineering and mathematics. The show’s executive producer, Chuck Lorrie, told the Deadline website that “when we first discussed it, we realized that when Big Bang started, this freshman class were 10 year olds”, adding that “some of them grew up watching the show, and maybe the show had influence on some of them choosing to pursue science as a lifetime goal. Wouldn’t it be great if we can help.” For this academic year, 20 “Big Bang Theory scholars” will be picked to receive financial assistance, with five new scholars each year from now. You can read more about it on the BBC website.
Elsewhere online though, not everyone is feeling the physics love. Writers at The Last Word on Nothing blog recently wrote a post titled “The best science to write about and the worst” as a part of their fifth anniversary write-ups. Unfortunately, two of the writers rated physics as their worst. While there was nothing particularly surprising about this – different people like different things and this extends to journalists and their preferred subjects, often referred to as one’s “beat”. What was rather annoying and off-putting, to me and many other science writers such as Jennifer Ouellette, was the almost predictable reasons they stated – the usual shtick of too much maths and the theory not being accessible. Writer Jennifer Holland complained that “the physicists I’ve talked to are incapable of dropping down to my level. I’ve had them become rather condescending, in fact.”
As a physics writer myself, I have come across bits of research that have been well beyond my knowledge, been terrified by the number of equations in a paper and have, on occasion, struggled to understand what the physicist at the other end of the phone is trying their best to explain to me. But I have found that doggedly asking the researchers many questions, even the “stupid” ones, until you really know what they have done and why, and doing a good bit of reading up and research makes any new study palatable. Some of the physicists I have spoken with were almost poetical about their work, while others had clearly thought long and hard on how to explain the crux of a paper in a way that makes sense to me without dumbing it down or reducing it to metaphors that don’t work. I am not suggesting that physics is the perfect science subject to be writing about (only I am a little bit, and yes, I do realise I may be a bit biased!), but most days I come to work and I am prepared to be amazed and impressed by latest bit of research that is waiting for me in my inbox. Take a look at Ouellette’s post over at her blog Cocktail Party Physics – I couldn’t agree with her more.
Elsewhere on the Web, read this article on The Guardian to find out what area of physics had author Virginia Wolf intrigued and what that has to do with the Royal Ballet’s production Woolf Works, take a look at the National Portrait Gallery’s new sculpture of Tim Berners-Lee and sign up for the first MOOC being hosted by ESA on “monitoring climate from space“.
I think the criticism of physics is significant. These days there is a fashion for physics ‘theories’ to be bound up with complicated maths and language (or jargon) that puts it beyond the realm of an explanation as far as Joe Bloggs is concerned. A consequence of that is that it becomes difficult to determine whether the theory follows reason or departs from it.
Another consequence is that a theory or explanation that happens to be simple and reasonably easy in terms of maths for Joe Bloggs to understand may be seen to be too naïve and lack credibility. However, should we not suppose that the universe is based on simple and minimal principles? Surely anything complicated implies too much of a contrived universe.
The best example is that of the observed accelerating expansion of the cosmos. Its called ‘dark energy’ and is as yet supposedly unexplained….except that the accelerating expansion can be explained as an effect of Gravity (with reasonably simple maths and illustrations) given that our cosmos may be surrounded by infinite others in an infinite, eternal universe.
The above post is *not* about a critique on physics or the language used within the academic field. It talks about physics journalism and communication, and the challenges therein.
Agreed Tushna, given your role, it’s not for you to criticize modern physics and the forms and ways it which it expressed, but to deal with the challenge of understanding and communicating it on. I just think that in your personal challenge there is a certain significance, in this era.
You and other physics journalists may have grown accustomed to physics papers, maths, expressions and concepts that are almost beyond your understanding (so how much more difficult for the ‘general person’ to understand and for you to communicate to them).
So, if that’s what you grow accustomed to/ expect, perhaps it becomes even more of a challenge to accept that a simple theory that’s easily understood (given not so difficult maths but a challenge to the imagination) is the one that can explain one of the greatest mysteries of physics, namely the accelerating expansion of the cosmos.
There is actually nothing challenging about the idea/explanation that the accelerating expansion is caused by Gravity, given a multi-cosmos, infinite eternal universe. It’s just a seemingly impossible challenge for any scientist/journalist, right now, to come out and say, hey, maybe that is the reason, because no one could believe, if that were the reason, that all the science brains around have not already worked it out or considered it – it’s too simple, surely.
This then might be a theory that your social conditioning/education/peers would tell you not to report on or even mention (despite it actually predicting the observed acceleration) but rather to list a host of other speculative /after-the-observation theories, none of which quite fit.
I wonder, since scientists and (astro)physicists are human, if they simply don’t want a theory understood and conceived of by Joe Bloggs to be the right theory, because it inverts a view that they are the only ones who can ultimately understand the universe.
In defense of my somewhat lazy explanation for not liking to write about physics, the post on LWON was meant as a quick hit of the subjects we love and hate, all in good fun. Certainly with the proper research and time spent asking the right questions, a decent science writer can make physics interesting and clear. My own experience, however cliched, is that it can be a slog, and the rewards for me personally aren’t as great as when I slog through some complex zoology, psychology, etc. Not to say that physics itself isn’t filled with amazing scientists doing amazing work. It’s just not my thing. Didn’t mean to hit such a raw nerve with my rather flip comments.