Points of View

How to succeed at engaging the public's interest in science

2011-05-29T13:39:38Z

Over at Astrobites, the astro-ph reader's digest written by graduate students for undergraduates, one of us (Dan Gifford) recently posted an article discussing reasons why students should get involved in science outreach. We hope Dan's article will convince readers to share their knowledge of and passion for science with their community. The big question is, How?

Whether you're a veteran or a newcomer to outreach, and no matter what stage of your career you are in, there are plenty of ways to get involved. In this article, we share some personal experiences and discuss various ways you can make an impact.

There's no shortage of motivations for engaging in public outreach. On a personal level, community service helps to develop your interpersonal and public speaking skills and can be wonderfully rewarding. It's important for your career, because fellowships and grants reward scientists who give back through outreach and education. For the field at large, we must explain the role of science in society in order to convince taxpayers that research is a good investment. As an added benefit, sharing science with others can be tons of fun!

"Outreach" refers to a broad range of activities. Outreach can mean visiting schools and making presentations to packed auditoriums or working one on one with students. It can mean inviting the public into your workplace to illustrate how research works or finding ways to capitalize on public enthusiasm through citizen science. Part of the fun—and value—of outreach is defining it for yourself.

How to succeed at engaging the public

The first rule of outreach is to share your enthusiasm. Think back to your favorite teachers in grade school or your favorite college professors. Chances are you remember them because they managed to bring the joy of learning into the classroom. Excitement is contagious!

Be visual. As an educator, you should find it impossible to teach torque without pushing on a door, or describe parallax without running up and down sidewalks. Physics is all around us, and astronomy is as wondrous as it is beautiful. It seems only natural to use the world around you to describe the world around you.

The universe is a huge place, so finding ways to "bring it down to size" can be an educational experience—and a workout! Try organizing a scale-of-the-solar-system hike. If the sun were the size of this beach ball, how far away, and how big, would all the planets be? This exercise is great in a wide open area where participants can see how far they've walked.

Stay current. People may find it interesting to hear about Isaac Newton and his apple, but they are riveted when you mention the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) and antimatter. Outreach wears many hats, but your favorite should be the flashiest one. Captivating your audience may be the most important goal.

Keep it light and fun. Change the learning environment by keeping things active—challenge a group of high school students to flip out their iPhones and race to find the next time Halley's comet will pass by. It is easy to fall into presentation mode, but remember—you are not trying to show how much you know. Rather, you are trying to make your audience realize the potential within themselves.

When speaking with other adults, respect their enthusiasm even if they are mistaken. Suppose that someone is excited to tell you about an article they read describing the dangers of the LHC. Instead of acting like a referee and immediately pointing out flaws in the article, find a creative way to shift the conversation to a related topic of value. If an audience member says, "I hear the LHC is going to create nano-black holes that will slowly destroy the Earth," you might respond, "I haven't heard that. Hey, did you know that astronomers are finally very certain a supermassive black hole lives at the center of our galaxy? They can actually watch the stars zip around it!"

Ready? First, ask around

You might be surprised to learn what outreach organizations are near you. The Nucleus lists 50 physics and astronomy outreach groups, there are science cafes in nearly every state, and many of the more than 650 chapters of the Society of Physics Students engage in outreach. Check your university's website and ask your colleagues and friends what activities they participate in. Many astronomy departments hold public lectures and observing nights, like we do at the Center for Astrophysics, that can provide great opportunities to work with enthusiastic visitors. And local museums often have volunteer programs just waiting for fresh faces.

Universities and museums probably aren't the only outreach venues in your area. Many local astronomy clubs all over the country specialize in giving planetarium shows, setting up telescopes in parking lots, and visiting scout troops and elementary schools to introduce the public to the night sky. Some of these clubs arrange meetings with city councils and local businesses on how to limit light pollution by reducing the use of skyward lighting. A great outreach example is the Tacoma Astronomical Society, which brings astronomy to the community through its observing nights and visits to schools, scout troops, farmers' markets, and libraries.

Once you've found an organization you'd like to contribute to, get in touch. Don't let your busy schedule stop you from getting involved. You should never make a commitment you can't keep, but volunteering doesn't have to be measured in hours per day. Many schools look for science fair judges in late winter and early spring. Besides being nostalgic (many kids still make volcanoes) and fun, the judging is usually in the evening and may last for only two or three hours. Outreach groups almost never turn down volunteers, so don't hesitate to contact them and discuss how you might help fulfill their mission.

A great example of a flexible outreach organization that offers a myriad of avenues for involvement is Harvard University's Science in the News (SitN), which brings the kitchen sink to public outreach. Graduate student volunteers give weekly public lectures that attract hundreds of people from throughout greater Boston, a twice-monthly web publication highlights high-profile issues, science cafes introduce researchers to the public, and SitN works directly with schools. The organization is truly a facilitator of science outreach and can help you get involved no matter what your interest, goals, or abilities.

Take the lead

In addition to the immediate motivations of the organization, outreach programs can be vital in providing students with leadership experience. Any outreach organization you're committed to will probably have avenues for you to expand your involvement. On the other hand, if you're deeply involved in an organization, think carefully about how your group's work will continue once you move on.

Michigan State University’s Science Theatre is a great example of an organization that encourages its members to take charge. A student-run outreach organization, Science Theatre has been performing interactive demonstrations for two decades in all fields of science at K–12 schools and events across Michigan.

Science Theatre encourages any volunteer with an idea. For example, volunteers often develop new demonstrations to add to the more than 60 in the theater’s repertoire. This creativity can be the first step toward becoming one of the ten officers that organize and lead performances. The leadership structure eases in new members and is invaluable to student organizations, which have a guaranteed turnover every four or five years.

Start your own

If you find that no existing organization can help you share your passion as you would like to, consider starting your own. That's what we did at Astrobites. Our personal experiences had alerted us to the need for a resource that we did not think existed—an informal tool to ease the transition from reading textbooks to reading journal papers. Since we all continued to tackle this process to some degree, we decided we were in an ideal position to provide a useful service to readers.

The first step in starting a new venture is to seek help. If you have an idea that you are willing to invest your time in, you can be confident that many of your peers will feel the same way. Astrobites started with a team of five that had responded to an e-mail sent around to astronomy graduate students at Harvard. It has since grown to include friends of the original members and friends of those friends. The blog now has 16 contributors from seven schools around the country. We are grateful for the consistently supportive feedback we receive from friends and colleagues. A group of students at MIT has started a sister site for chemistry, called Chembites.

The next step in making your project a success is to spread the word. You can’t help your audience if you can't reach it. Start by contacting organizations that have similar goals; ask them for feedback about your plans. Once your program is well defined, begin contacting institutions associated with your target audience. Michigan’s Science Theatre, for example, attracted more than 200 local elementary school students to its 2009 Halloween event by coordinating with local schools to distribute hundreds of fliers.

It's equally important to help your audience find you. Having a web presence is imperative. Even if your work is not primarily online, make sure you have a website that is informative, accurate, and up-to-date. Make yourself available and prepared to field questions via as many media as possible—mail, e-mail, phone, and even Facebook and Twitter.

An important aspect of a new venture is to make sure you and your collaborators are enjoying your experience. The best motivation to encourage participation in a project is to make the job fun, and that is especially true among volunteers. Talk openly about the state of your project and make adjustments to keep things light.

Are you involved in a great outreach project, or are you starting your own? Have you had experiences similar to ours? Let us know by leaving a comment below.

Nathan Sanders is a graduate student in the department of astronomy at Harvard University, where he works on type Ibc supernovae. Dan Gifford is a graduate student in the department of astronomy at the University of Michigan, where he works on galaxy clusters.

The challenge of gifted education

2011-05-28T14:37:22Z

by Alex Antunes

Would you consider an elementary school program that is "not challenging enough," in the words of one student, to be a blessing or a bane? We often focus on the kids who can't master the basics in K12 education and assume that the smart kids will do alright. They can fend for themselves. They're smart already, right?

If you suggest some kids are more gifted at learning, you’ll get the retort "but all children are gifted." Ask for better learners to get special teaching and now, you're elitist. Jeanne Paynter of the Maryland State Department of Education noted that "all students have gifts, but there are some students who are ready, right now, to play varsity." She was referring to the academically gifted. According to Louise Porter of Flinders University of South Australia, to claim that everyone is academically gifted "is akin to claiming that everyone is six feet tall and those who aren’t are either being stubborn about it or have been measured wrongly."

The nonacademic arena doesn't suffer that bias. We're pretty happy accepting that some kids are just naturals at sports, art, acting, being charismatic, or simply being beautiful. No one suggests the top swimmer be put in the kiddy pool to "inspire the others." No one gives the tennis star a badminton coach and says, "She'll do fine. She's got natural talent."

The children I'm taking about are identified as "talented and gifted" (TAG). Because "gifted" is such a loaded term, I favor "the academically gifted"—same acronym, more precision. Children gifted with speed or strength tend to be athletic. Those who have a natural talent in art or music are called artistic. You could call TAG students "smart," but I know folks who are street smart, social smart, book smart. Being academically gifted isn't necessarily being smart; it's having an astonishing capacity to learn.

The provision of teaching to academically gifted children rests on many myths about how they learn. We are falsely confident that smart kids will do OK on their own. We assume that gifted students love school. We have a naive view that the presence of smart kids will help inspire and motivate the other students. We hope that teachers challenge all students, even when class sizes grow. Those myths lead to policy that leaves the academically gifted behind, yet we are surprised when these smart kids disengage and fail to reach their potential.

Myths and realities

Most people accept that a child who is bored in school will not learn. What comes to mind is an ADHD (attention deficit hyperactivity disorder) child unable to focus on the material or a slow learner who can't understand and gives up trying. Picture instead a bright child who has to go over again material already mastered. Imagine yourself having to repeat second grade as an adult. After receiving sheet after sheet of subtraction problems, would you be engaged, a high scorer, an active participant in class?

Exceptional learners exhibit a wide variety of traits, which often include advanced vocabulary, intensity, a highly developed sense of curiosity, keen observation skills, and an unusual sense of humor. Teaching TAG children therefore requires a fundamentally different approach in the day-to-day classroom. You can't tell a TAG child (or special education or autistic child) "just sit through the seven-hour class with everyone else, then learn on your own time." Oddly, TAG’s goals, its funding, and its needs are more in line with Special Education than with conventional comprehensive classwork.

The Maryland state code formally defines a TAG student as an

elementary or secondary student who is identified by professionally qualified individuals as having outstanding talent and performing, or showing the potential for performing, at remarkably high levels of accomplishment when compared with other students of a similar age, experience or environment.

The code notes further that "a gifted and talented student needs different services beyond those provided by the regular school program in order to develop the student's potential."

Getting those different services is a problem for parents. TAG just isn't on the radar of most schools, which subscribe to the myth that smart kids can fend for themselves. As long as TAG is considered special or optional, our children will not get the education they deserve. We need to insist that TAG is not optional. TAG isn't just an advanced curriculum, but an inquiry-based learning approach—even when the material is not more advanced than the comprehensive class.

Academically gifted programs are often confused with honors programs, but the two are distinct. Honors programs typically involve more complex work or work at a higher grade level. Academically gifted programs involve a different approach to learning entirely.

One tool for teaching the gifted is differentiated education, which is also used in regular classrooms. According to C. A. Tomlinson, "differentiation is a way of thinking about teaching and learning that values the individual and can be translated into classroom practice in many ways." Differentiation addresses the same curricula at different levels for different students in terms of the content (what they learn) and the process (how they learn). A regular student may be asked to write a book report about what happened in the story, whereas a gifted student will be asked to extrapolate what happens to the characters after the story ends. For most students, the teacher presents material for the students to learn. For academically gifted students, the teacher suggests a path for the child to explore. In an address to a group of parents of TAG children, D. Arbogast noted that "all people have the ability to increase their capacity. Not all start in the same place, not all end in the same place."

Formal techniques in differentiation include pre-assessment, acceleration, tiered assignments, questioning techniques, independent study, and enrichment activities. But let's be pragmatic here. If a class has 2 TAG students and 30 comprehensive students, the odds that a handful of students will get differentiated instruction from a harried teacher is low. The bulk of teacher time is taken up dealing with poor performers and behavioral issues. As a Baltimore County teacher once noted, if she has one rebellious student, she's OK but if there are two, she shuttles between them and the class is derailed.

A real and testable phenomenon

About 10% of the population is TAG, according to Prince George’s County, Maryland, where every first grader in the county (private or public) is tested. That 10% stays the same regardless of income level, socio-economic status, language barriers, race, color, creed. TAG is a real phenomenon. It's not elitist, and it's testable.

But won't gifted students do just fine on their own? Sure, if "bored, frustrated, and tuning out" means "fine."

Don't teachers challenge every student? Not unless they change the curricula for 27 students to account for the 3 gifted ones. But teachers don't often have the time or the training to do that sort of differentiated education. It's better and cheaper to put a gifted-trained teacher with the gifted students and to put a comprehensive-trained teacher with the regular classroom.

Don't gifted children provide a role model, a challenge to the others? I don't see smart kids getting respect. Instead, peers say "it's easy for you because you're smart." Going back to sports analogies, is it heartening when a truly gifted varsity-level athlete steamrolls you? Being in the presence of talent is not motivating. The best challenge is what's within your grasp.

But in these tough economic times, can we afford special programs for gifted . . . Wait! Gifted education doesn't cost more than regular education, any more than teaching English costs more than teaching social studies. It's an approach to teaching, not more gear or books. In fact, under No Child Left Behind (NCLB), schools with all-gifted classrooms get less funding than an underperforming school because they don’t need specialists.

It turns out schools that are doing well and supporting their academically gifted tend to get less funding than Title I schools. There is punishment for schools that succeed. Funding tends to go to fix problems, not sustain strong performers. There is also a pile-on effect suffered by good schools. Parents will work to transfer their students (rightfully so) from a low-achieving school to a high-achieving school, resulting in overcrowding.

In a perfect world, every TAG child would have access to wonderful TAG services. However, achieving that ideal is really hard—for political, administrative, and financial reasons. Each principal and each teacher would have to buy into the idea that smart kids need help. TAG also requires all teachers be trained in differentiated education—and supplied with small enough class sizes to practice it. Logistically, it's easier to train a few teachers in TAG and differentiation, then concentrate the students (either locally or county-wide) in clusters.

I live in Prince George's County, Maryland, which has 12 000 identified TAG students. Just 2400 of them—20%—get a good education with TAG-trained teachers at the 10 TAG centers. The county runs a lottery to decide who gets into those TAG centers. The rest get a mixed bag of services ranging from one hour a week of supplementary teaching to TAG instruction in the classroom. Now the county is thinking of charging TAG students who need to be bused to the centers. The joke here is that to get a good academically gifted education, you have to be smart, lucky, and rich. And if you're all that, who needs the education?

TAG kids learn differently—in leaps and bounds—and can often outpace their teachers. To keep them engaged in school and let them reach their high potential, we need to provide appropriate teachers and appropriate education. If we fail to provide the academically gifted with the teaching and challenges they need, we risk their becoming disengaged and bored. Then, as a society, we all lose out. These are the same children who will one day help define our future. "We don't ask for more than our share, said a group of TAG students, "only that which meets our needs."

That sounds like a smart idea to me.

References

J. Paynter, address to Maryland Coalition for Gifted and Talented Education (2011).
L. Porter, Twelve Myths of Gifted Education, (2007).
Common Myths, National Association for Gifted Children, (2010).
Education: Title 8. Special Programs for Exceptional Children, The Annotated Code of Maryland, section A8-202 (2003).
C. A. Tomlinson, Quality Curriculum and Instruction for Highly Able Students, Theory into Practice 44(2), 160 (2005).
D. Arbogast, address to the 2010–11 PGTAG Annual Meeting.
T. Jackson, T., Prince George’s County Public Schools Talented and Gifted Programs and Services, address to the 2010–11 PGTAG Annual Meeting (2011).

Alex "Sandy" Antunes is an astrophysicist enjoying the dark world of science business development as a freelancer. His personal science venture is the picosatellite.

Putting the science in science fiction

2011-05-01T15:47:24Z

By Mika McKinnon

During my first day at Bridges Studio, I fed the energy of solar flares into traversable wormhole equations and tried to muffle fan-girlish squeals of delight while meeting people I had only known as characters. From that first day, and for the four seasons I consulted for Stargate: Atlantis and Stargate: Universe, I saw how much the entertainment industry cared about the science it presented. I learned how to help weave science smoothly into popular entertainment.

A consultant is a guest star for the crew, showing up only when episodes demand it. At first, I was the perpetual new kid on set, but a scientist is still a scientist, whether in a laboratory or in a studio. Slowly, I developed guidelines on how to successfully work the interface fostering a strong relationship between science and entertainment.

Wear close-toed shoes

A laboratory is an environment where function dominates over form. Old equipment lurks underfoot, spills ooze off benches, and a moment’s carelessness shatters glass across tiles. Vulnerable feet must be shielded within protective footwear.

On a film set, form dominates over function. In the hallways of spaceship Destiny, I awkwardly leaned over gutters of LED lights to write on the walls. Scooting too close to put the final touches on an equation, I overbalanced, slipped into the gutter and nearly twisted an ankle. Filming intensifies the hazard, when snaking camera cables and wooden crates litter the halls.

Accuracy creates plausibility

Although the science in fiction will rarely line up with recent journal articles, plausible science fiction must be drawn from credible references, as an extension of what might be discovered or could be true if the rules of physics were different. “The accuracy of your science is what grounds the fiction, allowing the reader or viewer to suspend their disbelief,” explains Stargate writer Carl Binder.

A science consultant serves as an illustrator to the authors, adding richness and depth to the world beyond the story. Explicitly, the science will appear in only a few lines of dialog, to capture the essence without bogging down the story. Yet the background contains all the accuracy and detail behind the concept in interweaving equations and persistent variables carried from episode to episode.

It is impossible to over-prepare

A director sees scientific accuracy as an opportunity for authenticity. On my first day, I prepared twice as much material as instructed, and used every equation. Every scripted notebook and white board had variations, and extra equations snuck into unscripted moments.

Now when I walk through the studio gate my bag contains an episodic notebook with at least four times the material the script requires, topical textbooks, the latest particle data book, reference sheets on a variety of physical phenomena, and an all-purpose notebook tracking choices I made in adapting science from every field to this fictional universe.

Be creative with the familiar

The appropriate use of science avoids a harsh disruption, balancing recognizable structures and symbols with complexity and creativity. A viewer’s disbelief is broken if a fictional biologist claims lines of C++ as the solution to a chemical reaction. To maintain plausibility, fictional geniuses must not be stumped by a high-school physics problem, and alien alphabets must be mixed with familiar mathematical notation.

Fiction demands a willingness to apply scientific research in defiance of practicality. The Stargate: Atlantis episode “Brain Storm” required 15 meters of equations, the length dictated by set and the topic dictated by plot. The tangle equations seamlessly tied together string theory, parallel universes, thermodynamics, and the consequences of a steady temperature imbalance on atmospheric science. The science was recognizable, the application fictional, the combination plausible and aesthetically intriguing.

Photograph everything

Creating clear, useful lab notebooks to record data and procedures is a skill drilled into young scientists. Likewise, my episode files are filled with photographs of on-set science.

In the Stargate: Universe episode “Pathogen,” trapped far from home, the character of Nicholas Rush started scrawling on the walls of the spaceship in a desperate attempt to understand the unknown. On set, it took me twelve hours to fill the hall, leaving me with an aching wrist and sniffling from chalk dust. The crew claimed to find errors in my addition as I meticulously photographed each section.

A week later, in a single moment of miscommunication, the walls of chalk were washed clean. It took another full day of poring over photographs to replicate each smudge and overlapping equation. I didn’t relax until the sealant dried, preserving the equations against future mishap.

Teach while learning

Scientists are irrepressible teachers, who want to share the beauty of fluid dynamics in coffee cups and of optics in sunsets with anyone who will listen. The cast and crew quizzed me on aerodynamics of dragonflies, natural hazards in Vancouver, and why the sky is blue. I traded answers for questions of my own, about the process of filming, the function of equipment, and stories of careers that led to this moment.

Embrace fans’ passion and curiosity

Theories are challenged in academic literature and debated at conferences. The first time I directly engaged with fans of the Stargate franchise, I assumed that I’d face harsher questioning than I experienced in my thesis defense.

The fans were as passionate as I expected, but far more relaxed. Curiosity focused on scientific concepts rather than technical detail, and scenes from episodes illustrated ideas from forgotten science classes. Fiction allowed me to engage their passionate interest in the show to build scientific literacy.

Be a model scientist

Every scientist who interacts with the entertainment industry shapes the cultural image of a scientist. Crew members continually seek new knowledge to inform film portrayals; as the on-set scientist I became a resource. When the costumes department asked me about the realism of our fictional scientist working at home in his flannel moose pajamas; I affirmed with stories of my own late-night sessions clad in fleecy polar bear pajamas.

In one episode of Stargate: Atlantis, the two lead characters argued over the use of a spaceship’s shields to deflect a coronal mass ejection from a nearby star. The dialog comes almost word-for-word from a conversation between the author Carl Binder and his daughter, an astronomy graduate student, who rejected the idea as implausible.

For me, the Stargate: Universe episode “Human” is a disorienting mix of fact and fiction. Filmed in my university's lecture halls, fictional graduate students sipped from brightly colored water bottles deliberately purchased to resemble the one I habitually carted around on set. I ransacked my undergraduate notes on cryptography when drafting the fictional blackboard notes, and started with a friend's current research in quantum computing to take real physics and spin it somewhere entirely fictional.

Before I first stepped on set, I thought I would be conducting an uphill, one-sided campaign to include actual facts in stories. Instead, by breaking down the mutual intimidation, Stargate built a symbiotic relationship between science and entertainment to create something better than either could in isolation. I see the glow in other shows that have embraced science, partners in crafting strong and fascinating stories to set loose in the world, and I hope to see it more often.

Mika McKinnon is a disaster researcher, entertainment science consultant, and irrepressible educator. She writes about disasters at GeoMika.com, and science in fiction at SpaceMika.com.

Changing your field of research is not as difficult as you may think

2011-04-27T14:55:42Z

By Giacinto Scoles

To honor the memory and the spirit of innovation of a recently lost friend, Arturo Falaschi, a biologist who loved physics

A few years ago, I changed the focus of my scientific work—from hardcore physical chemistry (high-resolution IR molecular beam laser spectroscopy) to something best described as the applications of nanotechnology to medicine. My new field involves the nanomanipulation of biomolecules on surfaces and the development of nanovectors for drug delivery.

The change, though not easy, has not been as difficult as one might expect.

First, I had to learn the basic facts and the language of the land of biology. From personal experience I knew that learning a language is not difficult if you immerse yourself in the new country and make friends with the locals. So I did that, and found that portion of my transition proved not too difficult.

Second, I had to learn to use—or, more precisely, supervise the use of—a completely different set of instruments. Setting up a high-resolution laser spectroscopy experiment is very different from designing and performing a nanobiology experiment in solution using an atomic force microscope. That challenge also turned out not to be crippling because, quite simply, all instrumentation is noise limited and behaves as specified in the instruction book, provided acoustic and other noise is shielded properly.

After learning a new language and setting up a new lab, I found it necessary and thoroughly enjoyable to explore the frontiers of my new field. Having spent 50 years in science, I’ve experienced the sense of accomplishment and sheer joy that accompany even a small discovery. Those feelings are so fine that the hard work it took to earn them looks like a summer stroll on the beach!

The most difficult aspect of my conversion has been the need for recognition and acceptance by a completely new community of scientists, especially referees. That process is still under way. But if you search the Web for my most recent publications, you’ll see that even that notoriously arduous process turns out to be navigable.

Does the publication of a few papers mean that I am now a biologist? Not at all. To become a biologist was the last of my goals. It means simply that I am ready to bite on the hardtack that is biology with my sharp physics teeth and try to soften it a bit by chewing on it for as long as it takes to do the job.

So, why did I feel the urge to write this article? I decided to get out and shout about how essentially easy it is to change fields; the great majority of scientists expect such a change to be very difficult, and the prospect of making the switch fills them with fear and apprehension.

During the past 10 years I had many conversations with a soon-to-be-ex-friend, trying to convince him that his (or, out of kindness, "our") field had lost its element of fun. My main argument was that computational science has advanced to the point that the behavior of molecules, atoms, or their assemblies can be predicted provided their size and electronic complexity don’t exceed those of biomolecules. At that point in the conversation, my partner usually left, with the belief, I presume, that old age had totally mixed up the few marbles left in my head.

I could provide more examples of what I mean with the expression “calculations that make the measurement not fun anymore,” but let’s assume the expression is true and that the only way to avoid duplicating a computer calculation is to ratchet up the complexity of a problem. I’ve had so many of these conversations about specific problems that even by sheer luck I’ve been right a few times. Invariably, however, I did not convince anyone.

So, here is a general, sociological case for why we researchers should always be ahead of our time, even at the cost of frustrating ourselves trying to solve insoluble problems. Suppose that the tank of a given field has another 10 or even 15 years of gas left in it. Why should we abandon the field and try to train our students in a different area? Good training in science doesn’t depend on the subject. But more important, why not enter a new field in which, like almost any subject in the life sciences, the time left to have fun does not have a foreseeable upper bound?

A dash too conservative

Let us try to imagine why scientists in their fifties and sixties are being a dash too conservative when it comes to switching fields.

Is it because they distrust Google, Google Scholar, Wikipedia, and other convenient sources of information about unfamiliar, jargon-filled fields? Possibly, but I doubt that Wikipedia is normally untrustworthy. There are too many crosschecking mechanisms available on the Web.

Is it because the best scholars shun superficiality and dilettantism as the worst of academic sins and take pride only in in-depth thinking and reasoning? I do not think so. In-depth thinking is certainly not a function of how many details you know in any given field. In fact, a good case can be made for claiming that a too-extensive knowledge of details may actually hinder instead of favor comprehensive thought.

After the rhetorical questions have been asked, I offer my opinion on the question at hand.

Scientists are conservative even when their job description could be succinctly summarized as “innovator” because the culture in which we operate is chock full of traditions that represent the opposite of innovation and intellectual freedom. We are still afraid of making mistakes—even simple terminology mistakes!—even though in the age of Google those can be corrected in an instant! We are still organizing our institutions of higher learning around power centers (the departments) that are built like fortresses meant to divide people instead of bringing them together!

Even banks have learned the advantages of small group divisions and flexible separations, but educational institutions are still building expensive, useless, mammoth structures that serve only to keep scientists separately competing for university resources. Several universities are still building libraries, for Pete’s sake!

In conclusion, let me offer a note of hope, but of caution, too.

Many of the scientific questions that await answers will, I hope, be solved in the second part of this century. Then, having solved the last of the big puzzles—that is, having explained the origin of life—scientists will turn their attention and the power of their quantitative tools toward explaining the sociological complications that arise when these very complex machines called Homo sapiens interact with each other. Let us hope the fruits of that research will respect the freedom of our minds—and of our bodies too!

What's it for?

2011-03-29T19:15:20Z

By Neil Calder

In 1989 the LEP accelerator at CERN was about to start up, and I had just begun my job as head of press at the laboratory. In the enormous LEP tunnel, now used for the LHC, I watched a young journalist from the BBC interviewing a senior physicist. “This is the world’s largest piece of scientific equipment; it has cost the British taxpayer 40 million pounds. . . . What’s it for?”

Twelve times the physicist tried to answer the question, but each time he reverted to specialized concepts and terminology. The reporter realized she was going home with nothing useable, and the physicist realized he could not explain the machine on which he had spent a good part of his career. The frustration was too much and both began to weep.

As they wept deep under the Franco-Swiss border, I realized that here was a fascinating career: equipping scientists so that when asked “What’s it for?”—whether by politicians, funding agencies, the media, or their mothers—they could answer with such enthusiasm and clarity that the only possible response would be, “Wow, that’s amazing!”

Now, 22 years later, I work as senior adviser in communication at the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology, a spanking new multidisciplinary graduate university that will soon admit its first students. Before coming to OIST, I had posts at some of the world’s most exciting science facilities: 12 years as head of press and publications at CERN in Geneva, 6 years as director of communications at SLAC in California, and nearly 3 years as head of communication at ITER, based in the south of France, the global effort to show that fusion is a feasible energy source.

In this piece I cover the nature of science communication, the changes that have taken place in that field, the different expectations in different regions, and why OIST seems to be just about the most exciting place to be doing science communication right now.

“So you work in PR”

I may be overly sensitive about it, but the term “PR professional” makes me bridle. For me it conjures up images of suave, good-looking people in suits, who work out of slick offices and take their clients to fancy, expense-account lunches. None of that has ever described me.

I do what might be called strategic communication for science. The job entails working with senior management in defining what the lab’s vision and goal should be and then devising a strategy to make them happen. In fact, the main goal of communication is more practical than that description and in my experience always comes down to the same thing: ensuring that your institute is correctly funded, whether publicly, privately, or both, to allow the best scientists to do the best research. To paraphrase Bill Clinton, “It’s the funding, stupid.”

All communication roads should lead to the golden city of funding, but there are many roads; some are narrow lanes, and some are six-lane highways. Identifying the audiences you want as allies and the tools you need to bring those audiences onto your team is a crucial part of the job. Potential allies may include neighbors, funding agencies, government representatives and their staff, high-school students, your own organization’s staff, local politicians, industry, scientists in the same field, and scientists in different fields. Each group may need a different set of communication tools, from traditional media through to Facebook, Twitter, and other rapidly expanding online media. There is little point in sending brochures to a TV channel or a mini DVD of cool animations to a staffer on Capitol Hill. How do you know what is the right tool for the right audience?

Judy Jackson, former director of communication at Fermilab and the most outstanding science communicator over the past decade, came up with a breakthrough of embarrassing simplicity. “Why don’t we ask them?” No one had really done that before. Everyone—I mean everyone—has their own ideas on how to communicate and what people want. Judy introduced an extra stage in the process by insisting that at all levels we ask the audience, “What do you want?” The replies were almost always different from our assumptions. Communicators first have to be listeners.

Listening to the audiences is just one of the big changes in the past 22 years. Has communicating science gotten easier in that time? No. I think it is much more complex now but also much more fun. In 1989 the options for getting news out were strictly limited. You could print a press release on a sheet of paper, fold it, stuff it in an envelope, stamp it, and put it in a mailbox. A couple of days later, or much longer for international mail, it would arrive, hopefully on the right person’s desk.

You could put up posters or send out brochures and annual reports. You also had telex, but that was about it. You hoped to lure journalists to the lab because telex was faster for them; they could phone in stories. It was a slow, cozy world with the means of production firmly in the hands of the press offices and the journalists.

Tim Berners Lee came to my office at CERN in about 1991 and tried to explain to me what the World Wide Web was. I listened for a while but, understanding nothing, I grumpily said something like, “Okay, let me know if something happens and maybe we can put it in the CERN Bulletin.” I cringe when I think about it.

Smarter, faster, communication

Now communicators have to be a lot smarter, faster, more plugged in, and more vigilant. We have lost control of the means of production. Anyone with a computer and an iPhone can run his or her own communication office. Anyone can pump out blogs, podcasts, video clips, photos, animations, websites, e-newsletters, and all the rest, and have them arrive instantly anywhere in the world. To compete, the professional communicator has to be better. It’s Darwinian: The quality of science communicators is much higher than it was two decades ago.

Besides being smarter, communicators in labs and institutes now have to listen to the message of the Good Book. “Love your neighbor as yourself.” In bygone days CERN communication staff tried to sell CERN, not particle physics. Each lab was an independent city-state that had little contact with other labs beyond occasional squabbles. Judy Jackson, Petra Folkerts from DESY, and I changed this outlook by setting up the Interactions collaboration.

Interactions brings together the communicators from all particle-physics labs, which now work as a team for the benefit of the field rather than as individuals for the benefit of their own lab. They all help each other, warn each other of upcoming difficulties, and consult on press releases. Interactions has a dedicated website, where you can get all the information you want about particle physics worldwide. The synchrotron radiation community followed the particle physicists’ lead and now has a collaboration among communicators and a central online resource for all light-source-related information.

Does this new way of doing things work? The proof is in the pudding; and for the particle-physics community the pudding was the truly amazing media coverage of the LHC startup. The CERN press team did an outstanding job, and communicators in all the particle-physics labs around the world backed them up. Everyone worked to promote the LHC and particle physics—no squabbling, just support. The result was the biggest science story since the first Moon landing.

Changing continents

Times have changed, techniques have changed, and I have also been lucky enough to have changed continents. Communication style and practice differ markedly between Europe and the US; I think one big difference is the concept of entitlement. In the US the budget cycle is annual. The budget is always there, either in preparation, in negotiation, or, as was the case every year I was at SLAC, in continuing resolution. A research lab spends significant amounts of taxpayers’ money and has to show the government that its money is well spent. Labs and researchers are entitled to nothing.

Communication from the labs is therefore focused on government funding agencies. Reports are written specifically for the agencies’ benefit, with the format and content that they want. Take a look at the Quantum Universe series.

Groups of scientists would go to Washington, DC, to thank legislators for their support and to explain why that support should continue. Scientists knew that they needed to be able to answer clearly, in language a legislator would understand, the same old question, “What’s it for?” The necessity of answering that one question has created a cadre of excellent communicators among US scientific staff.

Europe is different. The budget cycle tends to be longer. At CERN it was five years. The European Commission has seven-year framework programs. I think the longer funding time scale has to some extent disassociated the researcher from the source of funding. Budget discussions continue for a period and then fade away. Researchers do not have the same imperative to go out and hustle for support; rather, they have a sense of entitlement and complain if the funds do not arrive. Scientists do not visit government representatives to ask for support. That would be seen as lobbying—a vulgar and vaguely nondemocratic activity.

The lack of direct contact between scientists and government officials in Europe inflates the importance of the media. The idea behind that phenomenon is that politicians or their staff members read, watch, or listen to the media, so that is the channel for influencing them. The press is minutely scanned every day, and each tiny article is analyzed and discussed—a waste of time and energy, especially in our era of internet media.

Anyone can set up a press website today. An online newspaper calling itself, for example, “The Science Times” can actually be the product of one person on a beach with a good 3G signal. When you search the Web for mentions of your lab, articles from “The Science Times” will show up in the same way as articles from the New York Times. If the articles are negative or critical, they can cause totally unnecessary angst as they are shared online with sadistic glee. However, press articles have little influence on major decisions in science. The people with influence know the facts before they are published in the media. Press reports are like Robert Burns’s snowflake on a river, “a moment here then lost forever.”

Spanking new opportunity

The Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology (OIST) will be a brand new graduate school. The main campus buildings are finished, and we are currently building a second laboratory wing and an auditorium complex. With admirable vision, the Japanese government has set up OIST as an international, cross-disciplinary, graduate university with the ambition of creating one of the world’s leading research centers.

In November 2011 OIST will gain accreditation as a university, and the first teaching year will start in September 2012. I am here because OIST is new and different. The greatest attractions for me are the science itself but also the way of doing it. OIST is at the interfacial frontiers of molecular biology, neuroscience, materials science, genomics, environmental science, and evolutionary biology. I want to help catalyze the growth of these subjects.

Visitors to OIST will see neurobiologists working with physicists, molecular biologists with computer specialists, marine scientists with chemists and crystallographers, and many other cross-field collaborations. The recognized academic subject boundaries are being broken down, and a new, powerful cocktail is being mixed. Toss international faculty and students—more than 50% of each must be from outside Japan—into the mix and you have something unique and potent.

The vision for science at OIST is driven by both the needs and the possibilities of the 21st century. Okinawa is also geographically smack in the middle of a zone of change and development. It is roughly equidistant from the cities of Tokyo, Shanghai, Seoul, Hong Kong, Taipei, and Manila. The tremendous growth all around is evident, and it sets a perfect backdrop to the new approach at OIST.

OIST is a new graduate university with new ideas in a burgeoning part of the world. The ingredients needed to do groundbreaking communication work are combined at OIST—we are international, the science is outstanding, Asia is ready for new development, and we can get it right, from the start, with the communications technologies of the 21st century. So come to OIST and ask us, “What’s it for?”

Keeping ethics relevant

2011-02-01T19:32:09Z

Marshall Thomsen

I first taught an undergraduate course on ethics about 20 years ago. Being relatively fresh from a postdoctoral research position, I focused on issues I found most interesting: publication practices, peer review, and data analysis.

As I later read comments on course evaluation forms, I found that several students questioned the relevance of much of my chosen subject matter. I had obviously missed the mark for students planning to go into industry or high-school teaching.

Although establishing those topics' relevance to industry and to high-school physics teachers is possible, I had not done so. Instead, I had assumed that all of my students were on the same career trajectory toward academic research as I had been. Ever since then, I have been especially sensitive to the need to know my audience when I address ethics.

In my experience, most physicists place a high priority on relevance when it comes to ethics. For a time, that emphasis on relevance arose, in part, because it gave some members of the community a sense of immunity from certain ethical problems: Given the objective nature of data collection in physics, fraud could not be perpetrated for long before being discovered, and hence no rational physicist would attempt it.

Recent high-profile cases of fraud suggest that fraud is more relevant to the physical sciences than those community members had thought. The lesson of episodes like the Schön affair of 2002 is that even though fraud in high-profile areas will be discovered, the physics community may waste a lot of resources while the fraud is being perpetrated.

The recently reauthorized America COMPETES Act requires that all students and postdocs supported by NSF grants be given some formal training in the Responsible Conduct of Research (RCR). This requirement was inserted into the act at the request of NSF's inspector general because the number of misconduct investigations involving NSF funding had increased. Unless the physics community recognizes the value of RCR education, there is a real danger that physicists will regard the required RCR education as an irrelevant bureaucratic exercise.

Not just for biologists and medical researchers

In 2000 the University of Miami and the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle joined forces to create the Collaborative Institutional Training Initiative (CITI). Aimed originally at the biomedical sciences, the online initiative has produced a set of modules designed to help researchers comply with NSF's RCR education requirements. With a reported 1100 institutions participating in CITI, yours may well be one that uses the modules.

That a module set dedicated to the physical sciences exists is promising. However, the modules clearly reveal their origins in the life sciences. For instance, the Data Management and Acquisition module contains numerous references to human-subjects-related issues, such as maintaining confidentiality of sensitive information and working with institutional review boards. Those issues are relevant to physics education research, but the module presents them in a biomedical context. Furthermore, discussions of similar types of data being collected independently by multiple collaborators evoke images of social or medical research, not of a typical laboratory experiment in physics.

Whereas physics students who are interested in ethics will likely find CITI's physical sciences modules interesting and thought provoking, they may not find what they really need: the professional and ethical expectations of the physics community.

RCR education should not be considered complete without a reference to established standards in one’s own field, yet at many universities, such specific material is missing. An essential element of RCR education in physics is reading and understanding the relevant statements adopted by the American Physical Society, such as the APS Guidelines for Professional Conduct.

Physics Today is also a rich source of material on ethics. Over the years, the magazine has published articles, opinion pieces, and letters that address

Having students read a few of these articles is likely to generate a more lasting impression than having them read generic material on ethics in science. If physics-related reading material were discussed in the context of even one meeting in a weekly brown-bag seminar series, many of the key and fundamental issues related to RCR could be addressed effectively and efficiently.

The issues related to RCR in physics have enough depth and complexity for a full course of study. Every time I teach my one-credit-hour course, I am pained to recognize the number of readings I cannot squeeze in and the number of significant cases I do not have time to discuss in any detail. There is no shortage of physics-specific material.

Individual physics departments should insist that their institution's NSF RCR policy be flexible enough to accommodate the needs of physicists—or of any other scientific discipline. NSF has given the academic community considerable flexibility to design RCR programs that comply with its requirements. We should take advantage of that flexibility to ensure that the time our students spend on RCR education is productive.

Marshall Thomsen is a member of the department of physics and astronomy at Eastern Michigan University in Ypsilanti. Besides ethics, his interests include laser–solid interactions and thermodynamics.

Gedanken experiment: Levitate a physics sitcom?

2011-01-03T19:35:54Z

By Steve Corneliussen

Could scientists help the cause of science by helping CBS raise its physics situation comedy The Big Bang Theory from the level of Gomer Pyle, USMC to the level of MASH?

Might CBS let physicists help elevate BBT from the level of Seinfeld, a hilarious show about nothing, to the level of All in the Family, a hilarious show about society's profoundest issues?

During the early Vietnam years, CBS's Gomer Pyle portrayed a cheerful country-boy Marine and his irascible sergeant at a peaceful stateside base. The sitcom ignored Vietnam. Slightly later, CBS's MASH engaged war's horrors, but still provoked laughter, by imagining Marx-brothers-like situations at a ragtag mobile US Army surgical hospital near the Korean War battle front.

Gomer Pyle, like BBT, dispensed trivial fluff to draw high ratings. MASH reflected obliquely on Vietnam. The Washington Post said MASH's finale in 1983 "drew the largest audience ever to watch a single television program."

Indispensable physics addresses not fluff but human-caused climate disruption, clean energy at economy-transforming scales, tools for biomedical researchers and medical practitioners, and the future of everything electronic—not to mention fundamental questions about matter itself.

Drawing on not just physics but technoscience generally, I'll bet physicists could help CBS get even more laughs and an even bigger viewing audience by suggesting BBT script ideas to lift the sitcom from funny fluff to funny substance. But would CBS listen?

Probably not. CBS does employ a physicist, David Saltzberg of UCLA, to ensure verisimilitude in, for example, equations on BBT whiteboards. But as a BBT co-creator told the Washington Post, "obviously the science has to be almost irrelevant." In BBT, CBS produces fluff to make fast money.

Still, if the two-way engagement model of science outreach beats the deficit model, then this BBT-levitation question offers the national physics community an intriguing and maybe instructive gedanken experiment: How could this physics sitcom evolve from funny fluff to funny substance?

Under the deficit model, scientists continually seek to improve one-way science lectures in hopes of reducing a captive public's deficit of science information. The theory is that a better-informed public will cough up more cash for research.

At its best, the deficit model looks like the National Academies' series of "Gathering Storm" reports—accessible, friendly, persuasive advocacy for scientific research and science education. At its worst, the model looks like BBT's Sheldon Cooper, a caricature of a socially inept physicist—insensitive, condescending, and counterproductively hypertechnical, even if also lovable in his naive earnestness.

By now everybody in the physics community has surely at least heard of BBT. George Smoot, the physics Nobel laureate, and Neil deGrasse Tyson, the astrophysicist who seems to be replacing the late Carl Sagan as astronomy’s public face, have both appeared on the show. Jim Parsons, who plays Sheldon, won an Emmy and a Golden Globe this year. CBS now plans to air three more seasons of BBT.

The show makes fast money by exaggerating the nerdiness of Sheldon and three of his friends. The sitcom's situations involve nonscientists, notably Penny, who began in 2007 as a ditzy, stick-figure blonde.

Penny to Sheldon during a first-season episode: "I'm a Sagittarius, which probably tells you way more than you need to know."

Sheldon: "Yes—it tells us that you participate in the mass cultural delusion that the sun's apparent position relative to arbitrarily defined constellations at the time of your birth somehow affects your personality."

Three and a half TV comedy seasons later, Penny and the other characters have become more rounded. Even Sheldon—in fact, especially Sheldon, though still unaware of his own obtuse arrogance—has gathered depth, much as did the bigot Archie Bunker in CBS's All in the Family.

Archie became a fixture in American memory—and his TV chair a fixture at the Smithsonian—for his struggles with social change. So could Sheldon, not for his struggles with science-driven technological change, but for ours.

Like most actual physicists—including the vast majority who are polite—the fictional Sheldon is a quick study. That this theoretical physicist is also a caricature shows in his method of learning to swim: He consults the internet. That he has studied human-caused climate disruption but remains a caricature shows in his explanation: Because the ice caps are melting, "in the future swimming isn't going to be optional."

But Sheldon's casual, incessant, naive rudeness generates enemies. One is Leslie Winkle, a female physicist who taunts him, and who deflates him by correcting his equations. Another is the Sheldon-taunting Wil Wheaton, against whom Sheldon harbors a deep resentment having something to do with science fiction.

What if BBT introduced a climate-denying character to serve as another Sheldon nemesis? In real life, a few prominent physicists like Freeman Dyson, Will Happer, and Robert Austin dispute the climatological consensus that Sheldon would understand in some depth. What if a similar character joined the physics faculty at the Caltech-resembling university where Sheldon works?

Sheldon's inevitably laugh-inducing ire at such a challenging character would reach beyond the campus. At home, he would pontificate sarcastically, lecturing Penny and others accurately but highly technically. Sensible nonscientist Penny—nowadays a veteran in Sheldon's realm—would render his snide pomposity laughable simply by translating his jargon for others.

None of this would require BBT to become a science documentary show in the deficit-model, comedy-killing style. It could all be done in engagement-model style, with Penny and other nonscientists part of an incidental two-way exchange.

In fact, consider another idea for BBT storytelling that retains humor, excludes deficit-model-style propagandizing, shifts the show's fluff-to-substance balance, and potentially helps CBS enlarge BBT's audience.

Imagine that Sheldon's fellow physicist Leonard begins dating an attractive young woman whose nonscientist dad loves to talk science, especially concerning his absolute certitude about his lawsuit alleging that a new supercollider's startup will destroy the planet.

Like all drama, comedy centers on the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself—as when Leonard, caught between the opposing urges of scientific truth and romantic desire, must calibrate how much of that scientific truth to tell the young woman's dad.

Back in 2007, this sitcom seemed a science-outreach disaster, with only slapstick resemblances to the physics world that it nevertheless began branding. But it has evolved. The New York Times quoted Johnny Galecki, who plays Leonard, musing that although many people "thought it would be a show that poked fun at smart people, it has become a show that defends smart people," specifically those "molding our future."

So maybe the show's owner, CBS, could begin crafting scripts involving technocivic issues that make for comedy-catalyzing, laugh-inducing conflict—and for audience enlargement, in more senses than one.

But maybe CBS prefers the Gomer Pyle level. Maybe the network has no ambition to see Sheldon's "spot" alongside Archie's chair someday in the Smithsonian, or to hear Sheldon's all-purpose exclamation "Bazinga!" permeate American slang. Even then, the physics community could profit by running the gedanken experiment.

Physics Today commentaries, including this one, invite reader comments. Leaving aside one-way, deficit-model science lecturing but embracing the potential of entertainment for science engagement, what BBT script ideas can physicists and friends of physics invent?

I hope you record them here.

Steven T. Corneliussen, a media analyst for the American Institute of Physics, monitors three national newspapers, the weeklies Nature and Science, and occasionally other publications. His reports to AIP are collected each Friday for "Science and the Media." He has published op-eds in the Washington Post and other newspapers, has written for NASA's history program, and is a science writer at a particle-accelerator laboratory.

The humble physicist

2010-12-20T12:41:11Z

It hardly raises an eyebrow when someone proclaims that physicists are an arrogant lot. The topic recurs periodically at the Physics Today lunch table and even was the subject of a February 2003 Opinion piece that J. Murray Gibson wrote for the magazine. Gibson took the arrogance of physicists as a given and often helpful quality, but he argued that it had its negative consequences as well.

I think I see where the notion of the arrogant physicist comes from. First of all, some high-profile physicists are undeniably arrogant. Physicists take pride in their work and think it is important. Perhaps most significantly, physicists tend to think that their scientific worldview, with its ideals of objectivity and empiricism, is superior to the alternatives.

But aren’t those all human qualities, not doled out in special measure to physicists? Any subgroup you can name has its share of arrogant jerks. Pretty much all academics take pride in their work and think it’s important. So does the guy down the hall in advertising, and, I expect, so too do my lawyer, barber, and most other workers. And isn’t it almost axiomatic that once you’ve found a worldview that works for you, you’ll find it superior to the ones you’ve rejected?

When you put a bunch of physicists in a room, the exchanges are likely to be blunt and delivered at high volume. That form of commerce has often been called arrogant, but it is not arrogant per se, nor does it imply an underlying arrogance of the speaker. Rather, in my experience, the physicists’ discourse is a reflection of a passionate desire to know and the intense frustration of just not getting it.

On the other hand, several characteristics of how physicists (and sometimes scientists generally) do business suggest to me an arrogance below the academic or human norms.

For starters, science, by its nature, has an important deflating feature. Most scientists would agree that they can’t claim to be doing science unless they admit up front that everything they say can, in principle, be unambiguously proved to be garbage. I don’t know of any movie critics who have volunteered that sentiment—nor should they.

Unusually social animals

By academic standards, physicists are unusually social animals. Physics is sufficiently difficult that most of us find we need help to puzzle through whatever problem we’re working on. But it’s not just that we need help. We like visiting with colleagues in their offices to see what they’re working on and perhaps offer a suggestion or two. If we could somehow subtract out the frustration, most of us would say that our blunt exchanges are fun. And many of us go out of our way in our papers to acknowledge useful conversations.

An anecdote from my days as a teacher at a liberal arts college may shed some light on differences between scientists and other academics. As part of its faculty development program, the college sponsored lunchtime talks in which a professor would share his or her research with the rest of the faculty. Talks given by members of humanities and social science departments were generally well attended. Talks given by members of the science departments were generally well attended . . . by science faculty.

I recall one such talk, given by a colleague in the physics department, whose audience comprised scientists and one member of the English department. She happened to be the director of faculty development and was required to attend (but, to be fair, she did so willingly). After my colleague’s talk, we gave him the usual grilling: Your explanation of such and such didn’t work for me, so can you explain it again? Would this idea address some of the worries you described in your talk? Your comments about the Johnson rod suggest that thus and so might be an interesting thing to look at; have you tried that?

After a while my colleague from the English department asked if the behavior she had just witnessed was typical of what happens when scientists get together. When we assured her it was, she commented, “Wow. It seems like you all are really trying to get at the truth. In my field, we just stand up and try to show how smart we are.”

As an editor at Physics Today, part of my job is to ask experts to critique articles we have received for publication or journal papers on which we may report. My advisers seem to make every effort to be fair. When they have negative things to say, they are rarely gratuitous; a typical recommendation against covering a paper is couched in language like, “The work, though valid and interesting, does not rise to Physics Today’s high standards.” When I have my own reports critiqued by outside physicists, I am consistently asked to add names to the list of folks I have cited for an accomplishment.

A large part of my job is to try to better the expository articles of highly regarded physicists. I suggest that the word here is not what the author meant, that the logic there isn’t convincing, that the organization is not transparent, that the figures are cluttered and the captions uninformative. (I try to do all that in the most diplomatic way possible!) I have found that, with zero exceptions, the authors take my suggestions seriously. Some of my ideas, I learn, are misguided, and some of them don’t convince the author. But in the great majority of cases, at the end of the day the authors thank me for numerous small and not-so-small improvements.

Physicists: social, fair if not generous toward colleagues, open to the possibility that their ideas may be wrong, and remarkably willing to accept criticism. Sounds to me like the opposite of arrogant.

Steven K. Blau

How critical are manufacturing jobs to the US economy?

2010-12-02T18:30:53Z

Five years ago, a committee formed by the US national academies of engineering, science, and medicine released Rising Above the Gathering Storm: Energizing and Employing America for a Brighter Economic Future. The momentous report argued that the US should increase its investment in science and engineering education and R&D to sustain the country's prosperity.

Chapter 2, whose title asks Why Are Science and Technology Critical to America's Prosperity in the 21st Century?, begins:

Since the Industrial Revolution, the growth of economies throughout the world has been driven largely by the pursuit of scientific understanding, the application of engineering solutions, and continual technological innovation. Today, much of everyday life in the United States and other industrialized nations, as evidenced in transportation, communication, agriculture, education, health, defense, and jobs, is the product of investments in research and in the education of scientists and engineers. One need only think about how different our daily lives would be without the technological innovations of the last century or so.

The authors of the report cite numerous technological innovations that have improved our daily lives, from MRI scanners to transistors. Their case is convincing. The prosperity and security of the US or any other advanced country do indeed depend on flourishing domestic high-tech manufacturing industries.

But what the authors fail to do is prove an assumption that runs implicitly throughout the report: that boosting the number of high-tech manufacturing jobs is good for the economy and good for Americans.

I challenge the assumption on two grounds. First, the prosperity of all but the poorest countries appears to be inversely correlated to the relative size of their manufacturing sector: The smaller manufacturing's share of a country's GDP, the richer the country and its inhabitants are. Second, making things in a factory or workshop, which is what most manufacturing jobs entail, is not necessarily what Gathering Storm calls a "high-quality, knowledge-intensive job."

Given the broad support that Gathering Storm received in the science policy community, my challenge might seem futile and ill-advised. I make it because promoting manufacturing jobs at the expense of other jobs could harm the US economy. Moreover, creating the conditions in which high-tech industries can thrive—a policy that I favor—is unlikely to create many US jobs.

How critical is manufacturing to the US economy?

In September, the New York Times reported the appointment of Ron Bloom as President Obama's senior counselor for manufacturing policy. Accompanying the news story was a chart that tracked manufacturing's share of US GDP from 1945 to 2009.

That share peaked in 1953 at 28%. Since then, through wars, recessions, booms, and 11 presidential administrations, it has steadily fallen, hitting 11% in 2009. During the same period, US GDP exploded from around $200 billion to $14 trillion. Services and a swelling population powered that boom, not manufacturing.

The same pattern of services-led growth is repeated in other countries. In the years after World War II Hong Kong positioned itself as a manufacturer of textiles, toys, and electronics. Now, at a time when the territory has reached the same level of prosperity as the US and Western Europe, manufacturing accounts for just 4% of Hong Kong's GDP.

Manufacturing's declining share of the US economy has been accompanied by a change in the nature of US manufacturing jobs. Before an innovative product such as Apple's iPad computer is made, a company conducts market research, decides on features, and designs the device. In Apple's case, the people who do those jobs work for the most part in the company's headquarters in Cupertino, California.

Apple makes and assembles its products all over the world. Here, with my emphasis added, is how the company described its manufacturing operations in the 10-K form it submitted this year to the Securities and Exchange Commission:

Final assembly of the Company’s products is currently performed in the Company’s manufacturing facility in Ireland, and by external vendors in California, Texas, the People’s Republic of China (“China”), the Czech Republic and the Republic of Korea (“Korea”). Currently, the supply and manufacture of many critical components is performed by sole-sourced third-party vendors in the U.S., China, Germany, Ireland, Israel, Japan, Korea, Malaysia, the Netherlands, the Philippines, Taiwan, Thailand and Singapore. Sole-sourced third-party vendors in China perform final assembly of substantially all of the Company’s Macs, iPhones, iPads and iPods.

Those Macs, iPhones, iPads, and iPods are assembled in a factory in mainland China owned by the Taiwan-based Foxconn. Conditions and pay there are evidently grim. Fourteen workers, all between the ages of 19 and 24, killed themselves this year in apparent desperation.

Foxconn raised wages in response to the suicides, but I doubt assembling an iPad is what an American would call a good job. And if working in a US auto plant was a good job, it was because of wages and benefits that were unsustainably generous. Note, too, that when BMW and Daimler were looking for US sites for new factories, they chose South Carolina and Alabama, respectively. Neither state is known for the quality of its education systems. If BMW and Daimler had wanted to fill high-quality, knowledge-intensive jobs, they'd have gone elsewhere.

I and, presumably, the Gathering Storm authors hope that Apple and other US high-tech companies will continue to sprout, grow, and thrive. Among the jobs they create in the US will be some well-paid ones that require a background in science or engineering. Those jobs will be modest in number. A company doesn't need lots of researchers.

But what if the US government heeds Gathering Storm and tries to create more high-tech manufacturing jobs of all kinds? How can that be bad? First, subsidies and tax breaks—the state and federal government's usual job-creating incentives—are cut from a finite revenue pie. The bigger the manufacturing slice, the less that remains of the pie for incentives aimed at creating high-quality, knowledge-intensive jobs outside manufacturing.

Ireland, Singapore, and Switzerland attract foreign investment not through targeted subsidies, but through uniformly low corporate tax rates. Some of the jobs that the investment creates are in manufacturing, but others are in finance and other nonmanufacturing sectors. If the US favors manufacturing, it risks missing out on those other jobs.

The second way in which trying to create manufacturing jobs could be bad is that it won't have much of an effect. Last week, General Motors announced it would hire 1000 scientists and engineers to develop electric vehicles and power plants. The press coverage was justifably positive. But given that GM employs about 60 000 people in the US, an additional 1000, however welcome, will bring only a modest drop to Michigan's woeful unemployment rate.

It's also unrealistic to expect to defy an economic and historic trend of worldwide scope and power. The relative decline in manufacturing in rich countries in the 20th and 21st centuries is as inexorable as the decline of agriculture was in those same countries in the 19th century.

If you travelled out of London this past summer in almost any direction, you'd have seen field after field of growing crops and grazing livestock. A passenger on one of Britain's first steam trains would have seen much the same in the 1830s. Despite continuing to occupy a large fraction of the country's land area, agriculture now contributes 1% to UK GDP and employs 1% of the workforce.

Manufacturing might one day dwindle to a similar fraction in the UK and the US. What matters is that people are happy, healthy, and secure. For that, you need a good job, not necessarily a manufacturing job.

Charles Day

USA Science Fest: A good excuse for a father to take his girls to the Mall

2010-10-29T13:51:39Z

I dread the day when my two girls, ages 4 and 2, become aware of how society tells them they're supposed to look and dress. When that day does come, I imagine one of the girls will ask, "Daddy! Can you take us clothes shopping at the mall?"

My fear isn't so much for my inevitably shrinking wallet. I'm more concerned about losing influence over my daughters. Because I'm not the kind of father who's content to sit on the sidelines—or on a fashion boutique's dressing-room couch—and watch society influence my children, I was glad for the opportunity to go on the offensive last weekend.

Last month, I approached my daughters and said, "Hey! Daddy's taking you to the National Mall in DC to the USA Science and Engineering Festival!" Of course, they didn't have a clue what I was talking about. All they heard was the enthusiasm in my voice, which, for now at least, carries some weight.

I had been waiting excitedly for months to attend the inaugural USA Science and Engineering Festival, which kicked off on 10 October with a concert on the University of Maryland's College Park campus and culminated two weeks later with an expo near the National Mall in Washington, DC.

Sponsored by Lockheed Martin and organized by philanthropists Larry and Diane Bock, the festival promised, and delivered, more than 1500 interactive exhibits designed and presented by university research departments, NSF-funded centers, science museums, technology companies, and nonprofit groups that promote science.

More than 30 Nobel laureates, including NASA's John Mather shown here, participated in the festivities, which also included an Albert Einstein impersonator, unicycle riders juggling "nano balls," and singers belting out ballads laced with science lyrics.

NASA's John Mather at the inaugural USA Science & Engineering Festival

Even President Obama joined the action by hosting a science fair at the White House on 18 October. Thanks in part to his efforts to get the word out, more than one million people reportedly streamed through the exhibits on the festival's final weekend.

At the festival's Squishy Science booth, which was put together by condensed-matter researchers from Georgetown University, children played with gels, polymers, and other soft materials. The LaserFest booth, sponsored by the American Physical Society, the Optical Society of America, the American Association of Physics Teachers, and the Society of Physics Students, gave children the chance to meet Spectra, the teenage superheroine and star of her own comic book.

Physics also featured in the NASCAR booth, where families posed for photos in front of a racecar and learned about the science behind the sport. People crammed into Howard University's NanoExpress, a working nanotechnology lab lined with atomic force microscopes (AFMs) and other high-tech nanoscopic and nanofabrication instruments.

The longest line by far was for a ride on a space-shuttle simulator sponsored by the COPD Foundation. The foundation's simultaneous goals were to inspire young people to pursue science and to increase awareness of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and other lung conditions.

As a scientist, I relished the entire event the way my daughters would relish a trip to Disneyworld. They, however, were slightly less impressed. We experienced most of the exhibits either too briefly or from too far away because I knew my girls wouldn't have the patience to wait in lines or the appreciation of what an AFM was, or even care what their height was in nanometers—my four-year-old, Kera, is roughly 1 billion nanometers tall. Apart from the PBS Kids booth, where Kera (shown here) posed with Dr. Seuss's Cat in the Hat, most of the exhibits were simply over their heads.

Kera Matthews visits the PBS Kids booth

Even so, I was delighted to see children at the festival, especially girls and children from minority groups that are underrepresented in the fields of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. Several exhibits targeted those groups; all seemed geared to school-age children.

Next year, I would like to see the exhibits separated into three zones: a kid zone for elementary-school-age children, a teen zone, and an adult zone for the rest of us. I would also like to have the festival provide a location-aware smartphone app, or better yet, a humanoid robot, to guide me through my preselected exhibits. Without help the scale of the event is overwhelming. Maybe I'm asking too much.

More scientists involved

I also hope that next year more scientists get involved from the beginning. Since March I was plugged in to the planning stages through the festival's Facebook and LinkedIn pages. Judging by the pages' traffic, it appeared as though the organizers were initially slow to attract the cooperation of the traditional science societies.

It seems to me that scientists are cynical toward events sponsored by for-profit companies or organized by people outside of the established research community. That's a shame, because it is urgent that the US reinvigorate and reinvest in science education. There's a Gathering Storm; it's approaching category five; and we need all hands on deck.

I left the festival with a bag full of brochures, and two daughters covered with stickers and sporting a free bright neon-green baseball cap from the National Center for Women and Information Technology, which was there to inspire girls to study computer science.

But I also wanted material that my preschool children could learn from at home. I know it wasn't the shopping mall, but I was prepared and hoping to spend some money on science games or science-themed clothing and gear. Unfortunately, I couldn't find anyone selling such items on site. I did see a woman with a T-shirt that read "I ♥ physics," but she told me that she came to the festival wearing it.

Nonetheless, thanks to the USA Science and Engineering Festival, I no longer dread going to the mall with my girls when they reach shopping age. By then, they will have made several pilgrimages to the festival and will, I hope, have been positively influenced by it. And by then, their favorite outfit will perhaps include a T-shirt that says, "I ♥ physics."

Jermey N. A. Matthews

The path to a job in editing, including two roads not taken

2010-09-01T17:38:31Z

A body traveling in a straight line maintains its motion unless acted on by an outside force. That inertial principle, which has the status of law in physics, also applies less rigorously to other aspects of life.

Graduate students in physics generally pursue a path toward a career in research. That was the early road for all of us who are now editors at Physics Today. We diverted off the standard path to arrive here, and in my case, the path included a long detour as a teacher at an undergraduate college. If your career options are wide open, perhaps the following observations based on my years as researcher, teacher, and editor can help you choose the road with the best chance of leading to your fulfillment.

Pure excitement

For pure excitement, nothing tops being a researcher at a good institution, where first-rate physicists pass through on a regular basis, sharing their ideas. Because those ideas were not always fully developed, visitors were often as eager to hear what their hosts—faculty, postdocs, and graduate students—had to say as to tell us what was on their mind.

The author, on penny whistle, was a member of the Ceresco String Band, a group of Ripon College faculty from several departments that occasionally entertained at campus functions.

When I was a postdoc at the University of Texas, Nobel laureate Steven Weinberg would sometimes come into the office that I shared with other postdocs and request a few minutes of our time. He’d ask for our help with something that was puzzling him.

Actually, Steve was always a few steps ahead of us and we usually ended up learning of some subtlety we hadn’t appreciated rather than setting him straight. But we were glad he thought enough of us to ask, and we must have done something right because he’d stop by again before too long.

I much enjoyed the intellectual exchange that is a defining feature of the research world. A significant part of that pleasure was a conscious awareness that my colleagues and I were puzzling out ideas that were at the edge of humankind’s knowledge.

It was hard work. I recall vividly one evening when I was in graduate school and a nonphysicist roommate stopped by to pick me up for the walk home together. A bunch of us in the office were in the middle of a discussion, so he patiently waited. When it was time to go, his first words were “Man, that was intense.” I assured him that he’d just observed the normal give and take that’s all in a day’s work for a grad student. The day’s work often spilled into nights. Since dinnertime usually arrived with problems still unresolved, many of us found it difficult to leave our work at the office.

Nocturnal ruminations notwithstanding, we might well arrive at the office on any given day no further along than we were the day before. As a postdoc at Los Alamos National Laboratory, I asked my senior colleague Geoffrey West if he too had many zero-progress days. “Absolutely,” he replied. “Any given day is likely to be miserable and frustrating. But when you finally solve the problem that’s been bothering you, well, there’s no better feeling than that.”

Geoff was right that a successful research project can be enormously satisfying, but his remark did help confirm that the research world was not right for me. I could think of things more satisfying than solving theoretical physics problems and I was frustrated that my work would likely be helpful to only a small number of like-minded researchers. In 1992 I joined the faculty of Ripon College, a small liberal arts college in Wisconsin.

Tremendous upside

Teachers can potentially influence a great number of people. And I can think of no more honorable work than serving as a positive role model for young students embarking on life on their own.

Ideally I would have liked to inspire my students to continue studying physics. That was quite a challenge, especially when the students were in my classes to satisfy a distribution requirement or prepare for admission exams in another field—for example, medicine.

At the beginning of one class, I asked how many of my students were there because they felt they had to be there, not because they wanted to be there. Ninety percent of the hands went up. Next question: As long as you have to be here, how many of you will work to make the best of a bad situation and get something out of the course? One hand remained up.

Admittedly, it was a small class, but the results of that survey were discouraging and they were repeated time and again. Although teaching was often frustrating, in the end the classes had their good moments, and the students learned some physics.

Working at an undergraduate institution offers several advantages. I enjoyed being a part of a scholarly community that included all the fields taught in a good liberal arts college and having the opportunity—even the expectation—of attending a wide range of faculty seminars.

I and many of my colleagues liked being in a community with so many young people; it kept us young. And if we didn’t inspire our students to study our favorite field, but did demonstrate how to be prepared and enthusiastic and how to handle difficult issues with integrity, then we perhaps accomplished enough.

Teaching felt different from research. Whereas research is necessarily open ended, and one never knows if a given research project will end in success, I did know that I could plan and conduct a good classroom or lab session. My teaching job didn’t have the intellectual highs and lows of a research job. Rather, it was more like a steady grind. There was always a lot that had to be done for the next class session and weekends were often largely taken up with grading.

A lot of a teacher's work may be for the good of the institution and not related to teaching physics. As a member of an undergraduate faculty, you should be prepared to serve on numerous committees, cheerlead at admissions fairs, and so forth.

An additional difficulty, at least for me, was keeping up with the latest advances in the field. I still remember how I felt 13 years ago when I encountered Ed Witten's feature article in Physics Today about string theory duality. I knew the field wouldn’t stop moving forward just because I left it, but I was still stung to read about new discoveries of which I was not aware that had ripened enough to be worthy of a story addressed to the community as a whole. In short, I was no longer in the club.

A little this, a little that

In 2001 I became an editor at Physics Today. In some ways, working at a magazine like Physics Today splits the difference between being a researcher and being an undergraduate teacher. Editors have the opportunity and obligation to keep up with new developments—in string theory and in the other branches of physics.

This figure, which shows the geometry of foam, appeared in May's Quick Study "Making a frothy shampoo or beer."

But we are reporters of those developments, not contributors to them. We teach and serve a large community of physicists and scientists and play a role in giving that community its cohesiveness—at least we hope we do.

I’m proud of that work, though for me it is not as important as mentoring young people. The environment is intellectually stimulating though not as intense as in a research environment, nor as multidisciplinary as at an undergraduate institution.

The job has some special and wonderful features. Editors and science writers have a chance to learn at least a little bit about a broad range of fields in physics and related disciplines. The physicists whose advice we seek are eager to talk about their work and, stereotypes notwithstanding, are usually pretty good at explaining it.

Admittedly, authors sometimes put an editor’s diplomacy skills to the test, as when one told me I was “a poster child for what’s wrong with the American educational system.” But by and large they are a cooperative and collaborative lot and if they have an objection to what I do, there’s almost always a good reason.

Editors need to accept that their contributions to an article generally remain uncredited. But we also write pieces under our own byline. Those stories allow for a different kind of creative outlet, and seeing your byline in print never ceases to be exciting.

One of my roles here is to run Quick Study. Launched in 2006, the department features short tutorial essays that we hope will engage and inspire undergraduates. Sometimes it seems that just coming up with ideas month after month is the toughest part of keeping the department moving. Once I’ve gotten an idea—often provided by a Physics Today colleague—I typically need to get expert advice so that I can outline a short, cohesive, undergraduate-friendly piece based on that idea and identify a suitable author to turn the outline into a tutorial. The two tasks are not independent; often the author and I hash out the story idea together. Once the first iteration of the Quick Study is in house, the review process and the editing for punch and clarity usually go smoothly enough.

Although the workplace is intellectual and collegial, it would not be mistaken for a college or university. Two of the pleasures of academic life—job security through tenure and generally hands-off bosses—are not perks that the editor enjoys. Organizational hierarchy is more present here than in academia.

The worlds of research, teaching, and writing all have their own rewards and frustrations that need to be balanced out for someone choosing a career. Fortunately, we live in a varied world too, in which we all have our own formulas for evaluating that balance.

Steven K. Blau

Weaken unions to strengthen physics teaching?

2010-08-20T18:16:58Z

Physics Today's offices are situated inside the Washington, DC, Beltway in Prince George's County, Maryland. The county's school system had an enrollment last year of 127 129, a budget of $1.71 billion, and a chronic difficulty in attracting qualified physics teachers.

A look at the county's union-agreed pay scale provides a clue to the shortage. A teacher's pay depends on just two factors: length of tenure and class of degree. In Prince George's and other US counties, a new effective teacher would be paid less than an old ineffective teacher. And a high-school physics teacher would be paid the same as an elementary-school teacher of the same tenure.

To its credit, Prince George's County tries to work around the rigid pay scale by offering hiring bonuses to teachers whose expertise is scarce and prized. Second-career teachers who are experts in their subjects but who lack a formal background in education are allowed to work for certification while teaching and drawing a salary.

Still, imagine how a young physics teacher might feel, after she's spent her bonus and earned her certification, to find herself among colleagues earning twice as much as she earns, regardless of the effort required to master the subject or the effectiveness of their teaching. Imagine how she'd feel if she's laid off in this recession because her state's regulations protect senior teachers before junior teachers.

Working for their members—most of them

Unions work for their members. Without them teachers' salaries would undoubtedly be lower, as my mother-in-law, a former gym teacher, found out. She had taken a break from her public school job to raise her son. When she reapplied to work for her former employer, the county pay scale had made her too costly. She had to settle for a lower-paying job at a private school.

But unions, it seems to me, work hardest for most of their members, not all of them. Young teachers are outnumbered by a cadre of veteran teachers whose interests the unions promote and defend. That bias affects physics and other areas that must attract young teachers to fill empty positions.

Uniform, rank-based pay scales are the norm in the military and in paramilitary professions like the police force. There, uniform scales promote camaraderie and unit cohesion. In schools, they might be justified because the teachers in a given school have to teach more or less the same students. But because those students are the same, a school should be free to pay higher salaries to teachers whose students learn more.

There is a growing movement to reward teachers based on their effectiveness. As Steven Brill reported in the New York Times magazine, its impetus comes in part from a growing federal role in US education. In a recent opinion piece in APS News, Judy Franz, the former CEO of the American Physical Society, cited the lack of merit-based pay as one of the reasons for the dearth of qualified physics teachers.

Freeing schools to pay their best teachers more would help retain talented physics teachers, as would reforming tenure rules. But to attract young physicists to the teaching profession in the first place, high schools should be freed from another union-secured restriction; they should be allowed to offer subject-based pay.

Charles Day

My first laser

2010-08-12T17:58:15Z

When Theodore Maiman introduced the ruby laser on 16 May 1960, with pulses of bright, coherent red light from his laboratory at Hughes Research, I was an 11-year-old "Sputnik" kid playing dangerously with homemade rockets and radio circuits.

Although I was too young to pay much notice then, I got hooked on lasers two years later when I read an article in Popular Science magazine titled "The Incredible Ruby Ray" (scroll to page 89). It thoroughly captivated me—I just had to make a laser for myself!

The trouble with such a venture for a 13-year-old boy was the required equipment; a cigarette-sized ruby crystal and a high-energy flashtube far exceeded my discretionary funds. Cash from delivering papers and mowing lawns could keep a junior scientist stocked with chemicals and radio parts, but the components for a pulsed ruby laser would require a major bequest from a rich relative. I didn't have one.

After I had read the article in Popular Science, I started reading any article I could find on lasers and spending afternoons and weekends in the library of Philadelphia's Franklin Institute. I needed to find someone who would lend me the required ruby crystal. By 1963 a small number of companies in the United States were making those precisely grown crystals, but the price for the required two-inch-long specimen was well over $1000.

I wrote letters to every such company that I could identify, explained my plans, and inquired whether I could borrow a ruby crystal. To my delight, a research team at RCA's engineering research facility in Camden, NJ, wrote back and invited me for a visit. I took that to mean that they wanted to check me out before offering to help.

I left the RCA laboratory with not one but two laser crystals, in addition to lots of advice on how to build my first laser. The engineers I met during my first visit to RCA stayed in touch with me during what became my four-year venture as my lasers became increasingly sophisticated (and better working) and my ability to ask better questions matured.

My third laser, completed in 1965 (shown in the photo), was a reasonable scientific tool for the time. Making good use of a scientific tool for discovery is an important component of a scientist's education. While pondering what to do with my laser, another venture in letter writing served me well. I wrote to Hermann Muller, a professor emeritus at Indiana University who had won the 1946 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine by showing that exposure to sufficient quantities of x rays causes damage to biological cells and eventually leads to mutations.

I asked Muller to speculate on whether the unique characteristics of laser light—spectral purity and ability to tightly focus—might have novel effects on biological systems. To this day I marvel at the three-page response he sent back to me, a 15-year-old high-school freshman at the time. Muller's letter included ruminations on my query, suggestions for my experiments, background tutorials, and a long list of suggested reading.

His recommendations led me to do a series of experiments with my model 3 laser that involved controlled exposures of frog eggs harvested from the backyard pond and onion roots dug up from the garden. My experiments won me some minor awards in the regional science fair in Philadelphia, but, more importantly, the experience taught me how to do experiments.

Ten years later with a freshly minted PhD in physics, and ever since, I have tried to be generous with my time whenever a young student sends me an inquiry or asks me for advice or for a loan of scientific gadgetry. I remember how the RCA engineers and Professor Muller took interest in me and how they influenced my career in a positive way.

Within every scientist is the drive to understand how things work and to discover new ways of doing things. Yet the fervor for discovery is cultivated by strong mentors who encourage, steer, and challenge the budding scientist until—and often long after—he or she becomes a professional scientist. My own fascination with science was fueled by the invention of the laser and guided by scientists who took a personal interest in my curiosity—mentors who had a tremendous impact on my life and career.

H. Frederick Dylla

From interest in energy policy to activism - and then a job

2010-08-05T14:48:47Z

In 2001, when Dick Cheney’s Energy Task Force began its work, my interest in energy policy turned to activism.

At that time I was working as a R&D engineer at a small high-tech firm in the Seattle area, using my astrophysics education (MIT PhD, 1992) to develop a machine vision inspection system. But my interest in energy policy and technology began earlier, in high school, when I’d devour the articles in Omni magazine on nuclear fusion.

I’d also been following climate change science with increasing concern. In 1994, when I was a postdoc at the University of Washington, I created my first webpage. Hand coded with the Emacs editor, the site included links to good articles on climate science.

Then, as now, if anyone asked me about my interest in energy policy, I explained that physicists follow energy the way accountants follow money: It’s conserved in your equations or you know that something odd has happened and it explains what transactions or reactions occur.

Given my interests and concerns, I followed Cheney’s task force closely. Although I didn’t expect the task force to be very good, it soon became clear that it was much worse than I expected. I knew that by myself I could create a better national energy policy. That isn’t bragging; a random number generator linked to a set of possible policies could do better.

Living in Seattle, I knew it would be difficult to drive policy in the “other” Washington, but I felt I could make a difference at the state level. I’d been a passive member of the Sierra Club for many years, but that changed after I saw a mention in the club newsletter about an event about energy policy. I contacted the club; within a month I found myself the chair of a new committee formed to work on energy policy alongside the club’s more traditional sphere of forests and streams.

One of the first issues I dealt with was a request for help from opponents of a wind farm. But when I toured the proposed site and its surroundings, I found a rural area well suited to wind development. The winds there are strong and steady; high-voltage lines heading toward Seattle pass right through.

The wind farm was supported by local farmers and ranchers, who saw the benefit it would bring to their county in jobs and tax revenue. The opponents were a small number of landowners who felt the wind turbines would disturb the views from their exurban ranchettes. I testified before the state permitting commission in favor of the project. Eight years after it was first purposed, the Kittitas Valley Wind Power Project is finally under construction.

More renewables, less coal

The biggest issue my committee tackled was creating a renewable energy portfolio standard. Working with other groups, we lobbied our state legislature to create a requirement that utilities get a certain percentage of their electricity from renewable energy. Although the Northwest derives much of its power from hydro, 20% comes from coal plants. Since the amount of hydro is fixed and the region’s population is growing, coal’s share would grow unless strong public policy steered the utilities in a different direction.

After several years of trying the lobbying route, we invoked the western tradition of using a ballot initiative to let the voters decide. I found myself spending Saturday mornings collecting signatures at the dog park with my two pooches and my son in his BabyBjorn. We got our initiative on the ballot and the voters approved it by a wide margin.

Last year I was laid off from my high-tech job and found myself looking for work in a recession. Someone I knew at Seattle City Light, our public electric utility, knew of my interest in energy conservation and my experience as a project manager, so now I’m managing a large energy conservation project funded in part by the federal stimulus package. My coworkers and I go into homes and install simple energy-efficiency devices such as compact florescent lights and faucet aerators. We also install smoke detectors, look for toilet leaks, and teach residents about energy efficiency.

What makes the program especially valuable is that we’re targeting non-English-speaking households. I’m involved with everything: deciding what measures we will perform, training the installers, reaching out to community groups, developing marketing materials, performing quality assurance, and more. The installers know of my background and often ask me about the physics of their job, from how insulation works to how heat is wasted by the IR emissions from incandescent light bulbs.

Whether it is teaching sailing, designing medical devices or running a program screwing in light bulbs I’ve found my physics training is always there for me.

Andy Silber