Kill the myth of "stupid"

For about a month now, I've been plugging away at a series called "Basic Physics", trying to go through a first year physics curriculum in a way that is understandable to people who aren't in STEM, and may not have even looked at 'math' in years. My mother has kindly been acting as one of the guinea pig for this experiment, reading through posts and giving me feedback on what is or isn't clear, is or isn't helpful. The last post on vector multiplication was particularly difficult for the both of us. It's hard to explain simply, and she really wanted to understand them in the same way she understood the trig section (after some rewrites at her suggestions). Every time we spoke and she said she still didn't get it, she would apologize "for being so stupid".

Now, stupid isn't a word I would use to describe my mother, and I sincerely doubt she has ever honestly been accused of that in her life. I reassured her that these were not easy topics, and pointed out that I had complained to her for at least 2.5 years now that my students, who nominally should walk into my classroom knowing this stuff, don't get it. I added a paragraph of encouragement at the top of the post, which seemed to help because I got this as a response:

ok I realized that I was trying too hard.

I get it now because I accept your math without trying to do it in my head every step.

Bring on the next chapter.

I called her up later in the day to thank her, because I realize that she probably hadn't been looking to learn this stuff before I asked for her help. She is a very gracious woman, and said she was always open to learning, but again apologized for being "stupid".

After we hung up, I realized that this is a refrain I have heard over and over when teaching: "I'm sorry I'm being so stupid". I've heard it from students in class, in office hours, in tutoring sessions back in college, and now from my mother. The general sentiment always seems to be that if they can't get it on the first go round, they are stupid and incapable rather than the reality that the topic is difficult. My students have gone so far as to tell me that I must be far more intelligent than them to understand this stuff.

There is an article in the New York Times today who headline was "Why do Americans Suck at Math?" and I can't help but think that the refrain of "I'm sorry I'm so stupid" and headlines like this are connected. Connected because they reinforce this idea that people "suck" at math in bulk. There is this weird perception that math is something only special people are good at, that you have to have some innate ability to do it and understand it. That people who are good at math look always use the Feynman method of problem solving: write the problem down, think about it, write down the solution. The idea that math people look at a new math topic and go "Oh, of course! Obviously this is true" and run off and use it seems to be weirdly pervasive, both consciously and unconsciously.

Of course, it would be lovely if this were true. I could have whole years of my life back if this were true. And of course it feels nice to be on the math people side of this, because it makes one feel smart and talented when in your work you frequently feel frustrated. It's like payback for the mockery, real or perceived, for being STEM types with all the cultural baggage that goes with it.

But I think it is also incredibly toxic. If math is something only special people can do, then why should ordinary people try? If we ignore or hide away our own struggles with understanding, we encourage this myth and scare people away who, even if they aren't in STEM, might enjoy seeing the beauty of it all. And it is beautiful. Being able to see the world with math and science at your back is awe inspiring, adding a whole new dimension to everything you can look at and experience.

I know very, very few people who haven't struggled to grasp every math and physics concept when they were first introduced. I think I've known two in my entire life. I was on the 'elevated' math track in school, which means I got all the way through AP Calc B in high school. And I still struggled and struggle with math. What my students (and my mother) never saw was me with wikipedia on my laptop and my calc book open as I desperately tried to understand different kinds of integrals, or tests for convergence. They never saw the early mornings, between classes and late nights in the physics lounge with scratch paper everywhere, chalk covered hands, asking anyone who entered the room, "Can you explain this? What is a [cross product, wave equation, probability density, etc]?" The extended arguments that eventually ended up with the stuffed monkey Harold on one of the professor's door in a plea for help. They will never know how much help I got from professors, from other students, from older students as I struggled to learn this stuff that I now seem so natural at. I'm not smarter than them. I was just persistent. When my students see me reduce a fraction on the board, or quickly do a cross product they assume it's just natural to me, like music is natural to my dad. What it really is is 7 years more experience and work.

Now, is there some natural inclination involved? Sure. But not nearly as much as people seem to think. Being good at anything, regardless of natural inclination, requires work above all else. My sister is more naturally inclined than I towards languages; she also studied more and is therefore far more fluent than I am (as in, actually fluent). No matter what your natural talent and inclination, if you never work at it, it will wither and dry up. And while you may never be a prodigy, hard work can get a person far in pretty much anything that's not sports.

People don't seem to believe me when it comes to math and science, so here's an analogy. I enjoy cooking. At this point in my life I am pretty good at it. I can make recipes up on the fly and nine times out of ten they work. I can tell if a cake is done by appearance and a light poke; I know if my steak is done to my liking by touch. Now, is there some natural inclination at work? Maybe. My mother is an excellent cook, and let me mess around in the kitchen at an early age. But mostly it's because I've been cooking for over half my life. Because I read cookbooks and watched masters and purposefully worked on my techniques, my understanding of the underlying food chemistry, the physics of different methods of cooking. Anything I am good at is maybe 5% natural talent, 95% work. Five percent alone gets you absolutely no where. Ninety five percent alone can get you pretty far.

This is something that we need to work on emphasizing more. We need to emphasize fewer Sheldon Coopers and Charlie Epps, boy geniuses grown up and solving MATH. We need to make it clear that what we do is not magic, not the result of some fluke of genetics that gave us special math powers. Something sparked an interest and we pursued it to the best of our abilities. We weren't destined to become mathematicians/physicists/chemists/what-have-you any more than non-STEM people were destined to be librarians/writers/bankers/secretaries/what-have-you. We chose to be what we are, and we worked hard to get here. Of course, this means admitting that we aren't special beings with math vision. But if we want to encourage people to engage with STEM, we need to kill this myth of "stupid".

Basic Physics: Introduction

I have done a few introductory physics posts in the past, but I have never been happy enough with them to continue them as a series. After writing my post yesterday on the problems with science communication, I have thought more deeply about why I wasn't happy with them. I've decided that I didn't like them because they weren't able to adequately explain what I wanted to convey. This is mostly my limitations, but also because I hadn't set in my mind who my audience was, and because I had never done posts that explained what I understood to be background material to the topics.

So, I am going to try again in a more cohesive manner. By which I mean that I am going to do a year-long series of blog posts that roughly coincide with what physics majors (and engineers, and other interested parties) learn in their first year, covering basic classical mechanics, electrostatics, magnetostatics and circuitry.

Why? Why would I do this? First of all, I think it will be good practice for when I (fingers crossed) become a professor. I have mostly been working off of the curricula and methods of other professors--I would like to find my own. Secondly, I want to show that physics isn't "hard". Nearly every time I mention that I do physics for a living, I hear the same story--the person I'm talking to either took it in high school and did miserably, thus putting them off the whole thing, or they never took it because they were never any good at that brainy stuff. I want to write a series that, even if it doesn't make physics converts, gives people the confidence that they understand key physics concepts, and maybe understand why physics geeks geek out over physics.

To that end, I am going to be writing for people who have never taken a physics class, but who have some basic math background. I am going to assume a high school level of education, though even that seems to be a somewhat variable standard anymore. I am not going to hold back on "vocabulary words" as my students put it, because it's a blog and you have instant access to a dictionary, but I will explain any technical terms or words that are used in a manner different from their colloquial usage.

To start out with, I am going to do a series of crash-course algebra, trig, vectors, and calculus, so that we have a common math starting point, and a kind of reference guide. Math is the language of physics and it is very hard to really understand what physics is without being able to speak about it using math. Otherwise you kind of end up with something more like Aristotle's physics than Newton's, simply because it is very difficult to describe it using just words.

Then there will be a longish series on basic classical mechanics, which is the one physics topic most people can grasp with at least a bit of intuition. We have all thrown balls, used a seesaw, and spun in an office chair. It will cover more or less the same material you would see in first semester physics class.

The last part will be on what I have taught for 5 semesters now--introductory electromagnetism, or Intro E&M. This will cover basic electrostatic forces/fields, currents, simple circuitry and basic magnetism.

I'm going to try to stick to a schedule of posting one a week, again, roughly like it would be in a classroom setting. This will also give me enough time (hopefully) to properly proof read them and weed out errors.

So, without further ado, on to Part 0, Section 0: Algebra!

The problem with science communication

As a break from everything else that's been going on lately, I've been reading/watching a variety of what could be largely lumped as "science communication" blogs/videos. While I've been doing so, I of course have run across the odd "why do science communication?" post. The answers usually boil down to geekery ("because science is so cool and people should know it"), political ("If everyone were more science literate, they would vote X"), or humanitarian ("if people understood [this], they wouldn't be hurt by [that] or taken in by charlatans"). These are  by no means bad motives for doing these things. And I utterly agree that science communication is a critical activity in our day and age.

But, why? Why is science so hard to communicate that we need not only institutionalized communication (e.g. science class), but grassroots efforts, from blogs to podcasts to videos to local science festivals? Humans have been communicating stuff to each other for centuries. We have developed a wide variety of methods and tools for convincing people of things. Heck, we have a whole industry dedicated to it (advertising). Why does science communication seem so hard to do sometimes?

First, there is the sheer logistical reality of it. The better you understand a topic, let's say optics since I know that one, the deeper you've gone into it and the more that subject and it's prerequisites have become second nature to you. You now now Maxwell's equations almost instinctually. You have a gut reaction when you see velocities faster than \( 3*10^8 \ . You either stopped asking what was waving or have dug really deep into it, but either way you probably can't explain it in 100 words or less to the average person on the street.  On the other hand, the less you know the topic, the easier it is to explain at your level of understanding to someone who doesn't know much or anything, because you remember being in that state.

I have slowly started to realize this as I've been teaching problem solving sessions for the past five semesters. When I started out, I was not remotely confident in the topic. I had taken a few courses beyond the level I was teaching, but I knew I didn't really *know*, in the sense of understanding and internalizing, even basic electromagnetism. My algebra/calculus was shaky because I didn't do it all day, everyday, and hadn't really touched it in 8 months (I took some time off between undergrad and grad school).

So everytime I taught, I had very very detailed notes explaining the calculation to myself, because I knew I couldn't do it unprepared. My students were able to follow my solutions (handwriting permitting) because I wrote everything out, every single step, no "and it can easily be shown that", no "clearly, this equals". It was there. But my analogies to explain the weirdness of electromagnetism were terrible. I mean, really really terrible. Confused, convoluted, mixed. And I didn't have a sense of the background of my students, what they would or would not be familiar with.

Now, I do algebra and calculus for my PhD research. My dining room table, my chalkboard, my whiteboard, my desk, random napkins are full of equations. I sit and do page after page (and redo page after page) of math. I've gotten better at recognizing common algebraic patterns. I no longer have to FOIL simpler multiplications. I do not question the utility of sines and cosines. It's obvious! So my worked out solutions in class have started to skips steps. Bit by bit, I assume a higher level of math literacy from my students. My analogies and metaphors have, generally, become better. I no longer mix metaphors, I stick with one main metaphor throughout a topic, and I don't use analogies to things that my students have no idea what that is. So while my students feel less baffled by my words, I get a dozen of them before and after class asking how we got from point A to point B in an equation.

And this is I think a hurdle science communicators have to face.  The best ones are good in their field. They breathe physics, chemistry, biology, what have you. It's a core component of their being and they are excited to share it with you. But it also means that they are far away from the confusion and doubts of their audience. They need to practice that skill of empathy which, at least in pop culture, we famously lack. It's not an easy skill, to put yourself back at that point of confusion and try to talk to that person. It's like trying to teach a small child something that is to you so easy you don't think about it, like tying your shoes. The best thing is to have a non-STEM friend to test out your explanations on, but even they can be a biased sample depending on how frequently you try to explain your work to them.

The second problem, as the many youtube comment sections to these videos attest, is that science bumps up uncomfortably against areas of worldview and identity for people. The world is a big, nasty, confusing place and people build their worldviews and identities in a way that, fundamentally, tries to make them feel safe, even if it is a very weird and convoluted safety. For example, conspiracy theorists, whatever their theory of choice, want to believe that someone is in control. The idea that violence or disease or natural disaster  just happen, is intolerable. Far preferable that a malevolent and powerful group somewhere is in charge than we being hostages to fortune.

And this is even harder than empathy for confusion, because it does not require a  shoveling on of better explained facts, or more facts. It requires the mindset of a missionary instead of a teacher and it is a very different mindset. Its also a mindset that makes many scientists uncomfortable. Science isn't a religion, it isn't faith, it's fact. Facts exist whether you want them to exist or not. But science is increasingly touching areas of our lives that are not experienced as fully rational, where strong beliefs are preexistent and the science communicators job is no longer to make clear something that was not thought of or not understood, but to modify or replace beliefs. And it is a much longer process.

I feel it is important to note here that science communicators should also be aware of where to stop. There is a fine line between  teaching scientific truth and teaching your world view.  Most of the time I have seen science communication blow up is where that line is crossed. For example, please, by all means explain the correct mechanisms for evolution and the strength of evidence we have for it. The minute you say "See? You don't need a god to make this work after all" you have lost any ground or good will you may have gained.

I think we could borrow a bit from missionaries, modified to our needs. One of the classic techniques for missionaries is to talk to people, and begin from their starting point. The missionary can then more easily lead in small steps to the point where the next step is faith or not faith. I don't see why would couldn't develop a similar method for science communication where the problem is not information but belief. Again, using evolution as an example. Starting with something close to home (antibiotic resistant infections), moving further afield to elephants losing their tusks as a defense against ivory poaching, to dogs from wolves, making the gradual transition from 'microevolution' to 'macroevolution' to a final understanding that it is all just 'evolution'. But again, changing beliefs is not fast. It requires investment.

So, what is it that I am trying to say? Are we doing science communication badly? Should we stop doing it unless we can be just great? NO. By no means. What I am saying is that we already have a community of science communicators who are really good at what they do. Dr Skyskull has a great blog for weird physics, occasionally cats and horror. Myles Power has a bunch of great videos largely debunking bad science/logic in a fairly respectful manner even if his language is a little coarse to american ears. JimTheEvo has a really cool series on infection, evolution and human history*. My point is that we can be even better. Maybe by focusing our audience, maybe just by being more thoughtful. I think it might be time to move to the next level.


*I know they are all males. The women scientist blogs I read are less explaining and more linking to it things people would know. Powered by Osteons does a great job pointing out where bioanthropology intersects popular culture, for example.

Women in Science Part 2

In part one, I told my boring story of how I got into science without anyone telling me I couldn't because I was a girl. I wanted to put my story out there not as a "See? It's not really a problem. These people are exaggerating" but to show that this huge, widespread problem doesn't have to be. I didn't grow up in some science or feminist utopia. I know one other woman made it through college with a science degree without anyone telling her she couldn't, and she was homeschooled by two engineers. We shouldn't be the outliers. We shouldn't be considered lucky for having been encouraged or at least not actively discouraged. We should be in the majority, with those who were discouraged the outliers who ran into the few bad eggs.

And it's a big problem. I've heard the horror stories, seen the surprised looks when students walk into my classroom and see me, a woman, standing up there ready to teach them. I've had female students come up to me at the end of the semester and tell me how happy they were to have a female teacher, because they are interested in physics but were afraid that we were all, their words, "men or old cranky spinsters".  But it is honestly  shocking to me that there are so few women in my classrooms, or that I would have to serve as some kind of female-breaking-into-science role model. Am I in a 21st century secular classroom or what?

The problems pop up all over the place. It's not just people with outdated or misogynistic ideas discouraging girls the farther they get in their education. It's the fact that women in science is presented as this new thing, instead of us having been here all along, just kind of hiding. That scientists are socially inept man-childs. That to be a good scientist means having no life outside the lab. The fact that lab equipment is all designed for use by men.

I don't completely know what the solution to this is, either. I know what things should not be included in the solution. Things like telling women scientists to marry starving artists. Yes, this was the advice given to us by the feminist speaker at the Undergrad Women In Physics conference I attended. The logic being that a  starving artist would be willing to follow us around wherever our careers might lead, would be willing to take care of the house and any children because they would just be so grateful to be eating. The way to more women in science should not be paved with turning men into Betty Drapers. It should not include pink science sets. It should not including trampling other people and it shouldn't involve superficial changes.

I think a part of the solution needs to be scientists speaking out, not just as physicists or biologists, but as people. Something that nearly scared me off of grad school was the perception that I would lose who I am for that opportunity, and I have heard the same sentiment from the young women whom I teach. We don't want to be pigeonholed as housewives, nor do we want to be pigeonholed as scientists. There needs to be an explicit acknowledgement that you can be a human being with relationships and hobbies and be a scientist.

A trickier thing is to push for more inclusion of women without making their inclusion about their gender. The "we want to make sure we show off the women in our department" mentality is just as insulting (to me) as setting us up for exclusion. Include me because I am a scientist and my work is interesting, and make it possible for me to attend. Don't include me to make quota.

Science, and society, needs to do some soul searching. It is a painful absurdity that half the population is implicitly and explicitly pushed away from making the kind of discoveries that change the course of humanity. How much farther could we be if we didn't waste half of our intellectual resources? Scientists want to show that science is the way forward for humanity, they need to start proving that they aren't willing to leave half of us in the dust.

Women and Science Part 1

There has been a lot of very good discussion lately on how women are treated in our society. It's a discussion that needs to happen, though it's a terrible shame people had to die for it to happen. The discussion has been going on long enough now that it has started to group off into subgroups a bit. One of the discussions on my twitterfeed for the a few days  was about how women still face discouragement when they try to enter STEM fields, with women sharing stories of subtle and not so subtle prejudice.

It's a discussion that I could probably be expected to enter. On paper, I look like the right kind of girl to have experienced this kind of thing. I came from a strongly religious background, I went to a small high school and a Christian college, entering a field with some of the worst male/female ratios. Someone somewhere along the line should have told me I shouldn't go into physics, right?

Fact of the matter is, no. No one in my life ever told me I couldn't do science. I had a handful of people tell me I couldn't be a pastor because I was a woman when I thought that was what I was going to do with my life (oddly enough, one of them was a chemistry teacher). But no one ever said or implied that I couldn't do science because I was a girl. Through my entire growing up, I was given the opportunities and encouragement to explore whatever interested me. The fact that I landed in science feels less like "I beat the odds! I am woman, hear me roar!" and more like "I followed my natural inclinations and talents and this is where I landed".

Though I am nearly 100% certain this was not their intention, my parents gave me what, in retrospect, was a fairly gender-neutral choice of toys growing up. I had baby dolls, a toy kitchen, dress up clothes and play make up. I also had a big bucket of blocks, a wooden train set, an erector set, an a tool belt with kid-sized real tools. I got a microscope and an EZ Bake. If I expressed an interest in something, they got me books on the subject or took me to the library and helped me find what I wanted using the card catalogue or the computer*.

So I read mystery stories, fantasy stories, books on bugs, plate tectonics, and anatomy. At my grandma's house I read the encyclopedia, I experimented on one of her many spider plants, I cooked weird things and found out what was inside bath beads. For a science fair my dad helped me build a contraption exhibiting different types of levers ending in connecting a circuit with a ball bearing and lighting a small bulb. He explained the physics of musical instruments and other things. No one ever told me that I shouldn't explore any topic I found interesting.

In school, I will admit science education was a little haphazard. On the bad side of things, my seventh-grade science teacher was actually qualified in english, not science, and we learned more about his college hockey career and the three types of rocks he could pronounce than we were supposed to. He thought the preserved frogs we were supposed to dissect smelled too bad and left them to soak in buckets of water over spring break. That wing of the school was unusable for a week after spring break since it turns out that when you wash the preservatives out of dead frogs and leave them in a 90 degree classroom, they rot pretty quickly.

But my high school physics teacher was a legend in my school. Physics had a reputation for being an easy class compared to the other sciences taught at my high school because he didn't believe in busy work (which the biology teacher was famous for). He had two classroom spaces that had been joined together into one mega-classroom, one half having a traditional lecture set up and the other half having lab tables. Everyone knew he kept a tea kettle and a hot plate in his backroom, because you could hear the kettle whistle 15 minutes into class time.

He was a brilliant teacher. He had a very simple philosophy--if you wanted to learn, he would spend hours with you, working on a single topic until you were solid on it. If you didn't, he wouldn't heap worksheets on you--you just had to take your D and not complain. He would lecture for the first 15 minutes of class, pause to get his tea, come back and answer questions we had articulated in the meantime, then set us free to the back tables to work on problem sets. We could ask him questions, and he would guide you to the answer while never giving you the answer. When you were done, you could do anything that wasn't disruptive (a small group of us worked on the NY Times crossword with him). He worked on a budget of pretty much nothing. The books were 20 years old and falling apart, and he had only one working set of equipment for each topic, if that. He improvised, he used youtube videos, anything to get his point across. He convinced me that no matter what else I wanted to do with my life, I wanted to study physics.

Sidenote: As a testament to how great a teacher he was, even among the students he failed, the legend/myth grew around him that when he retired, that science wing of the school would fall. We turned out to be half right--the year after he left they discovered they needed to retrofit that wing for asbestos before they could finish an expansion of the school, and that part was indeed destroyed.

In college, the physics professors were indeed mostly male, but we had almost 50% female physics majors during my years there (we had a minor celebration when we realized at one physics department tea time that there were more females than males there that day).  My professors were never anything but supportive of the young women in their classrooms, all without making us feel like a special class of citizen. The only questioning of my abilities that I ever got was with regard to my ability to lift heavy things. But since I'm 5' 1", I can't say I really blame them, even if I did prove them wrong.

I did research with a great professor who guided me from the student-who-takes-orders stage to being in charge of his labs and coordinating between members of the project. I learned valuable skills in macgyvering lab equipment, finding what you needed in odd places and managing people. I never felt like a second class citizen. I was a physics major. The fact that I was a woman meant that I could go to the Undergraduate Women in Physics conference, but had nothing to do with my intelligence or my prospects. They were excellent role models, as physicists and as citizens.

Strangely enough, the first time I encountered anything that I could have construed as sexism with regards to my being a physicist was after I had already been in grad school for a semester. I just laughed in the commenter's face. It seemed so anachronistic. It was ridiculous, a weird joke. But no, they were serious, and far from alone in their opinion.

So, that's my story. A non-exciting story of how a young woman faced no opposition when she set her sights towards science. A story that I wish were commonplace, and I hope I can help make unremarkable.

*Yes, I know how to use a card catalogue. I don't know if that shows my age or the slowness with which my town adopted computers in the libraries.

I really want to like "Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey"...

but I just don't.

When I first heard about "Cosmos" and saw the ads for it, I was excited. A science show! A well funded science show on over-the-air tv! I'm all for science outreach, and making it look as cool as it really is. I got a little nervous when I read that it was being produced by Seth MacFarlane, because I have yet to enjoy any of his comedies, but I thought it would probably still be good. Money and sponsorship has to come from somewhere.

I watched the first episode with Dear Husband. The animations were stunning. The episode as a whole was...underwhelming. DH, who while not a scientist is highly logical/mathematical and a great appreciator of good CGI, felt the show was boring, slow, and kinda wandering. He has not watched another since, so I have been watching them on my own as I have time.

Now, I'm not old enough to have seen the original "Cosmos", so I'm judging the new "Cosmos" on its own merit, so anything that's an homage to the original, unless obvious or called out as such by others, is lost on me, as it will be for anyone under, say, 30.

My feelings about "Cosmos" haven't really changed since that first episode, which is disappointing because I want to love it. It's slow. It could be doing SO much more with the time and obvious animating talents at its disposal. It's historical segments* are full of half-truths, and give me the impression of an 8th-grade history paper. It's anti-religion bent is just tired. I could accept the latter if the former were honest. I could accept the former if the latter were absent, toned down or at least not directly tied to the former. As it is, I just sit there waiting through the historical sections for inaccuracies, anachronisms and the projection of 21st century thought patterns onto previous generations. Tyson made some not-as-subtle-as-he-thinks snide remark about religion and I just want to tell him to get on with it already. I'd have rather had a 5 minute atheist chit-chat in the first episode and just on with the science already.

For the record, I actually liked some of the taking-down Young Earth Creation (YEC) segments, particularly the one in "A Sky Full of Ghosts". I doubt it converted as many as Tyson thinks it should, but at least it's footing is firm--light travels this fast, ergo we shouldn't be able to see almost anything in the sky if the universe is only 6000 years old. We see lots of stars and galaxies, ergo the universe is much older.

Though Tyson gets a bit hand-wavy when it comes to the frontiers of the knowledge of science (multiverse, how exactly we got from chemical soup to single celled organisms), the science content is solid, if spread a little thin. I really think they could have fit more science content in, if they cut down the semi-history, Tyson spoke at a normal pace and they grouped topics a little more strategically.

Actually, Tyson as narrator poses a bit of a stumbling block for me to like this show. I know he's an astronomer rockstar, that he is a beloved science communicator, etc. But his tone and cadence remind me of the one that my mom uses in teaching 2s and 3s Sunday School, with a dash of pseudo-drama. I don't mind when people talk with their hands, but his hand movements feel fake, an affect someone told him was an effective presentation technique. Not that this is a great reason to dislike "Cosmos" but it does make it a bit of a chore, a kind of science devotional for me to watch the show. It's that class on the awesome topic taught by a teacher you can't stand.

Overall, I'm not sure that this incarnation of "Cosmos" will be as effective as the original. Of course, maybe I'm the wrong audience, but I have yet to find someone who didn't love the original that is taken with the new one. And preaching to the choir is not a successful evangelism, pardon me, communication method.

*A separate problem for me is the horrific accents for some of the animated segments. Some are fine, but some are just terrible.

Hellfire Preachers and Snarky Scientists

Every science blogger, tweeter (Twitterer?), and opinionator has been talking about the "Cosmos" reboot in the past couple of weeks. I've withheld comment because I was trying to sort through my feelings on it.

On the one hand, it is obviously well done. Tyson is a good science communicator and the special effects are marvelous.

I have two problems: the history sections, and the science community's gloating.

Dr. Tyson is no idiot. The science, as far as I can tell, is rock solid. Their history, where it isn't outright wrong, is highly deceptive. Tyson tries to soften it with small disclaimers, but a soft spoken phrase is hardly enough to dispel Seth MacFarlane's potent animation, which weirdly makes me think of Sunday School felt characters.

If it were just a conversation with scientists, I'd let it slide. But "Cosmos" is being set forth, and was designed as judging by the scripting, as a kind of science evangelism tool. Which I applaud. But it seriously undermines the credibility of the science message when the creators can't seem to be trusted to confer with a historian when writing the history of science. By distorting the most easily checked part of their program, it makes it far too easy for anyone already skeptical of its message to dismiss the rest, even if the rest is actually solid. It's a lot easier to check up on history than to check up on the science. If they couldn't do that right, they should have left it out, whether or not it was in Sagan's original.

The other thing is really getting my goat is the crowing going on in the public face of science, Twitter and blogs. A hashtag I've seen a little too much of is #CreationScience  and it's ilk.

I have a foot in both worlds. I am a faithful Christian who absolutely believes every word in the Apostle's Creed. I take seriously the Great Commision, even if I am particularly terrible at it. I am also a scientist. I think the universe began with the Big Bang, that life evolved on earth (and possibly elsewhere), that dinosaurs walked the earth long before humans and that geologists are perfectly right in the age estimates of the earth. Whenever I can, I try to correct people's misconceptions and make the case for SCIENCE.

So, dear fellow scientists, I say this with love as a sister in Science--who do you think you are going to win over by mockery?

You know that street corner preacher who yells at people who pass by that they are going to burn in Hell, with colorful descriptions of specific tortures? You know how annoying it is to run across these people? Has a single human being not already inclined to the preacher's theology ever repented and converted because they were yelled at?

Fellow scientists, you are that preacher. Every time you make a snarky comment about "Creationists" or "fundamentalists", you are just passing around a mean joke with your own clic. You want to know why 'they' are distrustful of science? Because this is what they see when they go on your twitter page, your blog, your facebook. They see sarcasm and mockery.

I am a old-earth-creationist/theist evolutionist who technically agrees with you and I feel hurt when I read those comments. Should I have a thicker skin? Sure. But making comments like that cuts deep, especially when coming from what I feel is 'my' community.

Do you think you are going to win over anyone by doing this? People on the fence are not likely to tilt to your side because you insulted them, and people who distrust you are going to run.

No one has changed their mind because they were insulted into it. Very rarely on anything that matters may they be discussed into it.

People are loved into change.

This is not likely to be a popular sentiment among you, my dispassionate brethren. You pride yourselves on logic and reason. But you are also deeply, deeply passionate about your research, your area of expertise, your hobbies. You are wonderful, caring people in real life. I rarely, in talking with you, am faced with the same vitriol that I find from you online.

Social media is a powerful tool. We could be using "Cosmos" to be reaching people who will never again set foot inside a science classroom. But if what they see coming from scientists is hatred, why would they want to change their views? Why would they want to associate themselves with you?

Don't be the annoying hellfire street corner preachers of science

Defeating the Wimpy Scientist Stereotype

Normally, I don't watch reality tv. Its like pop culture potato chips if its good, and just painful if its not. But when  a friend mentioned that Bill Nye the Science Guy was on "Dancing with the Stars", I had to see this.

Sadly, Bill Nye got eliminated week 3. He is a somewhat stiff dancer, not being able to do all the lithe movements the judges look for. That's not what I care about. 

In the 2nd week of the competition, he fell at the end of his dance and tore 80% of his quadricep tendon. Thats 80% of the tendon that connects big muscle on the front of your thigh to your knee. That is unbelievably painful. That's the kind of thing that sends football players to the ground.  Immediately after doing so, he got up, and stood in front of the judges before limping off and finally admitting he had hurt himself.

After hearing the doctor describe the damage and summarize his condition as "those few strands of tendons hanging on for dear life", Nye asks, "Well, what if I immobilize the knee entirely...and create some crazy choreography, peg leg fashion?" The doctor looks taken aback, and slowly responds with "Do I think you're going to be able to do much, no, do I think its going to hurt, yes, do I think you run the risk of worsening that tear or rupturing it completely, absolutely." and basically suggests a wheelchair.

And Nye went ahead with it anyway. Leg totally immobilized in a brace, lots of physical therapy treatments notwithstanding, he was obviously in  a lot of pain just standing up. Although he lost, the judges and the other dancers were in awe of the fact that he got up there at all.

So yes, he was a stiff white guy scientist, but he also shatter the perception of scientists as wimps (his background may be engineering, but he inspired so many kids to be scientists, he deserves the title). It's about as standard as stereotype as the social awkwardness and glasses. It's used frequently on things like The Big Bang Theory when the writers get lazy. And while I will readily confess scientists can have trouble with small talk around non-scientists, and a lot of us have vision correction of some sort, we are not wimps. Squeamish sometimes, but not wimps.

Scientists are tenacious. We have to be. We put in long hours, with weeks and weeks of frustration all for the hope of a few days of good data, or one right answer. Some will work years before seeing the fruit of their labor. And we will work through anything short of a coma. During the shutdown, memos had to be sent out to the scientists that they weren't supposed to work on their own time. Some of my colleagues have worked through medical conditions that most people stay home in bed or in the hospital for. I've worked with migraines, hand braces, and on crutches when I couldn't stand upright (which when you are doing experimental biophysics is challenging.)

We are not wimps.

So thank you, Bill Nye, for not only introducing us to how cool science is, but for showing we can tough it out with the best of the jocks.

~PhysicsGal

Theoretical Research: Reality vs. Fiction

Subtitle: A novice theoretical researcher's perspective

I swear, I will soon get around to the 'food' portions of physics and food, but rewatching a couple of episodes of "The Big Bang Theory" sparked the idea for this post. I thinking specifically of the few episodes where they show Sheldon working on his research. Having hung around theoretical researchers as an undergrad, I had an idea that they portrayal was a little exaggerated. From doing experimental physics for a few years, I knew the experimental labs they show are far too tidy, with too few boxes of old equipment in the corners and not enough of the apparatus held together with office supplies and duct tape. I knew Sheldon's white boards were too small, and oriented the wrong way to hold the kind of equations that he would be working on, for example. 

Now that I have done theoretical research for about 6 months, and had closer contact with theoretical researchers, watching the episodes made me want to shake the producers or writers or whoever decided that doing theoretical physics research looked like this:

Just standing around, staring at a handful of short equations on a white board for a couple of hours until you have an epiphany and write down the answer.

At least for me, the episode where Sheldon stays up for a couple of days and starts using small round objects to represent carbon atoms comes closer to the state of mind I usually end up in, but still misses the point.

From my (admittedly limited experience), doing theoretical research looks a lot more like a cross between a kid doing his math homework and a college kid writing a paper.

First of all, there is paper involved. Lots of paper. Reams of paper. Some people prefer notebooks that force all the paper to stay in order. Some people prefer loose scrap paper. I knew a guy who liked to use old school printer paper, the kind that was perforated but connected so he could write out really long equations all on one line. I have come to love the yellow legal pad that keeps all my stuff in order while I"m doing it but lets me rip it all out when its wrong to use on my grill or to staple together with other correct calculations  for easier reading. Chalk boards/white boards are great for testing out a direction, but they can easily be erased and lost forever. Anything that you think might be good, you want on paper. Possibly with scanned back up copies. *

There is a lot of referencing other people's work. Precursors to your own work. Finding out how to solve this particular form of equation. How to interpret your results. Huge bookmark folders of references. Binders full of them.

Thirdly, there is a lot of frustration, at least if you aren't one of those mathematical geniuses who can keep track of everything in their head. There is a lot of losing minus signs, plus signs, and constants. There is a lot of doing the same calculation over and over and over because you missed something at the beginning. Just recently I had to redo over 50 pages worth of calculations because I missed copying a plus sign on page 1 and turned an addition into a multiplication (and make the problem hugely longer in the process). I nearly wanted to tear my hair, but having done experimental physics for a while I at least had the consolation that the cost was a couple of weeks and some paper, not a couple of weeks and thousands of dollars worth of supplies.

Maybe there are some researchers out there who can use Richard Feynman's method of "Write down the problem, stare at it, write down the answer". Maybe if you do something like this long enough all the math is internalized. I certainly have gotten a lot faster at Fourier Transforms and integrating gaussians. But I doubt I will ever just look at a problem and know the answer. And I seriously doubt my equations will ever been that short in the middle of the solution.

*All that being said, if I had an entire room full of movable chalkboards like they have in some older schools like Princeton, I would totally being doing my calculations on them. Taking lots of pictures with my phone.