The particle physics community in the US has rolled out a new site promoting the Large Hadron Collider, because, you know, there was a danger that we might forget that it’s there. As part of the site, they’re featuring four new physics blogs, by Monica Dunford, Pam Klabbers, Steve Nahn, and blogosphere veteran Peter Steinberg.
They really need to work on getting a blog interface that doesn’t suck, or at least an RSS feed, but this has the potential to be an interesting site. It’s also the second time that the particle physics community has organized a blogging effort (the first was 2005’s Quantum Diaries project), while I’m not aware of any comparable program from any other fields of physics.
Now, there are some good structural reasons why this would be the case: particle physics is a much more cohesive community than, say, AMO physics, as huge international collaborations are the norm particle physics. It’s also a field that’s more in need of PR, and a field that has been burned by a lack of outreach in the past (the SSC debacle)– their experiments are hugely expensive, and anything they can do to boost public interest in their branch of physics probably helps keep the money flowing.
Still, the bloggy dominance of particle physics helps perpetuate the false and maddening idea that all of physics is particle physics. I’d really like to see some similar outreach efforts from other divisions of the APS– there are mind-blowing things going on in quantum optics and condensed matter physics, and I’m sure there are people out there who could blog entertainingly about them. Those fields could stand to get a little more public recognition as well, and to the extent that blogging would help that, it would be a Good Thing.
(Of course, while I’d like to see something similar for my own subfield of AMO physics, I don’t want it badly enough to volunteer to run it– I’ve got enough irons in the fire already, and don’t really need to be lighting more fires so I can add to that. So I’m just going to bitch about it on the Internet, rather than trying to bring it to the attention of anybody with the authority to do something…)