{"id":2210,"date":"2008-01-22T10:19:27","date_gmt":"2008-01-22T10:19:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/scienceblogs.com\/principles\/2008\/01\/22\/big-science-and-outreach\/"},"modified":"2008-01-22T10:19:27","modified_gmt":"2008-01-22T10:19:27","slug":"big-science-and-outreach","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/2008\/01\/22\/big-science-and-outreach\/","title":{"rendered":"Big Science and Outreach"},"content":{"rendered":"

In comments to my complaint about the over-identification of physics with particle physics<\/a>, I noted that this is largely because high-energy physicists have been successful in getting the media and general public to buy into their belief that high-energy physics is the coolest and most important thing in physics, for a number of reasons. Jonathan Vos Post asks:<\/p>\n

\n

The reasons being what, in your opinion, Chad?<\/p>\n

And, if so, what should we do (as citizens or a physicists)?<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

I think most of it comes down to the scale of the experiments and the collaborations that run them. There are two components to this: the large size of the experimental collaborations provides a degree of centralization to the field that makes it much easier to coordinate outreach and PR efforts; and the size and mind-boggling cost of the experiments creates a more immediate need for that outreach, to convince people that it’s worth several billion dollars to smash subatomic particles into one another.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

This is why you see organized outreach efforts on the Internet from the high-energy community, and not others– the Quantum Diaries<\/a> project, and the US LHC blogs<\/a>, for example. With big collaborations, it’s easier to go through and recruit people who will be good at that sort of thing, and do good for the larger community.<\/p>\n

In low-energy physics, we don’t have either of thse factors. A big experiment in AMO physics runs a few million dollars, which is the round-off error in the big collaborations’ budgets. There’s no real need to drum up major public support for new BEC experiments, because the funding for those is small enough to come out of the normal NSF budget, without requiring special action. And this also means that there’s not really the same kind of central coordination that you see in the high-energy world. Everybody in AMO physics has their own little research group, and they’re responsible for all the business of running those groups– they write all the grants, they write all the papers, they supervise all the lab work.<\/p>\n

There are undoubtedly people in the AMO physics world who would be excellent bloggers, and could do great work raising the profile of the subject. There’s no mechanism in place to identify them and encourage them to do this sort of work, though, and the community as a whole doesn’t see a pressing need for it.<\/p>\n

What can we do about it as low-energy physicists? Well, we could try<\/strong>. I was disappointed that the only people to step up and make an organized outreach effort online during the “World Year of Physics” in 2005 were the particle physicists. The APS or its component units should’ve done something similar to the “Quantum Diaries” project, showcasing the breadth and diversity of physics research, not just highlighting accelerator work. That was a really unfortunate missed opportunity, but there’s no reason they couldn’t launch something. Well, launch something better than the rather intermittent Physics Central<\/a>, anyway…<\/p>\n

It’s a bit of an uphill climb, because it’s hard to compete with the sheer scale of the big accelerators– nobody’s going to do an hour-long Discovery Channel documentary about the engineering marvels that go into making superconducting flux qubits, for example, because it’s a dinky little thing on a chip. There’s a gee-whiz factor to detectors the size of buildings that’s hard to top with anything from the low-energy world. But there’s plenty of fascinating material to be found in the low-energy world, and there’s no reason it couldn’t catch on, if we make the effort to sell it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In comments to my complaint about the over-identification of physics with particle physics, I noted that this is largely because high-energy physicists have been successful in getting the media and general public to buy into their belief that high-energy physics is the coolest and most important thing in physics, for a number of reasons. Jonathan… Continue reading Big Science and Outreach<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"1","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2210","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-physics","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2210","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2210"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2210\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2210"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2210"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2210"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}