We’re entering the stage of Breakfast With Einstein publicity where I start doing interviews with radio shows and podcasts to promote the book. One of these sent me a list of questions which included “What’s your favorite motivational quote?”

That was surprisingly difficult, because I’m not much of an aphorism guy. I’ll probably go with Michael Faraday’s “Work. Finish. Publish.“, but really, when I want motivation, I tend to turn to music.

This got me thinking about the broader question of what I find motivational, though, which (as is often the case) led to me seeing related material all over the place. Around the same time I was looking at those questions, a bunch of people shared this survey from Nature about scientific career tracks. This is mostly self-reported information about salaries and job satisfaction, and thus a giant reminder of why I’m glad I don’t work in social sciences. Asking “Are you satisfied with your job and/or salary?” seems like the kind of thing that’s horribly confounded by individual personality: some people are going to be satisfied wherever they end up, others won’t be satisfied with anything. The hope is that these types sort of average out in the end, but I don’t know that I trust that.

The cross-sector (academia vs. industry) comparisons in that seem particularly problematic, given that those personality differences probably also drive some self-sorting into those tracks. That is, people who go into academia may do so because they prioritize different things than those who choose industry. I had a number of conversations with friends in industry jobs when I was coming up for tenure, and the mutual incomprehension was really notable: they looked at the concentrated stress of the tenure process and said “I don’t know how you put up with this bullshit,” whereas I find the idea of 30-odd years of background anxiety about job security equally repellent.

And, of course, that carries over into the financial domain: I’m happy to accept a lower salary than I probably could’ve gotten in industry in exchange for job security and working conditions I find much more congenial. It’s not that I don’t care about money, just that I care more about not having to put up with certain kinds of bullshit.

Of course, it’s not perfectly true that academics in general aren’t motivated by money. Academia is maybe a bit less true than in more nakedly capitalistic careers, but in my time as a professor I’ve seen a lot of surprisingly bitter fights over amounts of money that seem… not trivial, exactly, but certainly not worth the effort expended on them.

(This is probably a place to note that we are incredibly fortunate in financial terms: I’m paid well for what I do in my day job, the benefits package is very good, and I get some extra money beyond that from writing. That gives me the luxury of not needing to worry about having the money to do the things we want to do, and I’m absolutely aware that this is a luxury.)

Some of this is money as a proxy for status, of course, which is the other big common category of motivation that doesn’t excite me. I was a little surprised, after the announcement of this year’s Nobel Prize in physics, by how big a deal was made of new laureate Donna Strickland’s status as an associate professor. For those not in academia, that’s the second step in faculty rank: pre-tenure folks are Assistant Professors, tenured faculty are Associate Professors, faculty who have been tenured for a while can be promoted to simply Professor, and the truly distinguished get named chairs– the Donor McMoneybags Professor of SubjectArea. Strickland was still an Associate Professor, and this was considered outrageous by many on social media, to the point where arguments about that basically crowded out any discussion of the science for which she was honored, which is a shame.

It was especially a shame because the set of those outraged did not include Strickland herself. When asked about it in an interview, she said she felt sorry for the university, because it wasn’t their fault. She had simply never applied for the promotion, she said, because she didn’t feel like going through that process was a good use of her time. (She has since applied, and officially been promoted…)

(That interview also contains the charming story of her husband calling up a local food critic and asking “My wife just won the Nobel Prize, where should I take her out for dinner?” That’s one for the all-time list of cute laureate stories.)

The Strickland case loomed large in my mind because, like her, I’m an Associate Professor– technically the Gordon Gould Associate Professor at the moment, a named chair that’s rotating among several people because of some complicated history. I’ve been eligible for promotion to full professor for… four years? Five? something like that. I haven’t gone up for promotion for a bunch of reasons that basically boil down to “I don’t think it would be a good use of my time.” There’s a review process that involves a bunch of paperwork, and the aggravation of that (and the downside risk of being denied) is more demotivating than the title upgrade and salary bump are motivating.

Of course, while I’ve disclaimed interest in formal academic ranks as a source of motivation, that doesn’t mean I’m completely uninterested in recognition of one sort or another. I will freely admit that one of the reasons I’ve been blogging all this time is that I like having an audience. I try not to slavishly follow clicks, but I do tailor my Forbes blogging to some extent to emphasize things that draw more attention, and de-emphasize topics that don’t. (There’s money involved in that, too, but if I’m being honest it’s less about the money than the attention.) I enjoy doing media appearances of any sort, whether directly promoting a book or just answering science questions into a microphone and/or camera. I’ve come to love giving talks, and wish more people would invite me to do that.

As is often the case, the same factors that motivate me to Do Stuff can also become a source of frustration. I’ve been mildly annoyed on a continual basis since late 2014 that Eureka, which I think contains some of my best work, really didn’t find an audience (and especially at the way people keep having success pushing what I regard as much inferior theses about the same general area). It irks me at times that despite being in the business of talking science on the Internet for a loooong time (my original blog was started in 2002), I don’t often get recognized for that, and have seen multiple generations of hot new Internet sensations in science communication go by. There’s lots of stuff out there getting big play that I look at and say “I could do better than that. Hell, I have done better than that…”

A lot of that is self-inflicted, though. While I like speaking to an audience, I hate explicitly asking for one– it’s a good thing that I don’t need to make a living from writing alone, because I hate pitching things (and let’s not even talk about how bad I am at nagging people to pay me…). I’m not particularly good about doing the things that would make me more connected to the broader science communication community, which necessarily limits what I can reasonably expect in terms of recognition from that area. And I could certainly choose writing topics and modes that are more explicitly commercial (or at least commercializable) than what I generally do, but I’m easily bored and can’t really sustain that for a long time.

I’ve mostly made my peace with those self-inflicted limits, because on balance I’m happier doing the things that I’ve chosen to do than I would be pursuing a different course, but there’s still some nagging frustration there, and that’s part of what motivates me. “Those other people are doing it wrong” can be a very effective driver– God knows, it’s driven me to write a lot of blog posts at times when I really should’ve been doing something else.

Mostly, though, I do what I do because it’s fun. And, again, I’m incredibly fortunate to have the luxury of doing that. One of the things I buy by taking a lower salary in academia is the ability to work on whatever the hell I feel like working on (within reason), without anybody hounding me to produce results on a particular topic. And having a day job that pays the bills and provides health insurance means I can blog about whatever I feel like (and just as importantly not blog about things that bore me), even when it’s not a great source of clicks.

I have to admit that I’m a little surprised at how much this sort of stuff motivates me– I sometimes get snappish with the kids interrupting me when I’ve gotten involved in doing some project that isn’t remotely essential, but happens to be the thing that’s caught my interest for the moment. And I have at times taken on too many things on a “Sure, that might be fun” kind of basis in ways that aren’t particularly healthy: in the last month I made a day trip to NYC and two weekend trips to DC in close succession and as a result crashed pretty hard. I’m also lining up quite a bit of stuff around the new book and general physics stuff over the next several months, and am going to have to be careful not to overdo things.

On the whole, though, it’s worked out pretty well. Still not a great source of motivational aphorisms, though…

I’ve been having a hard time reading fiction of late, largely because my daily schedule leaves me so drained by the time the kids are in bed that I just go directly to sleep myself. The current state of the world is also a factor– the daily news cycle is so stupid and depressing that, again, it just saps my will to read anything. I did, however, finish two interesting new books, one the conclusion of a series and the other the start of a new one, so to celebrate here are some brief review-type comments.

The The Divided Earth is the wrap-up volume of Faith Erin Hicks’ graphic novel series beginning with The Nameless City, the first two volumes of which we picked up for the kids last winter, because I remember reading them while on a cross-country ski weekend this past MLK Day weekend. The third volume came out in the last few weeks, and SteelyKid immediately pounced on it when she saw it in Barnes and Noble. Being graphic novels aimed at a young audience, this was a nice fast read.

The titular city was built by a now-vanished civilization who were powerful enough to cut a gigantic hole in a mountain to give it a path to the sea. It’s fought over by three empires, who take turns conquering it as their fortunes wax and wane, and is “nameless” because each conqueror tries to apply its own name every generation or so. The central characters are a young nobleman from the Dao, current masters of the city, and an orphan girl from the city, who meet and become friends at a pivotal moment in history.

As you would expect from a book targeted at younger readers, this is serious but not overly dark; there’s war and bloodshed in the plot, but the in-panel violence is minimal and not overly graphic. The characters and their cultures have a nice bit of depth to them, making the world an interesting place to visit. The political message of the story is not especially subtle, but not annoyingly preachy, and is generally positive and uplifting. The resolution might be a tiny bit too pat, especially where it comes to the chief antagonists, but again, that’s appropriate for the target audience.

On the other hand, Foundryside by Robert Jackson Bennett is very much an adult book, with quite a bit of sex and violence. Bennett’s Divine Cities trilogy was amazing, so I was eagerly awaiting this one.

Foundryside has a kind of Dickensian feel, set in the city of Tevanne where a system of industrial-scale magic has created a vast gulf between ordinary citizens and the ultra-wealthy merchant houses, whose founders and employees live in luxury in walled “campos” surrounded by incredibly squalid slums. The magic system is based on “scriving,” where writing the correct magical words on an object (or a metal plate bolted to said object) can convince it that the nature of reality is different. For example, many projectile weapons are scrived to “believe” that they’ve been falling from a great height for some time before they were released, and thus fly at their targets with terrifying velocity. The main character, Sancia, is a former slave turned thief, who has scriving-based abilities that make her exceptionally good at her job.

The magic system here is very much up my alley, and Bennett does a great job working out the details and implications of the system in ways that I found fascinating. He also doesn’t flinch away from the big moral questions raised by the society he’s created here, or the violence inherent in the system. There’s plenty of blood and death to go along with the squalor, and some impressive pyrotechnics around the conclusion.

This books was, unfortunately, not well served by the constraints mentioned in the first paragraph above. For long stretches of reading it, I was stuck doing at most a chapter a night, and the amount of exposition required regarding the magic system doesn’t fit well with such a disjointed reading schedule. And the heavy class politics of the world and plot occasionally felt a little too on-the-nose when paired with the grind of the modern news cycle.

That said, I did manage to get into more of a flow toward the very end, and I enjoyed the conclusion quite a bit. And I think that the way the plot opens up promises good things to come in the sequel, whenever that hits. I’ll do my best to carve out bigger blocks of time to read that, because I think this has a lot of promise.

And that’s what I’ve got by way of commentary on recent fiction reading. I definitely recommend both of these, though given the giant difference in tone, you probably want to consider your mood carefully when picking which to read.

Over at Inside Higher Ed, my Union colleague Christine Henseler has a piece arguing that colleges and universities should strive to attract more men into the “humanities” disciplines, to correct the gender imbalance there as well as the opposite imbalance in STEM fields that gets so much attention. I find this an interesting idea, in a lot of ways, and it connects a bit to stuff I’ve said repeatedly on Twitter in recent years.

I’d like to see this get taken seriously, in the same way that the push to recruit more women into STEM fields has. I would note, though, that in the same way that recruiting women into STEM fields has required not just marketing but self-examination, any serious push to draw more male students into humanities majors will also require a multi-faceted approach. This would necessarily include looking carefully at whether there are features of the scholarship and particularly the pedagogy of these fields that actively push male students away.

I’m not confident that this will happen, but I think it needs to. Simply attributing the lack of male students in these fields to “toxic masculinity” training them to be averse to exploring feelings seems like the mirror image of the claim that “women are naturally more interested in living things” that’s often made to justify the surplus of men in physical sciences. It’s a cop-out that pushes the problem off to vast, implacable societal forces and away from the responsibility of faculty to meet students where they are.

This also connects to a common complaint among current and former science majors, namely that while STEM departments work very hard to create special courses catering to non-majors (selecting special topics and building conceptual curricula that present the subject matter with minimal math), students majoring in STEM fields are expected to take regular major-sequence courses in the non-STEM fields. For a long time I wrote this off as merely whining, and in fact once pseudonymously argued in Inside Higher Ed that the right answer was to work to eliminate “Physics for Poets” courses. More recently, I’ve started to think there’s something to these complaints that ought to be taken more seriously– that maybe we should instead work on creating “Poetry for Physicists” courses that engage STEM majors in ways that they might find more congenial than bog standard English 101.

I’ve talked about this before, and probably will do so more in the future. I have to go teach a writing class, though, so for the moment I’ll just leave it there. I did want to give Henseler’s piece what signal-boost I can, though, because I think it’s an angle worth exploring.

This is one of those blog posts where I’m trying to walk through my thinking on an awkward subject, and it may end up wandering around quite a bit as I try to avoid various land mines, but typing it out might help clarify things in a way that will let me move forward.

So, the Nobel Prize in Physics will be announced on Tuesday, and a lot of people are playing guess-the-laureate(s). One possible winning subject that comes up a lot is “slow light” with at least part of the prize going to Lene Hau. And I’m kind of conflicted about the idea, leading to this blog post…

On the one hand, I absolutely agree with the many people who say it’s long past time for a physics Nobel to go to a woman. It’s an absolutely travesty that they never honored Mildred Dresselhaus or Vera Rubin when they had the chance, and only slightly less bad that they didn’t honor Deborah Jin. A Nobel award to Hau would be a tiny step toward correcting that shameful history.

On the other hand, though, I’m not super excited about this specific topic as a means to address that problem. I was a grad student at the time that Hau’s first papers got a huge amount of media attention, and the reaction at the time was that this is the prototypical example of a science story that’s way more impressive to science writers than actual scientists. There hasn’t been a lot in the last twenty-ish years to change that impression, for me.

This is not to say that there’s anything wrong with the science– it’s good, solid, technically demanding work that absolutely does what it says: the propagation of light through some medium is slowed or even stopped for a time by the interaction between the light and the medium. It’s just that what it does is a better hook for headline writers than for anything else. “Scientists slow light to 1 m/s!” certainly catches the eye, but explaining how it’s done is really difficult (the interaction between multiple laser fields in a cloud of multi-level atoms creates a situation where the effective index of refraction is changing very rapidly in a way that makes a pulse propagate very slowly through that medium), and the claims of what it’s good for remain really far out. There’s certainly a community of people that work on these systems, but it’s still kind of a niche thing– there are people who work on this stuff, but nobody’s really using “slow light” systems as a tool to study other phenomena, in the way that things like laser cooling, Bose-Einstein Condensation, or even femtosecond frequency combs have become common components of experimental systems.

Comparing “slow light” to some of the other frequently-suggested topics doesn’t really look great: quantum information comes up a lot, and that’s a field that has absolutely exploded since the work of frequently-suggested laureates Alain Aspect and John Clauser, with a lot of the field’s progress driven by their regularly-suggested co-laureate Anton Zeilinger. There are a lot of proposals for the theoretical work on geometric phases done by Yakir Aharonov and Michael Berry, which I don’t understand as well as I ought to, but which has become central to a lot of theory– “Berry’s phase” is a phrase that occurs with great regularity across a huge range of AMO and condensed matter physics. Perovskite solar cell materials and “metamaterial” systems also come up a lot, and those are a bit outside my expertise but both seem to have spawned larger and more active research communities than “slow light.”

The suggestion of “slow light” also doesn’t feel like a terribly well-thought-ought proposal, in that the only name ever mentioned is Hau’s. The basic ideas are a fairly straightforward application of the larger subject of “electromagnetically induced transparency” in gases of multi-level atoms, which was a thing before Hau’s headline-grabbing work, and continues to be carried on by lots of other groups. A prize for that general area of work might be in order, but if you’re going to propose that, there should be other names attached– Steve Harris and Marlan Scully, probably? Citing only Hau doesn’t suggest that this is a proposal based on familiarity with the overall body of Nobel-worthy physics, but more that she’s one of the few women to make headlines in physics research, and so readily comes to mind when writers have to draw up lists of possible laureates.

So, as I said, I’m conflicted. A prize for “slow light” shared by Hau wouldn’t be a travesty, but it’s not close to the most important of the areas that have yet to be honored, even on the AMO side of physics. At the same time, even a tiny step toward correcting the gender imbalance would be very much a Good Thing. I wouldn’t be angry if it turns out to be the subject of this year’s Nobel, but I’m not fired up about it in a way that would get me to lobby the Swedish Academy for this specific award (as I would’ve for Rubin or Dresselhaus or Jin, were they still alive).

Ultimately, what this points to is a need to develop a deeper bench of women who might be candidates for the Nobel Prize in Physics. This means not just recruiting and promoting women within physics, but also digging a bit deeper on the writing/communication side to develop a knowledge of who’s doing good work that isn’t getting headlines.

Another round-up post pulling together a bunch of my Forbes blogging from July through September (since even if I wrote something this weekend, I’d most likely schedule it for October 1, anyway).

• Three Recent Books On Physics And Philosophy: A combined review of books by Adam Becker, Paul Halpern, and Sabine Hossenfelder.
• A Book About A Single, Simple Experiment: Another book review, this time of Anil Ananthaswamy’s new one on the double-slit experiment.
• Why “Old Physics” Still Matters: A blog version of the talk I gave at the AAPT Summer Meeting, about why I tend to prefer a historical ordering of the “modern physics” curriculum.
• Soapy Physics: Viscous Jets And The Kaye Effect: An odd happening while refilling the soap dispenser leads to some interesting physics.
• What Scientific Failure Teaches Us About How To Detect Pseudoscience: A blog version of a chapter I wrote for an academic book, prompted by some oddly similar graphs in some papers making dramatic claims about superconductivity.
• Does A New Paradox Offer Hope For Progress In Quantum Foundations?: Maybe?
• New Physics Book Reviews: Totally Random Anxiety: A combined review of a forthcoming book about entropy, and a graphic explanation of quantum weirdness.

A whole bunch of book reviews this time out, which mostly reflects the fact that finishing my own book-in-progress left me with some time to read other people’s books for a change. There’s more of those in the works, too…

Anyway, there’s your quarterly update on what I’ve been doing to promote physics in the blogosphere.

As mentioned in a previous post, I made a half-serious suggestion that I would participate in the #UnionCollegeChallenge promoted by our new president by going to some seminars well outside my home in the sciences. There was a big email announcement the other day about a Women and Gender Studies lunch talk yesterday, and I didn’t have anything else scheduled for yesterday afternoon, so I dropped in to see that.

The speaker was one of our Modern Languages faculty, Prof. Stephanie Mueller, on the topic of “Boys Become Men: Masculinity in Post-ETA Basque Cinema,” and really, you don’t get a lot farther from my comfort zone than that. Between Sesame Street and a couple of trips to Mexico, I can comfortably order up to ten beers in Spanish, and that’s about the extent of my knowledge.

Happily, she opened with a nice recap of the political and economic history of the Basque region, very little of which I knew previously. I’m sufficiently clueless that while I was aware of ETA as a terrorist organization and dimly aware that they had made a cease-fire agreement a few years back, I didn’t know that they officially dissolved earlier this year.

Her thesis is that there’s been a change in the portrayal of Basque characters in film since the cease-fire agreement. While ETA was more violently active, Basque characters in film tended to be exclusively terrorists, but in more recent years, they’ve been at the center of lightweight romantic comedies. Along with the humor, these movies also reflect a warmer view of the Basque region as a part of a unified Spain.

The gender-studies gloss on this is that the new films present a different model of masculinity, where the Basque characters aren’t expected to live up to some soldier ideal, but are rewarded for being more traditional breadwinner types. She leaned particularly on a movie called Fe de Etarras, which was apparently retitled as Bomb Scared for English-language distribution. In this, an ETA terrorist cell hides in Madrid by pretending to be contractors repairing stuff in an apartment complex, and eventually become successful enough that they decide they prefer being contractors.

I thought the basic pattern she described sounded interesting, though it might’ve been nice to see movie clips, rather than just a verbal description. That might be an impossible ask, though, given possible rights issues, definite language issues, and the need to explain the historical context to start the talk, without which none of the rest would’ve made any sense.

The uncomfortable part of this, as is usually the case when I see work from the more literary side of academia, is that I’m never entirely convinced that what’s being presented is the right way to look at the works in question. That is, based on what I heard, the gender-studies gloss of this certainly seems like a reasonable reading of the situation, but it’s not clear to me that it’s the best way to read it.

But that’s a hard thing to judge from a 45-minute presentation (with a lot of context-setting) of something that’s a journal article presumably running to several tens of pages (it was mentioned at the start that this is a journal article, but it wasn’t clear to me whether this is published or in progress; a tiny bit of Google searching didn’t turn up anything that looked like what I heard, but then, there’s no film-studies category in the arxiv, so I don’t know that I should expect it to be findable). It’s also maybe not the best way to think about this stuff in the first place, but it’s my ingrained habit as a scientist to always look for the explanation that best fits the observations, so “That’s interesting, and I guess it’s plausible” isn’t a very satisfying end point.

The Q&A portion did afford me an opportunity to feel smart, though. Being congenitally incapable of sitting in a room for an hour without talking, I asked a question, which was “Do you see any similar pattern in works from other regions of the world where long-running bloody conflicts have de-escalated?” I felt a little bad asking that, because it was obviously beyond the scope of the specific project being discussed, but everybody was very polite and said that it was a good question, and something to definitely look at in the future. There’s apparently a professor in English who might have some related ideas regarding Irish literature, but she wasn’t able to make it to the talk yesterday; something to talk about next time I see her, I suppose.

Anyway, that’s my take on yesterday’s visit to the Gender Studies lounge. It was a pleasant enough way to pass the lunch hour, if not completely satisfying. Their next speaker isn’t for a few weeks, and is an economist, which might be cheating challenge-wise, but I may well go back.

And I’ll close by once again noting that I’d be happy to see somebody else take this up in the other direction, and have some literary faculty come to a Physics and Astronomy colloquium. I’ll be happy to look over our list of upcoming talks and make a specific recommendation if anyone’s up for it…

At the start of this new academic year, Union inaugurated a new President, David Harris, formerly of Tufts. At the ceremony, his inaugural address was framed around the college’s motto (“Under the laws of Minerva we all become brothers and sisters,” in French), and he had a big thing about needing to be made uncomfortable as an essential part of the process of learning wisdom. He turned this idea into a community challenge, asking people at the college to publicly commit to doing something uncomfortable for them that will make them a better person. And also to share the process on social media.

Now, to be sure, this is a little cornball, but I basically agree with and admire the impulse, so I’ll make an effort to play along. It’s a little tricky to come up with something feasible that I could commit to, though. After a bit, I half-seriously suggested that I would make an effort to go to seminar talks in departments outside the sciences and engineering that define my comfort zone.

By coincidence, this past weekend I was tasked with taking a group of Union students to the annual Undergraduate Research Conference run by the New York Six consortium of liberal arts colleges. A pretty good share of these were by non-scientists, so I backed into doing at least the baby version of the thing I said I would do. Which leaves just the “talk about it on social media” part, thus this blog post…

In many ways, the “talk about it on social media” part is the most uncomfortable bit, because it’s the part most likely to get me in trouble with strangers on Twitter, and more importantly colleagues on campus. A lot of my discomfort with the idea stems from being an academic accustomed to the ways of the sciences, and there’s a high risk of coming off as a stereotypical arrogant physicist telling people from other disciplines that they’re Doing It Wrong. So let me offer a disclaimer up front that that’s not my intent– I recognize that the customs of my people, as it were, are just a reflection of the standards of a particular community, and other ways of approaching the whole academic enterprise are perfectly valid.

That said, a lot of my discomfort with presentations coming out of the more literary side of academia is, at bottom, a reflection of the fact that their customs and practices just seem bizarre to me. One of the presentations I saw was in the classic form of presenting a paper– that is, a presenter standing at a podium reading a pre-written text, with minimal visual aids. That’s just never going to not seem weird to me.

The issue I have with this is not just that this isn’t the way science presentations traditionally work (though that’s a lot of it), but that as someone who makes a living stringing words together to explain complicated subjects in a variety of media, the whole business is just painfully awkward. When I write text to be read on a screen or on a page that’s a very different process than writing text to be spoken out loud– the rhythms of spoken language are very different than the rhythms of formal writing, and stuff that works well on the page can be painfully awkward when read out loud.

And that’s what happens with a lot of the paper-reading presentations I’ve been to– its a paper written to be read, but the words are being said out loud, and the result is weird and stilted in a way that’s enormously distracting to me. I also find it positively bizarre that this is the general practice in fields that are, at their core, devoted to the careful parsing of language– presentations where the language is so at odds with the medium of its delivery seem to actively impede communication.

The other thing that I find uncomfortable about a lot of talks from the other side of academia is a matter of absence, rather than presence. The world of science that I inhabit is very much a cumulative and forward-driving enterprise, and one of the ways that is reflected is that most presentations include an explicit call to action. Somewhere toward the end of any presentation in the STEM fields is a “Future Work” section, explaining some of the implications of the findings and sketching out what comes next. Whether it’s a paper or a talk, there’s almost always an explicit “We have shown X, and therefore we should do Y.”

One of the disorienting things about non-science academic presentations, for me, is the absence of that “…and therefore.” I’ve written about this before, and it crops up all over the place. The undergrad presentations I saw this past weekend were another example– one of the speakers went so far as to actively disclaim any intent, saying “we went into this project without any goal or plan.” That really threw me.

Now, of course, there’s a sense in which that claim is disingenuous– the specific project whose presenter claimed not to have a goal was amassing a big collection of material in a variety of media, which is a valuable goal in its own right. There is, in fact, a point to collecting stuff and making it available, namely that future researchers can mine that content for insights. But the fact that they felt it was sensible and even useful to say they had no plan speaks to a worldview that’s very much at odds with my own.

I think there’s also a disconnect here between what academics in these fields say and what they do– that is, a lot of people in this community clearly feel very passionately that the phenomena they describe in their research calls for very specific actions to address problems in society. Which makes it all the more strange to me that they don’t spell that out more. I think this contributes to the sense of these fields as “useless,” and the anger that engenders. People used to more explicit projection into the future find purely descriptive presentations lacking in a way that’s almost disorienting, while people accustomed to the norms of these fields think the implication is perfectly obvious, and people asking for that “…and therefore” to be spelled out explicitly are engaged in some sort of bad-faith argument.

As for the actual content of these presentations… I’m going to keep away from that, because these were undergraduate speakers, and I don’t think it would be right to go too deeply into the specifics of what they did or didn’t say, and what I found more or less congenial about their material. While they were generally quite impressive and accomplished presentations, some of the things I might call out as deficiencies in the content of their work might just reflect their inexperience and the necessarily limited scope of an undergraduate research project compared to a more professional presentation. I’ll save that for some time when I hear a distinguished professor talk about a project that spans multiple years. Also, this post is already longer than many people will bother to read…

So, that’s a bit on some presentations I found uncomfortable, and why I don’t often seek these out. Going forward with this (to the extent that my schedule permits me to get to these sorts of talks), I’ll make an effort to keep these factors in mind, and adjust my expectations for the presentation in a way that will allow more focus on content than delivery. And we’ll see where that goes…

I used to do a lot more pop-culture blogging than I’ve done in recent years, but that’s tailed off for a bunch of reasons. Partly it’s that Forbes doesn’t want pop-culture stuff, and they’re the primary outlet paying me to blog these day. Mostly, though, it’s that I just don’t consume much any more– between work and the kids, I’m too busy. Which is sad-making, but that’s life.

Last week, though, for the first time in I don’t know how long, I saw not one but two new movies: Solo and Ocean’s 8. I blew off the afternoon last Monday because it was my birthday, and went to see Solo by myself, then Kate expressed an interest in Ocean’s 8, so we got a babysitter Saturday night and went to that together.

The two end up having more in common than you might think, given that one is a movie about elaborately costumed aliens and the other is a Star Wars flick. They’re both fundamentally heist movies, they both have big casts and complicated backstories, and neither has any really compelling reason to exist in their current form.

OK, that’s maybe a little harsh on Ocean’s 8— as Kate noted, any modern “large crew of impossibly glamorous people conspire to do crimes” movie is going to be compared to Ocean’s 11 these days, so they might as well lean into it. The direct connection to the previous films is more of a distraction than an essential element, though– this feels a bit like a script idea that was kicking around anyway, and lightly re-branded to ride the current “gender-flipped remake” trend.

Which is not to say that it’s not fun. Bullock and Blanchette have a ton of charisma as the principals of the heist, and the rest of the crew carry off their roles well. The heist scenes are well executed, and while the twists aren’t exactly surprising, everything is pulled off very smoothly. It was a fun movie; not an enduring classic, but a pleasant way to spend an evening in the theater.

If it has a weakness, it’s that the whole thing feels a little slight, especially compared to the original (this is where the tie-in to the other films does this movie a disservice). The Clooney-Pitt Ocean’s 11 has Andy Garcia as the villain to provide a sense of menace, as a casino owner who’s not afraid to have people killed. The villain in this is… Debbie’s ex, who’s kind of a dick. The stakes, like the crew, are smaller, and while there are probably some gender studies theses to be written about why that is, the end result is to blunt the impact of the movie a bit.

The same problem of lowered stakes also hurts Solo, in a much more significant way. For one thing, it’s a prequel, so there’s never any question about the ultimate survival of the protagonists. Beyond that, though, it runs smack into one of the pitfalls of sci-fi heist movies: the final setpiece has our heroes fleeing trouble by diving into technobabble, where they’re menaced by technobabble but escape by using technobbable to run one bit of technobabble into another bit of technobabble, creating a new danger because of technobabble, which they escape thanks to a sudden infusion of technobabble.

Despite being the tenth movie in this universe, none of that technobabble has really been established previously, which means we don’t have any sense of the rules by which these things operate. Which robs the whole sequence of a lot of its drama– the visuals are cool and all, but there isn’t the same pleasure that comes from seeing how the “real world” thieves of Ocean’s 8 outwit the authorities. Despite a vastly higher body count, then, Solo somehow feels even less weighty than the lower-stakes Ocean’s 8.

Which, again, is not to say that it’s not entertaining. The visuals are, in fact, very cool, and the execution is reasonably competent. There’s a bit too much box-checking (one of the reasons why prequels are dumb), and there are some missed opportunities to set things up a little better, but given its troubled production history, it’s kind of impressive that it works at all. And it was a pleasant enough way to spend an afternoon.

So that’s your inessential pop culture report for the moment. Come back in six months or a year, which is probably how long it will take before I see another two movies in the theater.

A few months back I did a round-up of Forbes posts for the first three months of 2018. I said at the time that I’d try to do these more regularly, but clearly that hasn’t happened. So here’s a round-up from April through June:

(Technically, there’s a week-and-a-bit left in June as I write this, so there’s an outside chance I might blog again, but odds aren’t good, and I have time now to do this, so I’ll put up the post now and maybe edit it later)

• Why It Doesn’t Matter That The World Wide Web Was Invented At CERN: A new rant on a long-standing pet peeve about the way physicists argue for funding.
• Experimental Physicists Are A Lot Like Little Kids: Both groups just start playing with things straight out of the box, often without reading the instructions.
• Why Science Is Essential For Liberal Arts Education (And Vice Versa): Including my one-sentence summary of the essential nature of liberal-arts education: “Students should be able to analyze a situation, decide on a course of action, and advocate for their choice.”
• Interpreting Quantum Mechanics Is All About Observers: We think of them very differently, but both the Copenhagen and Many-Worlds interpretations have the observer playing a central role, in very different ways.
• When Is ‘Failure To Replicate’ A Problem, And For Who?: Some thoughts about the “replication crisis” and how it manifests differently in physics.
• What Counts As A Schrodinger Cat?: Classifying some approaches to thinking about the most infamous gedankenexperiment in history.
• Is This A Good Time To Start Looking For Dark Matter?: Looking for exotic matter was a hot topic at DAMOP, but would it be a good investment to launch a new experiment right now?
• Basketball Physics: Why Is That Ball Spinning?: Using video to answer the question of why basketball players are coached to put backspin on their shot.
• The Difference Between Particle Physics And Quantum Foundations: Expanding on my interview in Sabine Hossenfelder’s Lost in Math, and why I think the two subfields mentioned deal with philosophy in very different ways.

As always, a reasonably wide range of stuff, and responses to that stuff. I was really happy with the liberal arts and basketball physics posts, but neither got as much traffic as I would’ve liked. I was also a little surprised that the replication thing didn’t get more of a reaction, even if only from social scientists blasting me for being a smug and arrogant physicist.

Such is the blogging life, though…