Because Graham is on Holiday and Chun Yao's Dead

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Despite the fact that this is satire and thus includes some level of exaggeration, it does do a rather nice job of highlighting some of the frustration of science outreach. Not everything can be condensed down into an information mcnugget or two, and there are subjects where you really need a decent background in physics to understand what’s going on, even at a superficial level. That frustration comes to a head when you meet someone who thinks that advanced science should be understandable to them even without any background schooling, and those same folks seem to be the ones who hold you at fault when they don’t understand. (They also seem to conclude that it’s wrong if it doesn’t make sense to them, but that’s another level of frustration)

h/t to Schrödinger’s hat

4 thoughts on “Because Graham is on Holiday and Chun Yao's Dead”

  1. It is just another example of dumbing down TV. Doesn’t everyone know heterotic supersymmetry as an effective theory build from the heterotic string? Doesn’t everyone know how to build gauge theories from strings ending on D-branes?

    Man up people…

  2. Well they are one of the few double acts with a physics grad (Ben Miller even started phd on “Novel quantum effects in low-temperature quasi-zero dimensional mesoscopic electron systems” but was lured away by show business)

  3. The problem is also intramural. Behold two stereograms of tellurium’s crystal lattice, as atoms in space and as chemistry. The third image is calculated normalized handedness of the mass distribution, CHI = 1.0 being perfectly handed.

    http://www.mazepath.com/uncleal/teatoms.gif
    http://www.mazepath.com/uncleal/tebonds.gif
    http://www.mazepath.com/uncleal/chite4.png
    Tellurium to 505,000 Å Radius (50.5 microns)

    Physicists do not use stereograms. The vacuum is observed chiral toward mass all the way down. Its keepers do not conceptualize left and right shoes. Hectares of publications spewing Higgs, SUSY, and quantum gravitation with zero physical evidence may be testably wrong… using chemistry, on a lab bench, in 24 hours.

    Plumber installing low volume toilets or Nobel Laureate, if you get black swanned it’s your own fault. A defective toilet is local nuisance. A defective science is bigger.

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