By Tushna Commissariat
It’s not often that one can say that watching TV may help your future career as a scientist, but today, after the hit US TV show The Big Bang Theory announced a scholarship for STEM students at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), it may be possible. The show, revolves around a group of young scientists – mainly physicists, but also an engineer, a microbiologist and a neuroscientist – making it a science-heavy show. Indeed, we at Physics World have delved into the secrets of the show’s success and talked to one of its scientific advisers. Now, the sitcom’s co-creator, cast and crew have announced a scholarship fund at UCLA to provide financial aid to undergraduate students pursuing degrees in science, technology, engineering and mathematics. The show’s executive producer, Chuck Lorrie, told the Deadline website that “when we first discussed it, we realized that when Big Bang started, this freshman class were 10 year olds”, adding that “some of them grew up watching the show, and maybe the show had influence on some of them choosing to pursue science as a lifetime goal. Wouldn’t it be great if we can help.” For this academic year, 20 “Big Bang Theory scholars” will be picked to receive financial assistance, with five new scholars each year from now. You can read more about it on the BBC website.
Elsewhere online though, not everyone is feeling the physics love. Writers at The Last Word on Nothing blog recently wrote a post titled “The best science to write about and the worst” as a part of their fifth anniversary write-ups. Unfortunately, two of the writers rated physics as their worst. While there was nothing particularly surprising about this – different people like different things and this extends to journalists and their preferred subjects, often referred to as one’s “beat”. What was rather annoying and off-putting, to me and many other science writers such as Jennifer Ouellette, was the almost predictable reasons they stated – the usual shtick of too much maths and the theory not being accessible. Writer Jennifer Holland complained that “the physicists I’ve talked to are incapable of dropping down to my level. I’ve had them become rather condescending, in fact.”
As a physics writer myself, I have come across bits of research that have been well beyond my knowledge, been terrified by the number of equations in a paper and have, on occasion, struggled to understand what the physicist at the other end of the phone is trying their best to explain to me. But I have found that doggedly asking the researchers many questions, even the “stupid” ones, until you really know what they have done and why, and doing a good bit of reading up and research makes any new study palatable. Some of the physicists I have spoken with were almost poetical about their work, while others had clearly thought long and hard on how to explain the crux of a paper in a way that makes sense to me without dumbing it down or reducing it to metaphors that don’t work. I am not suggesting that physics is the perfect science subject to be writing about (only I am a little bit, and yes, I do realise I may be a bit biased!), but most days I come to work and I am prepared to be amazed and impressed by latest bit of research that is waiting for me in my inbox. Take a look at Ouellette’s post over at her blog Cocktail Party Physics – I couldn’t agree with her more.
Elsewhere on the Web, read this article on The Guardian to find out what area of physics had author Virginia Wolf intrigued and what that has to do with the Royal Ballet’s production Woolf Works, take a look at the National Portrait Gallery’s new sculpture of Tim Berners-Lee and sign up for the first MOOC being hosted by ESA on “monitoring climate from space“.
