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Education and outreach

Education and outreach

Second thoughts

01 Feb 2008

The Second Life virtual world may seem like a waste of time but physicists would be wise not to ignore its potential in attracting young people to the subject

Second thoughts

The last few months have not been a great time for physics. As we reported last month (see “The £80m black hole”), an £80m shortfall in funding for the UK’s Science and Technology Facilities Council has forced the country to pull out of plans for the International Linear Collider (ILC), withdraw from the Gemini telescopes in Chile and Hawaii, and axe funding for fields like solar–terrestrial physics. Meanwhile, high-energy and fusion physicists in the US are coming to terms with their own funding crisis, which has seen America slash support for the ILC (see “US physics suffers budget setbacks”).

At times like these, it would be tempting for physicists to take refuge in an alternative reality where none of these unpalatable problems actually exist. In fact, there is such a place, in the form of Second Life — an Internet-based 3D virtual world where users, known as “Residents”, can take part in many activities that occur in the real world, such as walking, talking, shopping, socializing and even buying and selling “land” and services. Residents, who can choose any appearance that they like, known as their avatar, can move at normal speed from one place to the next or zoom almost instantly between locations.

Second Life was set up in 2003 by Linden Labs — a US firm founded by its chief executive Philip Rosedale, who originally studied physics. Over the last year, this strange world has caught the attention of the mainstream media, but for those who have no idea what it is all about, our news story this month (“Doing physics in Second Life)is a good place to start. At first sight, Second Life may seem trivial and pointless — why bother talking to a computer-generated person when there are real people all around us? — but there is more to it than meets the eye.

Some universities now have “virtual classrooms” in Second Life, the journal Nature has hosted a conference there, and there are even science museums. Residents can take a Shuttle flight or tour a nuclear reactor — things that few would have the opportunity to do for real. For better or worse, Second Life — and other virtual worlds like it — exist and they are fast becoming second nature for young people. If there is a way of exploiting Second Life to encourage such people into physics, then it would be unwise for physicists — notoriously conservative when it comes to exploiting social-networking technology — to dismiss the potential of these virtual worlds.

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