{"id":618,"date":"2007-11-12T14:37:26","date_gmt":"2007-11-12T19:37:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/?p=618"},"modified":"2008-01-16T15:43:16","modified_gmt":"2008-01-16T20:43:16","slug":"popularizing-science","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/?p=618","title":{"rendered":"Popularizing Science"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>While it&#8217;s not one of my main goals in life, I&#8217;m all in favor of the idea of popularizing science and making it as accessible as possible to as many people as possible.  But sometimes I do wonder about the kind of things scientists get involved with when they try and do this.  Just this morning I ran into these stories about science that make me ask myself:<\/p>\n<li>Is it a good idea for physicists to appear on a <a href=\"http:\/\/cosmicvariance.com\/2007\/11\/11\/quirks-and-quarks-before-the-big-bang\/\">radio show<\/a> discussing what happened before the big bang, or does the lack of any evidence about this or of a convincing model mean that this is just inherently too speculative a topic to be sold as serious science to a wide audience?  Should one perhaps leave this topic to the <a href=\"http:\/\/fr.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Avant_le_Big_Bang\">Bogdanovs<\/a>?<\/li>\n<li>Is it a good idea for physicists to promote to the public their work on <a href=\"http:\/\/www.zeit.de\/2007\/45\/P-Ronald-L-Mallett\">time travel<\/a>?  Or might this also give the public some misleading ideas about science? (via  <a href=\"http:\/\/unglaschluppe.blogspot.com\/2007\/11\/interesting-science.html\">i postdoc, therefore I am<\/a>, but there seems to be a whole genre of &#8220;time travel&#8221; books written by theoretical physicists).<\/li>\n<li>Is it a good idea for physicists to appear on a <a href=\"http:\/\/www.ifilm.com\/show\/22792\">TV show<\/a> explaining the forces involved in crushing beer cans, as part of a segment on whether women can crush beer cans with their breasts?  Especially physicist bloggers known for attacking other physicist bloggers for their <a href=\"http:\/\/asymptotia.com\/2007\/08\/29\/still-so-far-to-go\/\">sexism<\/a> and <a href=\"http:\/\/asymptotia.com\/2006\/08\/21\/more-scenes-from-the-storm-in-a-teacup-i\/\">media-inflated nonsense<\/a>? (via <a href=\"http:\/\/www.sunclipse.org\/?p=382\">here<\/a> and <a href=\"http:\/\/asymptotia.com\/2007\/11\/11\/tales-from-the-industry-xiv-manswers\/\">here<\/a>)\n<\/li>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>While it&#8217;s not one of my main goals in life, I&#8217;m all in favor of the idea of popularizing science and making it as accessible as possible to as many people as possible. But sometimes I do wonder about the &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/?p=618\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-618","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/618","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=618"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/618\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=618"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=618"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.math.columbia.edu\/~woit\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=618"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}