{"id":6112,"date":"2012-03-27T14:21:56","date_gmt":"2012-03-27T14:21:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/scienceblogs.com\/principles\/2012\/03\/27\/query-for-non-physicists-initi\/"},"modified":"2012-03-27T14:21:56","modified_gmt":"2012-03-27T14:21:56","slug":"query-for-non-physicists-initi","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/2012\/03\/27\/query-for-non-physicists-initi\/","title":{"rendered":"Query for Non-Physicists: Initial Reactions"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I was thinking about attitudes toward physics the other day, and realized that whenever I meet somebody (not a physicist) for the first time and tell them that I&#8217;m a physicist, their initial responses most frequently fall into one of three general categories:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>&#8220;You must be really smart.&#8221;<\/li>\n<li>&#8220;I hated that when I took it in high school\/ college.&#8221;<\/li>\n<li>&#8220;Can you explain string theory to me?&#8221;<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>It occurs to me that this helps explain why physicists are not generally considered scintillating conversationalists. Because, really, where can you go from any of those starting points?<\/p>\n<p>Anyway, that got me wondering what the stock responses are for people from other academic fields. I asked a few people at lunch today, but there weren&#8217;t all that many people there. So, consider this a free-form poll question:<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>When you meet new people, and tell them what you do for a living, what are the most common responses?<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>It would help, of course, if you say what it is that you do in the same comment with the response. Though I suppose it might be amusing to just get the response, and try to guess the profession from that&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I was thinking about attitudes toward physics the other day, and realized that whenever I meet somebody (not a physicist) for the first time and tell them that I&#8217;m a physicist, their initial responses most frequently fall into one of three general categories: &#8220;You must be really smart.&#8221; &#8220;I hated that when I took it&hellip; <a class=\"more-link\" href=\"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/2012\/03\/27\/query-for-non-physicists-initi\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Query for Non-Physicists: Initial Reactions<\/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":[8,139,104,37,11,75],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6112","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-academia","category-culture","category-humanities","category-pop_culture","category-science","category-society","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6112","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=6112"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6112\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6112"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6112"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6112"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}