Month: June 2018

Thinking About Science Writing

Posted on by jabittan
Amanda Gefter’s book Trespassing on Einstein’s Lawn is an enjoyable read even if you only have a slight science background because Gefter is able to transform incredibly challenging physics topics into understandable and relatable concepts and ideas. Her use of metaphor throughout the book is funny and inviting, and while I am not an expert in the cutting edge of physics after reading her book, I do have a better basic grasp of the challenges physicists face when observing and making predictions about the universe today.

Early in the book Gefter describes some of her own confusion with topics like general relativity and quantum mechanics, and she provides in depth yet accessible explanations. In addition to describing the ideas themselves, Gefter is able to describe the why the problems and challenges at the edge of science puzzle so many people in a way that is accessible. Regarding quantum gravity she writes,

“I knew that physicists needed a theory of quantum gravity because general relativity and quantum mechanics couldn’t manage to peaceable coexist in a single universe. But what made exactly made them so hopelessly incompatible? Everywhere I looked I found technicalities—the world of relativity is continuous and the quantum world discrete; relativity regards positions in spacetime as well defined, while quantum theory renders them fuzzy. They were obstacles, sure, but they struck me as mere couple’s squabbles, not deep, unbridgeable rifts. It was like relativity preferred chocolate and quantum theory vanilla—not like relativity was a Protestant and quantum theory was a duck.”

I have more or less forgotten any ideas about quantum gravity, but I have managed to retain some general relativity and some quantum mechanics knowledge after reading Gefter’s book. What I enjoy about the passage above is the humor she brings to the science. We don’t often invite people into the science because we become very technical when describing the complexities of cutting edge science. There is a place for the jargon, but when we want to excite people and get them interested in the truly fascinating work taking place, we need to make science more clear and create demonstrations that will encourage people to look further as opposed to confuse people and put them to sleep.

What I think is also important to remember is that it is good for people to hear the answers to the basics, even if we (or they) have heard the basic questions and basic answers multiple times in the past. I listen to a lot of science podcasts, and the question/answer portions of the shows often have pretty strait forward and basic questions. My reaction as a human being when someone asks a question to which I know the answer is to praise myself for being so smart and to criticize the other person for not already knowing the answer to the question. However, I try my best to acknowledge that reaction, and then put it away because it is not helpful. Undoubtedly every time a simple question is answered, the response on a podcast is unique, and my understanding is deepened or even corrected altogether. What we must remember when discussing science, and what Gefter does a great job of in her book, is that everyone in our audience will come to our writing (or podcast discussion) with a different level of understanding and we must write in a way that does not make those with less background think that we are arrogant in our use of language and description of basic concepts.

Energy and Gravity Games

Posted on by jabittan
A great challenge within physics today is understanding how the same physics is able to operate at different scales. The geometry of planets and galaxies seems to operate in the same way as the physics of airplanes and softballs, but dive a level deeper and the physics of electrons and photos does not quite seem to follow the same rules. Experiments give us photons that seem to know how we are looking at them, and behave differently depending on what experiment we choose and what method of observation we use. Once we get to the super small world of particle physics, we continue to use the same physics, but the interactions between matter and energy seems to be different. Piecing together exactly what is happening is challenging, and often requires looking at the results of experiments in new and creative ways.

 

In her book Trespassing on Einstein’s Lawn, author Amanda Gefter explores many of these head turning and confusing realities. She looks at the smallest scale we can reach in the universe, the point at which there simply are not more “things” to be discovered by looking for even smaller and smaller particles. At the Plank scale, gravity and energy have interactions that we would not expect based on our understandings of quantum physics. Gefter describes what physicists observe,

 

“But keep zooming in and, strangely, things start to turn around. The laws of quantum mechanics contain a loophole that allows large fluctuations of energy to burst forth from the vacuum, provided they don’t stick around too long. At increasingly shorter time scales, energy blinks in and out of existence in the form of fleeting, or ‘virtual,’ particles. The more localized the virtual particle, the greater its momentum, and the  greater its momentum, the larger its energy. Thanks to E=mc2, more energy means more mass. So as you look at smaller and smaller distances, virtual particles grow increasingly massive until, at the Plank scale, gravity grows as powerful as the other forces An energy in its own right, gravity’s crescendo generates a runaway feedback disaster of the same variety that can collapse a 1032 pound star into a black hole.”

 

Gefter describes the process above as the breaking of spacetime and refers to John Wheeler who said that this process creates “spacetime foam.” Physicists are challenged because all the forces we experience as sentient human beings exist across all scales, but their impact is different based on the mass and energy of the particle or system. Gefter’s quote above shows us that physics does not just go away at a certain point. Instead, the rules remain, but the way the rules play out changes.

Solving a Great Mystery

Posted on by jabittan
As a teenager in high school, Amanda Gefter was relatively disengaged from classes and studying. It was not that she wasn’t smart, was not interested in the world around her, or did not want to learn, but that teachers and her school did not manage to grab her attention and excite her with the subjects they taught. In her book Trespassing on Einstein’s Lawn, Gefter explains the interest she took in physics and science outside the classroom, and discusses how interesting science is, yet how little of the mystery of our world was actually conveyed in her classes.

 

She writes, “Einstein said, ‘This huge world stands before us like a great eternal riddle.’ Why couldn’t any of my teachers have told me that? ‘Listen,’ they could have said, ‘no one has any idea what the hell is going on. We wake up in this world and we don’t know why we’re here or how anything works. I mean, look around. Look how bizarre it all is! What the hell is all this stuff? Reality is a huge mystery, and you have a choice to make. You can run from it, you can placate yourself with fairy tales, you can just pretend everything’s normal, or  you can stare that mystery in the eye and try to solve it. If you are one of the brave ones to choose the latter, welcome to science.”

 

We present science in school in a way that allows us to test student knowledge. The knowledge we test is usually just basic facts and information that can be evaluated with multiple choice questions. Science in the real world, however, is not multiple choice. We don’t actually know all the answers and the quest to find them involves creative thinking to design experiments, evaluate the world, observe complex phenomena, and crowdsource knowledge to establish accepted theories of what is taking place. When we reduce this complex web that we call science to basic multiple choice questions, we create an illusion that science is well understood and that we have all the answers figured out. Students become disengaged because we lose the mystery and fail to connect the challenging science to the important developments of the world.

 

To inspire kids with science we need to first obliterate the idea that math is hard. Math is not hard, it is just a different frame for understanding the interactions of the universe. If we tell our kids that math is a secrete code to the universe that they have the power to understand, then they can approach the subject with less apprehension and more intrigue, and they can be more successful. From there we must explain the mysteries of the universe that we are working to better understand, and we must demonstrate to kids the interesting work and knowledge being undertaken and discovered every day. We must create new ways of transmitting knowledge and testing knowledge that don’t involve multiple choice questions and textbooks that present information without connections to real world applications.