As expected, LIGO was recognized by the Nobel Prize in physics this year. The LIGO experiment is an enormous undertaking that combines elegant, simple theoretical ideas; incredible engineering and experimental capabilities; and technically virtuosic numerical theoretical calculations and data analysis techniques. It's truly a triumph.
I did think it was interesting when Natalie Wolchover, one of the top science writers out there today, tweeted: Thrilled they won, thrilled not to spend this morning speed-reading about some bizarre condensed matter phenomenon.
This sentiment was seconded by Peter Woit, who said he thought she spoke for all science journalists.
Friendly kidding aside, I do want to help. Somehow it's viewed as comparatively easy and simple to write about this, or this, or this, but condensed matter is considered "bizarre".
9 comments:
Unfortunate about Wolchover's comment, really goes to show what an uphill battle we have as condensed matter physicists, even among the people working hard to get the science message out there.
:( Re: Wolchover's comment, but mad props to the winners
And also... super happy to help science writers understand what's so cool about our field.
It's not just condensed matter people who have an uphill battle, in the context of Wolchover's comment. It's any kind of physics, except those few areas that have been deemed suitable for public consumption by the people who have to write those articles, i.e., astronomy and high-energy collider experiments. A sad state of affairs. Doug, Peter, we're ALL happy to help. But for the most part they don't want our help, it seems.
And people like Peter Woit ought to know better than to exacerbate this problem. It does nobody any good, including his own field, to make it seem as if physics is solely the purview of the esoteric.
I'd like to take my hat off to the National Science Foundation (NSF) for supporting LIGO for all these years, and, especially all the American people who supported it through their tax dollars. LIGO and the GW observation was a stunning result and I think America has a lot to be proud of. Well done guys on opening a whole new era in experimental physics!
Hi, just a random thought of a passer-by; I would say that some CM stuff really looks bizarre. And I am happy that real BH stuff won it.
Along with that I would guess that no one would label e.g. graphene as bizarre.
Anon@6:48, fair point, though some of that is an issue of hype in this case. I'd written something about that particular result here.
I'm afraid that it is hard to see CM articles without amounts of hype lately, especially when it is about analogies to HEP/astro. It looks like the respective CM authors look down on themselves, because they do not work at HEP/astro and pretend that their work (on analogies) does it. Since actual use of results of physics depends on CM research, be proud of yourselves!
BTW A link to Symmetry magazine at your mentioned blogpost leads just to the site instead of that "amusing" article. And with some nitpicking, chirality is not exactly helicity that reminds me of a recent exchange among comments in this blogpost.
Anon@9:22, it's marketing. Thermoelectric measurements in NbP sounds waaaaaaaay less likely to get into Nature than "gravitational anomaly". Thanks for the link correction - it's fixed now. The amusing article is here.
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