Over in yesterday’s communications skills post commenter Paul raises a question about priorities: I wonder to what extent good writers, public speakers and communicators are being promoted in science in place of good thinkers – people who can challenge prevailing dogma, invent promising novel approaches to old problems, and who have the intuition needed for… Continue reading Are Communications Skills Holding Science Back?
Tag: science
Communication Skills for Scientists
As I am still getting lengthy comments at the Chris Mooney post accusing me of making unreasonable demands on scientists, I thought I should spell out as explicitly as possible what skills I think scientists ought to have. This probably won’t solve the problem, but it’ll give me something to point to the next time… Continue reading Communication Skills for Scientists
I Am Baffled Regarding Chris Mooney
The kerfuffle of the moment in the science blogosphere once again relates to Chris Mooney, who is pretty much a kerfuffle looking for a place to happen at this point. This time around it centers around a Washington Post op-ed that is basically the executive summary of a American Academy of Arts and Sciences paper… Continue reading I Am Baffled Regarding Chris Mooney
Photons: Still Bosons
Last week, Dmitry Budker’s group at Berkeley published a paper in Physical Review Letters (also free on the arxiv) with the somewhat drab title “Spectroscopic Test of Bose-Einsten Statistics for Photons.” Honestly, I probably wouldn’t’ve noticed it, even though this is the sort of precision AMO test of physics that I love, had it not… Continue reading Photons: Still Bosons
The Physics of the Imbecile: Chopra Interviews Kaku
I don’t remember who pointed me at this transcript of Deepak Chopra interviewing Michio Kaku, but if I remember who it was, I fully intend to hate them. DC: Is our conversation affecting something in another galaxy right now? MK: In principle. What we’re talking about right is affecting another galaxy far, far beyond the… Continue reading The Physics of the Imbecile: Chopra Interviews Kaku
Watching Individual Atoms Make a Phase Transition
A press release from Harvard caught my eye last week, announcing results from Markus Greiner’s group that were, according to the release, published in Science. The press release seems to have gotten the date wrong, though– the article didn’t appear in Science last week. It is, however, available on the arxiv, so you get the… Continue reading Watching Individual Atoms Make a Phase Transition
The Problem of Broader Impacts
Over at the Cocktail Party, Diandra Leslie-Pelecky has a post about the image of scientists that spins off this Nature article on the NSF’s “broader impact” requirement (which I think is freely readable, but it’s hard to tell with Nature). Leslie-Pelecky’s post is well worth reading, and provides a good deal more detail on the… Continue reading The Problem of Broader Impacts
Cathedral-Building in Science
Tommaso Dorigo has an interesting post spinning off a description of the Hidden Dimensions program at the World Science Festival (don’t bother with the comments to Tommaso’s post, though). He quotes a bit in which Brian Greene and Shamit Kachru both admitted that they don’t expect to see experimental evidence of extra dimensions in their… Continue reading Cathedral-Building in Science
Through the Wormhole
The Science Channel debuted a new show last night, Through the Wormhole with Morgan Freeman, with the premier apparently designed by committee to piss off as many Internet types as possible. The overall theme was “Is there a creator?” and it featured physicist-turned-Anglican-priest John Polkinghorne talking about fine-tuning but no atheist rebuttal. It spent a… Continue reading Through the Wormhole
I Need to Work on My Sound Bites
One of the questions asked of Neil deGrasse Tyson at the WSF thing last week was “When did you change from a mild-mannered astrophysicist to a rock-star scientist?” (or something close to that phrasing). In his answer, he said that after his first tv interview was edited down to a three-second shot of him wiggling… Continue reading I Need to Work on My Sound Bites