jeff

You should get out of your university rooms and meet some kids in the real world, than you might understand what I mean.

Giorgio.

best regards

(Goffredo: there are two very practical reason for popularizing science. First, otherwise money’ll stop coming. Second, after a while we’ll be looking for ways to avoid get burned atop a nice heap of books, nailed on a friendly tree.)

I also pointed a high-school physics and math teacher to your video, and he’ll use it.

Keep up with the good work!

Cheers,
T.

And Goffredo, I don’t want a fight. Cutting remarks ain’t my style. I’ve done alright being my nerdy self, though

Alpinekat, I applaud your efforts. The video was entertaining. It was fun. And it may have inspired a few kids to take a closer look at what CERN is trying to do. What more could you ask for?

We live in a world were “communication” is now the most important factor in promoting ideas and this video is a great way to bring the attention of young people to the world of science.
Show a young kid something new that is fun and he will google the hell out of it until he will know everything about it.
This is how you spread ideas in today’s world.

Get a grip on reality Goffredo, I do also love classic music, but we are not anymore in the year 1800….

Alpinekat, keep promoting science, every effort counts.

Giorgio.

Jeff

Many budding scientists don’t think of themselves as nerds. I certainly didn’t and any SOB that made fun of me because I liked studying, loved science (physics in particular) and adored Bach was instantly silenced by cutting remarks. I learned to defend myself. But you need to defend yourself from a very dangerous enemy that was never mine: yourself! I was always indifferent to the need to be accepted (peer pressure) and actually got greater inner strength the more I was surrounded by herds of mindless idiotic sheep (people tend to behave like idiots once they are sheep and move in groups).

Very warm suggestion. Keep secret the motivation for making the video. Nobody is reading this thread anymore so I don’t think any damage was done. And also keep from telling people what you think about yourself; at most tell it to close friends.

Sincerely patronizing

Jeff

p.s. I kind of hope you tell me to shove it. It would show you have balls.

I’m reachable at kate.mcalpine at gmail.com.

And Goffredo – Our dorky getups were aiming for “nerdcore.” Like it or not, budding scientists get saddled with the “nerd” stereotype early on (me included) and some keep their enthusiasm about science quiet trying to avoid it. Nerdcore is all about embracing nerdiness instead of running from it, usually poking fun at the stereotypes simultaneously. The video took a fair amount of my spare time, and a few hours from other people (maybe more from beat man Will), but this was a zero-budget film. Even the camera was borrowed, and the clips were edited in Windows Media Maker. No physics resources wasted here

What about Berlusconi? His magazine Science et Vie gave a cover story (January 2008) about Garrett Lisi’s E8 model, declaring (on the cover):
“… Theorie du tout Enfin!
Un physicien aurait trouve la piece manquante ..”,
with a cover illustration showing the missing piece of the puzzle being found and falling into place.

Whatever you think of Garrett Lisi’s E8 model, and whatever you think of other aspects of Berlusconi, the Science et Vie cover story shows that Berlusconi is interested in popularizing physics,
and maybe your “D.” might act similarly.

Tony Smith

PS – Although I don’t have a YouTube account,
and so have not ever put anything up on YouTube,
I recently also made an effort towards a 4-minute (roughly) video
about physics, but with some history etc thrown in.
Mine is on the web as a 17 MB .mov file at

http://www.tony5m17h.net/LlullSlideShowB131.mov

My audio is not as contemporary (mine is part of Beethoven String Quartet Op 131),
and since I am too old and ugly to appear in person, I made the video out of a science/history slide show,
so my effort is probably not so popularly accessible,
but maybe somebody somewhere might find some part of it to be of interest.

FRED! You made me blush!

To me, popularizing science is a must not just for kids, but also for those who “stir the drink”, as Fred nicely put it, to continue funding scientific advancements in pure research -that which is always unable to explain its value to a businessman. A product like this video has a lot of potential, and I know what I am talking about… Wait until D., a reknowned player in the publishing world, acts on this thing, and you’ll see.

Cheers,
T.

And YES you really did almost(?) talk yourself out of the first one, for I find it very hard to believe the scenario of legions of kids not liking school, spending time on internet, watching youtube, and yet getting hooked on science by seeing some dorky video. And then… When they get to college they suddenly and painfully discover that they don’t know how to study, cann’t tollerate frustrations, succumb to peer pressure, cann’t write a decent report, have an attention span that is measured in seconds, don’t know how to organize their confused thoughts, etc etc.. Are these poor bastards to be the next generation of scientists? Of course not.

The next generation of scientists are those kids that liked at least some subjects in school, learned early how to study and to organize their thoughts. They make a choice for their future because they have a passion. But I acknowledge that their passion may have started years earlier for weird and personal reasons (comic books, scifi books, movies, even vidoes, a headline news, a relative, a father giving his kid his first science book at the age when kids look up to their dads,…). So I acknowledge that maybe this video might even get some kid hooked. And that would truely be a wonderful thing. I just find it unlikely (in view of the dorky impression the physicists give).

And I do think there are better ways of exposing people to science where everyone learns something, including the physicist that learns something about psychology, cognitive science and even philosophy. The GEE WIZ approach to popularizing science is not only useless, it is superficial and not even wrong. Indeed it is completely artificial and has no basis in everyday life nor in serious physics labs. It seems only to exist at the interface between scientists (frequently naive and ignorant of real life elements of sociology) and the public, be it jounalists, politicians, tax paying adults, parents and of course swarms of hormonal school kids.