Today, I would like to share with the readers two interesting, physics education-related topics that have attracted my interest over the course of the last few days.
(1) How does media hype affect physics teaching?
The first topic is related to a manuscript published on the arXiv. It is entitled "How media hype affects our physics teaching: A case study in quantum computing". The report is based on a collaboration between the University of Colorado Boulder and California State University Fullerton, and has been accepted for publication in the journal "The Physics Teacher".
The central message of this paper is that popular media has a strong impact on the physics curricula of our universities, the way that physics is being taught and clearly also the topics students are most interested in. The authors discuss this connection between media hype and physics education by referring to the currently hyped topic of quantum computing, but they also mention other examples such as graphene, exoplanets, the Higgs Boson, high-temperature superconductivity as well as batteries for electric vehicles. Personally, I would like to add anything related to "nano" at this point, which was a buzzword in many grant proposals some years ago. Nowadays, I guess this has changed and everything is "quantum" instead of "nano".
According to the authors, such a hype comes with pros and cons with regard to teaching physics: On the one hand, it may help to attract people to study and pursue a career in physics, however, on the other hand, it can also "result in inflated preconceptions of what the science and technology can actually do" (quote from the paper). I think that the article is a highly important piece of work and in its conclusion it even brings up several question that instructors may find valuable. For example, the instructor has to define their objectives in adding a certain hyped topic to the course syllabus and bringing it up in the classroom. Furthermore, it is crucial to determine where the technology currently stands in the characteristic hype cycle.
In this context, for the first time in my life, I have come across the so-called Gartner Hype Cycle -- a very interesting concept of which I had an intuitive idea, but I was not aware of its formal definition. In essence, there are several stages for the visibility of a hyped topic as a function of time, starting with a sharp increase ("Technology Trigger"), before it reaches the "Peak of Inflated Expectations", and then drops into the "Trough of Disillusionment". Ultimately, the topic may experience another, more modest increase through the "Slope of Enlightenment" into the "Plateau of Productivity".
To summarize, I can only recommend reading the above-mentioned article and I would be glad to learn about other folks' thoughts on this matter.
(2) Are we currently experiencing a crisis in particle physics?
Last weekend, I came across several posts on social media (Twitter and Reddit) discussing the possible existence of a crisis in particle physics. In particular, I am referring to a Twitter-thread by Associate Professor Martin Bauer as well as a discussion in the Physics subreddit that has been started by a user named Seitoh.
In short, both posts are debating whether discoveries and findings in particle physics are getting more incremental and less disruptive. The Reddit post discusses this from the perspective of (PhD) students in high-energy and particle physics, who nowadays could be regarded as data scientists (instead of actual physicists) that are part of a gigantic collaboration, merely processing, analyzing and interpreting a subset of a ridiculous amount of data that were acquired at CERN or other complex and expensive experimental facilities. I am perhaps not the best person to assess the situation in experimental particle physics, so please understand that I am not going to offer a detailed discussion here. However, I can only state that obviously in condensed matter physics, the field that I am working in, the situation is typically entirely different, given the smaller size of collaborative groups. In any case, I would like to recommend these two posts to the readers of this blogpost to make up their mind.
I should also note that both posts are perhaps a bit in the same spirit of a recently published paper in Nature, where M. Park and coauthors argue that scientific papers and patents are becoming less disruptive over time; see also this News article by M. Kozlov for a good summary. This is are more general discussion and not just related to particle physics.
As a conclusion of this post, I would like to refer to the historical example of Max Planck who (in 1874 or so) was told by his advisor Philipp von Jolly that there is not much left to be done in theoretical physics. Oh boy, was that statement wrong. Therefore, we should always be ready to encounter further surprises in our future research activities.
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