From: tobis@meteor.wisc.edu (Michael Tobis)
Subject: Re: Communicating Physics (was Re: Detecting crackpots - for laymen?)
Organization: University of Wisconsin, Meteorology and Space Science
Date: Wed, 18 Nov 92 20:12:37 GMT

In article <18NOV199210501176@csa1.lbl.gov> sichase@csa1.lbl.gov (SCOTT I CHASE) writes:
>In article <1992Nov17.231944.13221@meteor.wisc.edu>, tobis@meteor.wisc.edu (Michael Tobis) writes...
 
>>I think that the question of how to distinguish nonsense from science is
>>a very serious one, though I am not sure this is the appropriate forum
>>to discuss it. Physicists do tend to think of themselves as an elite,
>>rather than in the public employ, and tend to be particularly weak in  
>>conveying their ideas to the public. 

>I'm not so sure that this is true.  Ask a random person on the street
>to tell you anything about modern biology - something you couldn't find
>in a textbook written in 1950.  How about chemistry?  I think you would
>find many more people who could tell you lots of qualitative stuff 
>about physics in the last 40 years than either of these other hard
>sciences.  The Big Bang and the CMBR, quarks, high Tc superconductivity,
>supernova observations, chaos, etc. are all, I think, widely known parts of
>modern physics.  

Probably the cosmology stuff has more currency than the particle stuff.

Many people know the word "quark" but would be hard pressed to tell you
what a quark "is". For myself, I'm doing Ph.D. level work in computational
fluid dynamics. I try to read every article in Scientific American, and
generally fail to get much of anything out of the articles written
by physicists. Perhaps this is a failing in myself, but I have to suspect
that others have the same experience.

>I think that most physicists shy away from trying to communicate this complex
>web of incomplete ideas and inconsistent data.  It is much easier to 
>talk about 1960's physics.  There is also a mathematical barrier that can
>be difficult to overcome.  Much of what motivates new ideas in high energy
>physics are mathematical considerations, or at least highly mathematical
>physical considerations.

I acknowledge that it is particularly difficult. I do not see a recognition
among physicists that it should be a very high priority. It certainly seems
to me that anyone asking me for $4,000,000,000.00 should be able to give
me some idea what they are going to do with it!

>Personally, I think that the market is flooded with well-written books
>for the layman on interesting physics subjects.  But this is clearly not
>enough to educate the general public.  I think that we need more outreach - 
>community lectures and demonstrations, inviting the public into our
>labs to see what we do, going into the public schools to help teachers
>expose their students to what goes on out on the cutting edge, etc.

I think the well-writtenness is an illusion. It is much easier to read
something once you know something about the material. More to the point, 
though, the popularizatrions do not seem to deal with current topics.
Rather they continue the endless torture of Schroedinger's cat, poor
beast, which is certainly interesting enough but hardly current.

In any case, I do read
lots of the stuff, and it doesn't give me much grounding for separating
the wheat from the chaff in sci.physics. And it seems to me that I ought
to be particularly well-equipped for this compared to the general public
not involved in a physical science. Having worked in fluid dynamics and
having a couple of electrical fields courses under my belt, I am pretty
firmly grounded in 19th century physics!

However, I would be interested in your list of well-written books. btw,
I thought Hawking's book was weak, and Gleick's _Chaos_ utterly atrocious.
I like Davies' books, and Ian Stewart's _Does God Play Dice_ is an
excellent semi-popular (it does contain some elementary equations) 
survey of chaotic dynamics.

What's a CMBR?

mt