Outreach
drorzel | June 17, 2016The NPR program Here and Now has been running segments this week on Science in America, and one of these from yesterday featured me talking about science literacy. We had some technical difficulties getting this recorded-- it was supposed to happen at a local radio studio last week, but they had some kind of glitch, so instead we did it via Skype from my office on campus. (Where there was some sort of heavy equipment running outside my window before and after the interview, but miraculously, they took a coffee break for the crucial fifteen minutes of the actual call...)
You can listen to the…
drorzel | May 22, 2016I've had this piece by Rick Borchelt on "science literacy" and this one by Paige Brown Jarreau on "echo chambers" open in tabs for... months. I keep them around because I have thoughts on the general subject, but I keep not writing them up because I suspect that what I want to say won't be read much, and I find it frustrating to put a lot of work into a blog post only to be greeted by crickets chirping.
But, now I find myself in a position where I sort of need to have a more thought-out version of the general argument. So I'm going to do a kind of slapdash blog post working this out as I type…
drorzel | May 19, 2016Noted grouchy person John Horgan has found a new way to get people mad at him on the Internet, via a speech-turned-blog-post taking organized Skeptic groups to task for mostly going after "soft targets". This has generated lots of angry blog posts in response, and a far greater number of people sighing heavily and saying "There Horgan goes again..."
If you want to read only one counter to Horgan's piece to get caught up, you could do a lot worse than reading Daniel Loxton's calm and measured response. Loxton correctly notes that Horgan's comments are nothing especially unique, just a variant…
drorzel | April 19, 2016It's been a while since I last rounded up physics posts from Forbes, so there's a good bunch of stuff on this list:
-- How Do Physicists Know What Electrons Are Doing Inside Matter?: An explanation of Angle-Resolved Photo-Electron Spectroscopy (ARPES), one of the major experimental techniques in condensed matter. I'm trying to figure out a way to list "got 1,800 people to read a blog post about ARPES" as one of my professional accomplishments on my CV.
-- The Optics Of Superman's X-Ray Vision: Spinning off a post of Rhett's, a look at why humanoid eyes just aren't set up to work with x-rays…
drorzel | March 1, 2016As you probably already know, last year we ran a workshop at the Joint Quantum Institute for science-fiction writers who would like to learn more about quantum physics. The workshop was a lot of fun from the speaker/oragnizer side, and very well received by last year's writers, so we're doing it again:
The Schrödinger Sessions is a three-day workshop for science fiction writers offering a “crash course” in modern physics, to be held at the Joint Quantum Institute (JQI), one of the world’s leading research centers for the study of quantum mechanics. We will introduce participants to…
drorzel | March 1, 2016A few weeks ago, I traveled down to Jefferson Lab in southern Virginia to give a talk for their Science Series of public lectures. They recorded the talk, and have done a very nice job of editing together the video, which you can see at that link, or right here:
It's a bit under an hour, which must include the Q&A period at the end. So, if you've been wondering what sort of thing I do when I travel to give talks, well, here's an example. And it'll give you something to keep you entertained while I travel to Illinois to give another (different) talk tomorrow...
drorzel | February 26, 2016I've been really, really bad about using this blog to promote stuff I have coming up, but I'll be doing two public-ish appearances in the month of March, and I probably ought to announce those here:
1) Next week, on Wednesday, March 2, I'll be giving the Physics Colloquium at the University of Illinois, on public communication stuff:
"Talking Dogs and Galileian Blogs: Social Media for Communicating Science"
Modern social media technologies provide an unprecedented opportunity to engage and inform a broad audience about the practice and products of science. Such outreach efforts are…
drorzel | February 10, 2016I did bring my good camera with me to Newport News, and took it on the tour of Jefferson Lab yesterday, but despite the existence of DSLR pics, you're getting a cell-phone snap for the photo of the day:
That's the audience about 10-15 minutes before my talk last night, so it was a good turnout. And they laughed in the right places, and asked some really good questions last night. I also got asked to appear in a selfie with a bunch of students from a local school, so they could prove they were there to get extra credit for their science class...
The talk went well, though we had some…
drorzel | February 8, 2016I've been remiss in my self-promotional duties, but I'm giving a public lecture tomorrow night in Newport News, VA, as part of the Jefferson Lab Science Series. This will be my traditional "What Every Dog Should Know About Quantum Physics" talk, with the sad addition of a slide honoring the late, great Queen of Niskayuna (visible as the "featured image" with this post). This isn't the first dog-physics talk I've given since her death in December, but the previous one was the relativity talk, which has less Emmy-specific content. This one includes one of the video clips I made around a dog…
drorzel | January 22, 2016The Center for Quantum Technologies is running a "Quantum Shorts" contest, where they solicited short stories exploring some aspect of quantum physics. They cut their large number of applicants down to two short-lists of ten, one for the "Open" category, and one for the "Youth" category. They'll be giving out a "People's Choice Award" based on Internet voting, so you can go over there and vote for your favorite.
There are also judged prizes, and I'm serving as a judge for the "Youth" category (and already sent in my rankings), so it would be inappropriate for me to plug any particular stories…
drorzel | December 22, 2015A couple of weeks ago, I gave a talk at TEDxAlbany on how quantum physics manifests in everyday life. I posted the approximate text back then, but TEDx has now put up the video:
So, if you've been wondering what it sounded like live, well, now you can see...
drorzel | December 4, 2015So, yesterday was my big TEDxAlbany talk. I was the first speaker scheduled, probably because I gave them the title "The Exotic Physics of an Ordinary Morning," so it seemed appropriate to have me talking while people were still eating breakfast...
The abstract I wrote when I did the proposal mentions both quantum physics and relativity, but when I actually wrote the talk, that made for a really awkward transition, so it's all quantum, all the time. I cover quite a bit of ground-- the no-animation-effects version of the slides is 42 slides and Word has it as just over 2500 words written out…
drorzel | December 1, 2015I've been a little bad about self-promoting here of late, but I should definitely plug this: I'm speaking at the TEDxAlbany event this Thursday, December 3rd; I'm scheduled first, at 9:40 am. The title is "The Exotic Physics of an Ordinary Morning":
You might think that the bizarre predictions of quantum mechanics and relativity– particles that are also waves, cats that are both alive and dead, clocks that run at different rates depending on how you’re moving– and only come into play in physics laboratories or near black holes. In fact, though, even the strangest features of modern physics…
drorzel | October 30, 2015I've been slacking in my obligation to use this blog for self-promotion, but every now and then I remember, so here are two recent things where I was interviewed by other people:
-- I spoke on the phone to a reporter from Popular Mechanics who was writing a story about "radionics" and "wishing boxes," a particular variety of pseudoscience sometimes justified with references to quantum mechanics. The resulting story is now up, and quotes me:
It is hard to investigate the ethereal thinking around radionics, but physics is something that can be parsed. So I got in touch with Chad Orzel, a…
drorzel | August 12, 2015Over in Tumblr-land, Ben Lillie has an interesting post on all the stuff that goes on behind the scenes of a science talk. It's an intimidatingly long list of stuff, in quite a range of different areas. But this is a solved problem in other performance fields:
And that raises and interesting question, since aside from the science section (and not even all of that), all of these apply to any other performance or production. So how do those people master all of those things? The short answer is that they don’t. Almost any production that requires a long, and more importantly disparate, set of…
drorzel | August 6, 2015Last weekend was our APS-funded outreach workshop The Schrödinger Sessions: Science for Science Fiction, held at the Joint Quantum Institute at the University of Maryland. The workshop offered a three-day "crash course" on quantum physics to 17 science fiction writers from a variety of media-- we had novelists, short-story writers, screenwriters, and at least one poet. The goal was to provide a basic grounding in quantum physics and a look at current research in hopes of informing and inspiring new stories that will, in turn, inspire the audience for those stories to look more deeply into the…
drorzel | May 29, 2015Last week, the blog Last Word On Nothing did a piece on the best and worst sciences to write about, and the two writers tapping physics as the worst said things that were really disappointing to hear from professional writers. I nearly wrote an angry rant here in response, but Jennifer Ouellette covered it more diplomatically than I would've, so I opted to try for a more positive response over at Forbes: Four Reasons to Not Fear Physics.
Would've been better to get this out much earlier in the week, but it's the next-to-last week of the term, and I was buried in grading all this week, and it'…
drorzel | May 20, 2015The big social media blow-up of the weekend was, at least on the science-y side of things, the whole "boys with toys" thing, stemming from this NPR interview, which prompted the #GirlsWithToys hashtag in response. I'm not sorry to have missed most of the original arguments while doing stuff with the kids, but the hashtag has some good stuff.
The really unfortunate thing about this is that the point the guy was trying to make in the interview was a good one: there's an essentially playful component to science, even at the professional level. I took a stab at making this same point over at…
drorzel | May 5, 2015I'm still in the late stages of an awful cold, but shook it off a bit to write a new conversation with Emmy, the Queen of Niskayuna over at Forbes:
“HEY! YOU POODLES! STAY OFFA MY LAWN!”
“Emmy! Stop barking!” I sit up. She’s at the gap between the fences, where she can see into the front yard.
“But, those poodles..”
“We’ve had this conversation. It’s a public street, other dogs are allowed to walk on it. No barking.” She comes over, sheepishly. “Why can’t you just lie down and enjoy the nice day, hmm?”
“Well, I would. But, you know… Quantum.”
“What?”
“I would love to just lie in the sun, but…
drorzel | April 6, 2015Last week, Steven Weinberg wrote a piece for the Guardian promoting his new book about the history of science (which seems sort of like an extended attempt to make Thony C. blow a gasket..). This included a list of recommended books for non-scientists which was, shall we say, a tiny bit problematic.
This is a topic on which I have Opinions, so I wrote a recommended reading list of my own over at Forbes. I'm more diplomatic about Weinberg than Phillip Ball was, but I have ego enough to say that I think my list is way better...
I won't pretend that it's a truly comprehensive list, though, so…