Physics for Non-Majors

Yesterday I met Serge Haroche, the 2012 Nobel Prize winner in physics. While Prof. Haroche wasn’t the first Nobel laureate I had met in my time at the University of Chicago, he was definitely very impressive and in many ways rather inspiring. What got me the most about the way he interacted with undergraduates during our very casual breakfast event was definitely the fact that despite having benefited from the current academic and scientific system he was very openly critical of it and supportive of others’ being, if nothing else, skeptical of the ways in which scientific funding or application processes for tenured positions work. The rather capitalistic model in which science is only funded for the short term, where every project has to meet certain milestones; the way in which graduate students are often treated as interchangeable, passive, cheap labor; the pressure to publish obscurely-written papers in Science and Nature which are both owned by private companies rather than being regulated by a physics society of some sort; and the gender issue in physics were discussed in as much depth as our guest’s scientific achievements. And while all of these topics probably deserve a whole other set of discussions, the one thing that always seems remarkably relevant to me in these conversations is the fact that people that deal with funding or regulating science are barely ever scientists themselves. In other words, the financial and logistical setup of academic research today is heavily influenced by people who have never actually tried their hand at running an experiment or posing a potentially fruitful theoretical problem. Inevitably, this brings up the topic of what I’ve always referred to as ’science education for non-majors’ and what it can do in order to allow non-scientists in charge of funding scientific research to understand its processes well enough for the posing of a sustainable, fruitful system of regulation for it.

I’m always shocked to learn how often institutions actually do conduct research on science education and focus completely on optimizing the introductory major sequence rather than the classes that fall under the umbrella of general requirements. Though I am completely aware of the fact that I might be something of an elitist and that my background definitely puts me in a position of privilege over many, I still generally like to argue that most major oriented classes need to be in some sense self-selecting in order for those that emerge as graduating physics majors to have promising careers. At the same time, I would argue the exact opposite when it comes to non-major or general requirement classes - no-one should be able to opt out or sail through these classes. I always think of an anecdote one of the Chinese faculty members in our department tells us about being denied a visa because his project proposal included the word ‘atomic’. The administrator making a connection between an ultracold atomic experiment and the atomic bomb very likely didn’t receive very good science education and yet was allowed to decide on whether someone, who went on to be very successful, should be granted a work opportunity. Yet, thinking of a typical physics class in which all that is discussed are crates sliding down inclines, springs, and pendulums and in which all that is ever taught is how to plug numbers into equations that might not even work out every time, one shouldn’t be surprised to learn of mistakes as the one described above. Science education that goes beyond this approach seems to be rather necessary.

Another thing that inevitably comes to mind is the fact that I once took a whole course on the history and sociology of science and medicine and all I learned was that not even highly educated sociologists have a very good picture of how science is done on a day to day basis. A professors teaching this course routinely spoke about the scientific method, falsifiability, and bias against publishing certain results, while at the same time claiming that results found in laboratories didn’t actually map to the real world, criticizing ‘big science’ like the LHC and LIGO from the perspective of someone that had only ever read about these things in the newspapers, and very consistently claiming that too much money was being spent in all of the big endeavors of physics today that did not immediately shatter the current paradigm. The two other physics majors in the class and myself rolled our eyes for ten weeks and put a lot of effort into subverting the given essay prompts but it is reasonable to assume that most of the other history or sociology students retained quite a bit of this sentiment. The irony here is that these people will likely be the ones with more power over scientific research than those of us hoping to pursue an academic career in it. This sort of perspective combined with likely boredom and utter confusion in any general requirements course can only work to convince non-scientists that science is either not trustworthy or obscure or, most horrifyingly, that it should be treated as any other capitalistic business endeavor.

The natural question is then that of what can we do about it and why haven’t we done that already? As far as the first point I imagine that teaching less classical mechanics brute-force plug-and-chug problems and more conceptually interesting, historically important examples could do wonders for changing laymen’s attitude about physics in general. Crates sliding down inclines are really not interesting at all and without the drive to see what comes next, a drive that generally only physics major students are bound to have, I cannot possibly see why learning about them would be a pleasant memory for a future senator or a congressperson. Recreating an experiment proving that electrons have spin and debating implications of a two-state system for quantum computing ought to be much more fulfilling even if some of the mathematical formalism and rigor is left out. The lack of modern topics in many curricula seems to make people think that research has never quite gotten beyond Einstein and Heisenberg which was by now more than 80 years ago! An ideal physics class for non-majors, as I imagine it, would also include a discussion session with real academic scientists and lots and lots of talk about where funding comes from, how projects are justified, and how an academic scientists deals with the logistics of their work on a day to day basis. Real scientists live nothing like the crew on the “Big Bang Theory,” nor is obtaining grant money as easy as getting a salary at, say, an office job. As to why classes like this do not exist and why classes taught on science by social scientists miss the mark so readily is something of a mystery to me. It is a fact that academic scientists generally try to do research and nothing else ever but that, in a lot of ways, seems like a consequence of the way the system is currently set up. At the same time, scientists who are deeply invested in thinking about science education and the ways in which the scientific community interacts with the public definitely seem to exist and what they seem to be lacking is some sort of a platform. 

While the solution to this problem is not even remotely clear to me, I do firmly believe that it is important for young scientists who are already caught up in social media to take advantage of it in order to try and implement at least some minor, gradual change in the way others perceive science. We can’t all hold the social capital of a Nobel laureate but anyone can yell on Tumblr.

Carls and Neils

Even though I have not seen the new Cosmos with Neil deGrasse Tyson yet, I am already amazed at what a huge accomplishment with regards to popularization of science, it is becoming judging solely on its presence in social media. While the nerdier parts of Tumblr have always been more in favor of Sagan’s suave scientific charm than the meme that has made Tyson a fundamental block of the new Internet culture, screenshots from the new Cosmos are quickly emerging and deGrasse Tyson is proving to be as enthusiastic and fun as his now legendary predecessor in this television series. In browsing some of the stills featuring deGrasse Tyson I was pleased to see a post with over 130,000 notes in which he recalls meeting Carl Sagan in Ithaca when he was only seventeen. In telling the anecdote, he notes that he “already knew I wanted to become a scientist, but that afternoon, I learned from Carl the kind of person I wanted to become”. This sentiment has resonated with me very strongly, not only because I have been lucky enough to have shaken hands with Nobel winners and gotten advice from some of the most excellent minds in physics today, but because it underlines, in easily relatable terms, how the figure of a scientist as a person rather than as a puppet in a lab coat can be tremendously influential. Accordingly, I want to share some thoughts on science popularization, science education, and the ways in which mainstream media, modern academia and our culture mystify science in ways that make “Carl Sagans” stand out rather than being the norm.

Last year, I took a class on the history of medicine and science. For one of the lengthier assignments I wrote a nine page essay on the mystification of science and the popular perception of laboratories as special, magic places where the scientist is, by default, so much more powerful and so much more important than his  or her counterparts educated in other fields. I opened my discussion by writing that

“A condensed matter physicist might say that a metal is a solid with a Fermi surface thus appealing to a quantum mechanical concept accounting for the most characteristic properties of metals.  The concept of a Fermi surface is a very specific one and it is likely that an astrophysicist or a biologist would not be familiar with it enough to understand why it implies that, for example, metals conduct electricity. At the same time, the recognition of metals as solids that conduct electricity is in no way an obscure fact and it is plausible to expect most people to be aware of it. The disconnect between hearing the phrase “Fermi surface” and thinking of electrical conductivity of metals therefore illustrates the disconnect between scientists and their mode of thinking and the way in which everyone else perceives the same natural phenomena. Moreover, this disconnect should not be taken as simply a matter of language but as an implication of a deeper sense of hierarchy between the kind of understanding of nature that is available to scientists and to the proverbial layperson.”

It is remarkable that this is a phenomenon that emerges very early in one’s career as a scientist – the moment you feel confident enough to utter “moment of inertia tensor” or even simply “quantum mechanics”, all conversations with friends, family, or hairdressers stop as their eyes either roll or widen. Sometimes it is even enough to just mention studying physics to get the uniform response of “you must be so smart, I hated physics in high school”.  At the same time, considering the politicians that sit in Congress and routinely vote on NASA funding, education plans, and science regulation, one notes that very few are indeed scientists and it becomes very easy to wonder whether their responses would be the same. How many Senators would be scared of the jargon?

Two reasons for this disconnect come to mind. One concerns our culture and mass media. The crazy scientist is a trope as old as comics and television and the fact that it is almost impossible to see a scientist who is not a white male wearing a lab coat has only recently been questioned. Scientists you meet on television are crazy, evil, or simply no fun at all. I happen to be about halfway through watching The X-Files which is for all intents and purposes a cult show and I am constantly frustrated at how Dana Scully’s scientific background is used to make her (very justified) rational approach to the paranormal sound boring and stubborn, in comparison to Mulder’s often borderline psychotic fantasies about the little green men. Scientists in novels and comics are equally problematic since if they are not evil they have usually been in a horrible accident and have become everything other than a scientist. My research mentor, a theorist with a remarkable publication list, is an energetic older lady who likes classical music, works in an office stacked with books and goes home by 4:30 every day. I have yet to see a scientist like her in a TV show or a graphic novel. And while I want to stop listing examples here in order to move to discussing the part of the problem that lies within the scientific community itself, it is worth mentioning that even if you don’t care about the scientist in the Simpsons or the fact that there has never been a Disney princess who sported lab goggles rather than a tiara (I keep waiting for an Ada Lovelace-inspired steampunk fantasy) reading the news and comparing the amount of space allotted to pop celebrities and controversial politicians as opposed to real science, beyond the common buzzwords such as “God particle”, “black hole”, or “time travel”, should definitely drive the point home.

Results from a Google search for "scientist"

As I mentioned above, a large part of the issue definitely lies with the scientists themselves. To some extent, the issue is larger than science – in a world where obtaining credibility means paying thousands of dollars to learn things, a large portion of which one could read about in library books and Wikipedia entries, it is no surprise that academics are insular and at least slightly elitist. On the other hand, it is rather easy to argue that science impacts people’s lives daily and that the vast majority of its findings are applicable to the well-being of our society beyond simply adding to the overall body of human knowledge. And while jargon is sometimes inescapable and oversimplifications can indeed be as misleading as fun analogies—both of which abound in popular science writing--it is definitely true that most scientists subscribe to yet another set of stereotypes about scientists except that this time the key ingredients are institution rankings, awards, and peer-reviewed gossip. These guidelines for dismissing someone’s work or ideas as not worth discussing are things that one learns rather quickly and after year or so into one’s bachelors degree it is already so easy to complain about the lack of rigor or lack of fame in certain highly specialized circles. For a layman, it is therefore hard to break into the social and professional circle of “real” science and it is no wonder that the groups that are routinely marginalized in all spheres of life, such as women or people of color, make it in science even more rarely than their white male peers. Consequently, if the goal is to bring science closer to those who make big decisions as well as those who want to make educated consumer choices, and to make science less mystical and less inferiority complex-inducing, the story of Carl Sagan spending an afternoon with the 17 year old deGrasse Tyson and inviting him to his house should be compulsory reading for everyone.

Another related point is definitely that of science education for ‘non-majors’. It is interesting to note that a number of institutions conduct research in science education (I definitely have physics in mind here) but very few of the improved introductory sequences are aimed primarily at non-majors--not in the sense of premedical students, but rather in the sense of those studying economics, political science, or the humanities. While I might be something of an elitist myself, I have always felt that among the students interested in pursuing a career in science there is a fair amount of self-selection going on.  Difficult science classes for science majors mean that there are sometimes less science majors at the end of the class but the ones that are left have the kind of talent or endurance that a career in academia or industry might require. Non-major science classes are by default fundamentally different and it seems crucial that these students be a little more knowledgeable but more importantly a lot less intimidated once the class is over. Providing this kind of background to those who will be making laws or movies would most definitely change the kind of reputation science has taken on.

Finally, I want to emphasize that even if it is difficult to believe that a change in culture and a proliferation in science popularization along the lines of Cosmos can bring about an atmosphere in which scientists are respected, we can never really stop talking about the need for role models for future scientists, no matter where they come from and what they look like. In contemplating writing this, my guiding thoughts have definitely been focused on laymen and the way in which this can be made a less ugly word, but all of the efforts to make science less intimidating and better supported by the structures of power are essentially futile if there is not a constant influx of new minds into all of the scientific fields. The Carl Sagans of the world are instrumental here and it is particularly inspiring to see that his successor is not just some old white man in a lab coat. These are the kind of people that science students should indeed grow up to be.

Questions, questions

Given that a remarkably large percentage of our social interactions take place on social networks and other virtual spaces that offer a limited amount of privacy, steering away from all things political is quite a conundrum. Re-blogging a quote on Tumblr, bragging about a purchase from a certain company on Facebook, following a celebrity on Twitter – all of these actions are interpreted as reflecting some sort of social commentary or vaguely political choices. While all of this is consensual since none of us are being forced to establish online presence, it opens up the vast majority of our actions to a spectrum of (mis)interpretations.  It is interesting to look into the kind of questions and comments that are prompted by the use of the word “feminism” and generally explicit statements about gender equality in this particular context.

In my personal experience, one of the most common reactions is a slew of, private or public, questions about personal experiences related to issues that feminism is seen to be dealing with. Some examples include the following:

 “What is your worst experience as a woman studying in a male dominated field?”

“Have you ever been openly discriminated against at work?”

“Do you get cat-called a lot?”

“Do you often feel unsafe at night?”

“Do you personally know a lot of girls that have been assaulted by men?”

To some extent, one could argue that there is nothing particularly problematic about this approach to understanding one’s involvement with the feminist movement. If two people are discussing a certain issue, the one that has had some experience with that issue is likely to have more insight into its nature. This is often a prominent factor in discussions of gender related issues since different genders often do experience different treatments and therefore cannot have perfect knowledge about the experiences of one another. One of the most prominent characteristics of any kind of privilege is the fact that those that are privileged are almost by default unaware of it. Coming from such a perspective, inquiring about the experiences of the member of potentially marginalized groups should largely be expected and definitely should not be discouraged.

At the same time, the issue of what kinds of questions are appropriate and, more importantly, productive is one that needs to be addressed.  The questions I have listed above are all focused on rather negative and subjective experiences. While these questions are in no way irrelevant for feminist discourse, it is not obvious why they would be a more natural choice for opening a discussion of one’s views on gender equality than asking something along the lines of “Why do you think feminism is important?” or “What kind of observations motivate your involvement with the feminist movement?”.

In fact, building an argument based on answers to any of these questions seems rather faulty. While a person that has been assaulted or discriminated against because of their gender might have insights that one that has not been in that situation is clearly lacking, they are also significantly more likely to view the situation in a highly emotional rather than a rational way. Consequently, their subsequent socio-political views are likely to be heavily skewed due to their personal trauma. If a friend tells me one of our acquaintances is a horrible person but I know that the two have previously engaged in conflict that ended up hurting my friend in some way, I am likely to be anxious around this third person but also more than aware of the fact that my friend is not being fully objective and that this acquaintance might actually have all kinds of good things going for them. Assuming that someone is interested in gender equality because they have had a personally bad experience, similarly offers unreliable information about the actual nature of gender related issues. For exactly this reason, these questions seem to be a very inefficient way of gauging someone’s take on feminism.

Moreover, these questions often seem to be a first step towards discrediting one’s opinions related to issues of feminism and gender equality. In a culture that already teaches men and women from a young age that women are “crazy” and “overly emotional” or “less rational” a woman that has had a bad experience because of her gender and is at the same time devoted to gender equality is almost immediately dismissed as someone that just cannot be taken seriously. All subsequent arguments are marked as being due to “overreacting” and what is often referred to as typical mind fallacy or the belief that a single example can be generalized to all members of the relevant group.

At the same time, even if one assumes that most feminists are primarily motivated by being personally hurt or angry, the previously presented list of questions refers to a very narrow range of events that can cause this anger. To some extent, even the last two questions can be dismissed as somewhat irrelevant. Catcalling is often claimed to have nothing to do with gender equality and rape culture – it is just a clumsy attempt at compliments. Feeling unsafe is similarly presented as not being a gendered phenomenon – anyone can get raped if they walk alone at night. Unless the event that is being discussed as the cause of one’s involvement with the feminist movement is objectively horrible, it is generally not difficult to construct a narrative that explains the proposed problem away and comes back to overreacting.

The issue of what sort of gendered phenomena one can be upset about is directly related to the way in which we think of inequality or manifestations of patriarchy. It is often claimed that the patriarchy is an irrelevant term since men do not hold all positions of power anymore and men and women are equal according to the laws of most western countries. In reality, this claim is true only if one assumes that the patriarchy is a purely legal entity with no effect on our culture. Popular culture lags behind legislature and harmful stereotypes and marginalizing behaviors remain intact even when there are no legal obstacles to achieving true gender equality.

Accordingly, when questioned about my experiences as a woman and the way in which they relate to me identifying as a feminist I am inclined to say “I have never been assaulted or marginalized at work but I have watched a lot of movies and flipped through a lot of magazines.” Unfortunately, an answer of that sort often leads to the discussion of female overreacting outlined above. Pointing out objectification in music videos, movies or magazines typically becomes a matter of shifting the blame and questioning agency since, to some extent, expressing the fact that one is offended is often a choice. This kind of discourse is neatly summarized on the “Feminist Killjoy” t-shirts since the implication generally tends to be that feminists choose to be offended by popular culture and “fun things” because of some false narrative they have constructed for themselves. It is more than ironic that one can simultaneously claim that we have achieved full gender equality while at the same time deciding on what exactly is it that one of the genders is allowed to criticize or find problematic. Asking questions about one’s personal experiences and focusing on the glaringly obvious, macroscopic forms of discrimination and inequality establishes exactly this kind of hierarchy of phenomena that are “really bothersome” and those that should really be dismissed on grounds of knowing what “women and feminists are like”.

Finally, while there is no doubt about the importance of dialogue, the emphasis should really be not on just asking questions but rather on asking them productively. Questions that involve a minimal number of assumptions and that are not dependent on highly subjective views of whatever issue is being discussed strike me as the ones we should all be asking once confronted with someone whose opinions might differ from our own. Most of the questions listed above are nothing but implicit statements about the nature of the feminist movement and consequently far from being productive. Facebook comments can definitely be put to better use.

Taking It Back

When feminists discuss objectification of women as one of the big problems of our culture they often do so with covers of men’s and women’s magazines in mind. These covers regularly feature scantly clad women in sexually suggestive poses and many have argued that this depiction identifies women with their sexuality thus denying their individual agency as thinking, feeling individuals. In a recent Facebook thread a counter-argument was raised: women that pose for these magazines do so out of their own volition and are therefore in charge of their representation instead of being objectified. In this post, I would like to address the validity of this counter-argument as well as the attempts to “take back” words and behaviors that have been historically harmful to the position of women in Western societies.

Moreover, studies have shown, that women are more likely to be hired or get a raise if they “conform to a feminine stereotype” i.e. “appear friendly, warm and concerned for others above yourself” in interviews. Consequently, I can’t help but wonder whether empowerment, not only in the strictly abstract sense, can be achieved by embracing the stereotypes. If a woman acts in a stereotypical manner in order to get a raise and succeeds in doing so, this behavior has effectively benefited her. Similarly, a men’s magazine model whose covers attract a lot of attention is very likely to be popular and well paid. While adopting the kind of behavior that feminists tend to criticize, these particular women are advancing in their careers and potentially living a better life. Why is it then appropriate to criticize these behaviors?

One of the answers lies in the fact that in considering both the model and the businesswoman we cannot deal with individual cases as fully separate. The problems arising from stereotyping and objectification are by default systematic, which implies that our analysis also has to take into account the proverbial big picture. In both cases that are bing discussed the stereotype of women as always gentle and friendly or the identification of women with their bodies viewed as esx objects does not only affect the particular woman interviewing or doing a photo shoot but rather all women everywhere. Consequently, even though an individual woman might achieve some level of empowerment by adopting stereotypical behavior or consenting to be objectified, her behavior serves as an example of what women are like that the readers and editors of magazines or owners and managers of businesses necessarily keep in mind when thinking about and interacting with women in general. In the case of the stereotypically feminine interviewee this effect is fairly obvious. As the study cited above suggests, most employers are already inclined to hire a woman acting in what they consider to be typically feminine and will, in fact, be expecting such behavior from a good candidate. An increasing number of female candidates acting in that way can then only further this bias and therefore effectively create less opportunities women that don’t find stereotypically feminine behavior empowering or comfortable. In the language of economics, consenting to stereotypical behavior in order to gain personal profit is a negative externality i.e. it has a negative effect on a party not directly involved in the hiring process, in this case, all women everywhere.

This particular danger with respect to “taking back” the stereotypes is strongly related to the fact that when a woman is acting in a stereotypical manner, it is not obvious that the she is doing something empowering despite the fact that she might feel that way. A similar situation is that of a typical classroom in which the teacher might be convinced that his or her students understand the material because the material is clear and obvious to themselves. With this mindset, teachers are inclined  to interpret the lack of questions as meaning that the students understand everything even though, in reality, students might too confused to even phrase a question. This phenomenon is known as the illusion of transparency.

An excellent example of how the illusion of transparency relates to the argument at hand is in the attempts to take back the words such as “bitch” or “slut” and rebrand them as superlatives rather than slurs. While this might work in some social circles, as long as the meaning of the word is not universally changed, the “taking back” of it usually only causes confusion. If I refer to a friend as a “bitch” in a loving manner and someone that is not aware of the way I am using it overhears it, they might think I am deeply insulting her because of the socio-historical context of the word. Furthermore, if they note that my friend is not offended they might attempt addressing her in the same way and with the same intention, but in this case it is her that might be confused and take offense. As a friend recently noted “if I started declaring that pink was the gender neutral colour for babies to wear that doesn't mean that people feel that to be the truth”. The same is definitely true for all behaviors that are taken to mean approximately the same thing by the vast majority of people. Consequently, the project of “taking back” words and behaviors is only possible in terms of the much broader feminist project of fundamentally changing the way in which women are perceived and described in general.

Finally, I want to emphasize that none of the situations being discussed are as black and white as they might seem. There exist women that enjoy being stereotypically feminine and they should not be judged because of that. It is problematic that women have to act stereotypically in order to succeed and it is problematic that one sexy looking woman on a cover of a magazine is taken to mean that most women are sexy things to be looked at. It is not problematic that some women like spending time in the kitchen or chose to be housewives in the same way it is not problematic that some women just like to be sexy. The kind of ignorance that prevents one from knowing whether a woman is deriving empowerment from stereotypical behavior or if she is forced into it makes judgment in these cases very difficult. In particular, the same way we should be weary of generalizing the behavior of one stereotype-abiding woman to all women, we should also be careful upon judging women that seem to be conforming to these stereotypes. A Facebook discussion of Laurie Penny’s slightly too emotional article “I was a Manic Pixie Dream Girl” produced a variety of comments explicitly addressing this difficulty. A friend writes: “how can an actual person feel like a MPDG? It seems impossible to feel like a "supporting actress" with everything you do. To me, it seems she's [the author] interpreting OTHERS' lives as somehow unimportant, as if what they've chosen to do is just play a "supporting role.”  The same point seems to be important relative to the behaviors I have been discussing. While it is hard to deny the utility of stereotypes as “cognitive shortcuts” in short term interactions with new people, they are problematic mostly because they are often one-dimensional and therefore cannot provide a good description of someone we have known for any significant amount of time. Real people are, in general, unbelievably complex and cannot be fully defined only by their more stereotypical features. Stereotypes can serve as placeholders in the process of getting to know someone, but should not be taken to be complete and rigid descriptions of their personality. Consequently, while we should be aware of the danger of embracing stereotypes even when they seem to be individually advantageous to us, we should also not judge or blame those that find stereotypical behaviors comfortable or natural since its is always incorrect to assume that just because one sometimes acts stereotypically, she is a nothing more than that stereotype.

Thanks to Victoria, Monica and Vipul for sharing the thoughts quoted above and pointing out relevant pieces of information clickable in the text.