Scicomm

I have an undergraduate degree in mechanical engineering but I’ve always struggled with thermodynamics. To the uninitiated, this means most of the knowledge specific to mechanical engineering over other branches remains out of my reach. I would struggle even with the simpler concepts, and perhaps one of the simplest among them was pressure.

When a fluid flows through a channel, like water flowing through a pipe, it’s easy to intuit as well as visualise what would happen if it were flowing really fast. For example, you just get that when water flowing like that turns a corner, there’s going to be turbulence at the elbow. In technical parlance, it’s because of the inertia of motion (among other things, perhaps). But I’ve never been able to think like this about pressure, and believed for a long time that the pressure of a fluid should be higher the faster it is flowing.

In my second or third year of college, there was a subject called power-plant engineering, a particularly nasty thing made so because it was essentially the physics of water in different forms flowing through a heat-exchanger, a condenser, a compressor, a turbine, etc. Each of these devices mollified the fluid to perform different services, each of them a step in the arduous process of using coal to generate electricity.

Somewhere in this maze, a volume of steam has to shoot through a pipe. And I would always think – when picturing the scene – that the fluid pressure has to be high because its constituent particles are moving really fast, exerting a lot of force on their surroundings, which in turn would be interpreted as their pressure, right?

It was only two years later, and seven years ago, that I learnt my mistake, when my folks moved to an apartment complex in Bangalore. This building stands adjacent to a much larger one on its right, separated by a distance of about 40 feet, with a wall that rises as high as an apartment on the sixth floor. My folks’ house is on the fourth floor. Effectively, the complex and the wall sandwich a 40-foot-wide, 80-foot-high and 500-foot-long corridor. The whole setup can be surveyed from my folks’ house’s balcony.

When there’s a storm and the wind blows fast, it blows even faster through this corridor because it’s an unobstructed space through which the moving air can build momentum for longer and because its geometry prevents the air from dissipating too much. As a result, the corridor becomes a high-energy wind tunnel, with the wind whistling-roaring through on thunderous nights. When this happens, the curtains against the window on the balcony always billow outwards, not inwards.

This is how I first realised that the pressure outside, in the windy corridor, is lower than it is inside the house. The technical explanation is (deceptively) simple: it’s composed of the Bernoulli principle and the Venturi effect.

The moving wind has some energy that’s the sum of the kinetic energy and the potential energy. The wind’s speed depends on its kinetic energy and its pressure, on its potential energy. Because the total energy is always conserved, an increase in kinetic energy can only be at the expense of the potential energy, and vice versa. This implies that if the wind’s velocity increases, then the corresponding increasing in kinetic energy will subtract from the potential energy, which in turn will reduce the pressure. So much is the Bernoulli principle.

But why does the wind’s velocity increase at all in the corridor? This is the work of the Venturi effect. When a fluid flowing through a wider channel enters a narrower portion, it speeds up. This is because of an elementary accounting principle: the rate at which mass enters a system is equal to the rate at which mass accumulates in the system plus the rate at which it exits the system.

In our case, this system is composed of the area in front of the apartment complex, which is very wide and wherefrom the wind enters the narrower corridor, the other part of the system. Because  the amount of wind exiting the corridor at the other end must equal the rate at which it’s entering the corridor, it speeds up.

So when the wind starts blowing, the Venturi effect accelerates it through the corridor, the Bernoulli principle causes its pressure to drop, and that in turn pulls the curtains out of my window. If only I’d seen this in my college days, that D might just have been a C. Eh.

In 1907, a New Zealander named Ernest Rutherford moved from McGill University in Canada to the University of Manchester. There, he conducted a series of experiments where he fired alpha particles¹at different materials. When he found that the beams deviated by about 2º when fired through air, he figured that the atomic constituents of air would have to have electric fields as strong as 100 million volts per cm to explain the effect. Over the next decade, Rutherford – together with the help of Hans Geiger and Ernest Marsden – would conduct more experiments that ultimately resulted in two very important results in the history of physics. First, that the atom was not indivisible. Second, the discovery of the proton.

In the last year of the 19th century and the first year of the 20th, Rutherford, and Paul Villard, had independently isolated and classified radiation into three types: alpha, beta and gamma. Their deeper constituents (as we know them today) weren’t known until much later, and Rutherford played an important role in establishing what they were. By 1911, he had determined that the atomic had a nucleus that occupied 0.1% of the total volume but contained all the positive charge – known today as the famous Rutherford model of the atom. In 1914, he returned to Canada and then Australia on a lecture tour, and didn’t return to the UK until 1915, after the start of World War I. Wartime activities would delay his studies for two more years, and he could devote his attention to the atom once more only in 1917.

That year, he found that when he bombarded different materials with alpha particles, certain long-range recoil particles called “H-particles” (a term coined by Marsden in 1913) were produced, more so when nitrogen gas was also present. This finding led him to conclude that an alpha particle could have penetrated the nucleus of a nitrogen atom and knocked out a hydrogen nucleus, in turn supporting the view that the nuclei of larger atoms also included hydrogen nuclei. The hydrogen nucleus is nothing but the proton. Rutherford couldn’t publish his papers on this finding until 1919, after the war had ended. He would go on to coin the term “proton” in 1920.

Interestingly, in 1901, Rutherford had participated in a debate, speaking in favour of the possibility that the atom was made up of smaller things, a controversial subject at the time. (His ‘opponent’ was Frederick Soddy, the chemist who proved the existence of isotopes.) It is highly unlikely that he could have anticipated that, only three or so decades later, people would begin to suspect that the proton itself was made up of smaller particles.

By the early 1960s, studies of cosmic rays and their interactions with matter indicated that the universe was made of much more than just the basic subatomic pieces. In fact, there was such a profuse number of particles that the idea that there could be a hitherto unknown organisational principle consisting of fewer smaller particles was tempting, albeit only to a few.

In 1964, Murray Gell-Mann and George Zweig independently proposed such a system, claiming that many of the particles could in fact be composed of smaller entities called quarks. By 1965, and with the help of Sheldon Glashow and James Bjorken, the quark model could explain the existence of a variety of particles as well as some other physical phenomena, strengthening their case.

Then, in a series of seminal experiments that began in the late 1960s, scientists at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center began to do what Rutherford had done half a century prior: smash a smaller particle into a larger one with enough energy for the latter to reveal its secrets. Specifically, physicists used the linear accelerator at the SLAC to energise electrons to about 21-times the energy contained by a proton at rest, and smash them into protons. The results were particularly surprising.

A popular way to study particles, then as well as now, has been to beam a smaller particle at a larger one and scrutinise the collision for information about the larger particle. In this setup, physicists expect that greater the energy of the probing particle, the greater the resolution at which the larger particle will be probed. However, this relationship fails with protons because of scaling: electrons at higher and higher energies don’t reveal more and more about the proton. This is because, at energies beyond a certain threshold, the proton begins to resemble a collection of three point-like entities, and the electron’s interaction with the proton is reduced to its interactions with these entities, independent of its energy.

The SLAC experiments thus revealed that the proton was indeed made up of smaller entities called quarks, of two types – or flavours – called up and down. Gell-Mann and Zweig had proposed the existence of up, down and strange quarks, and Glashow and Bjorken of the charm quark. By the 1970s, other physicists had proposed the existence of bottom and top quarks, discovered in 1977 and 1995, respectively. With that, the quark model was complete. More importantly for our story, it also made a complete mess of the proton – literally.

In the 1970s, physicists began to smash protons with neutrinos and antineutrinos to elicit information about the angular distribution of quarks inside particles like protons. They found that a proton in fact contained three free quarks in a veritable lake of quark-antiquark pairs, as well as that the sum of all their momenta didn’t add up to the total momentum of a proton. This hinted at the presence of another then-unknown particle that they called the gluon (which is its own mess).

In that decade, particle physicists began to build the theoretical framework called quantum chromodynamics (QCD), to explain the lives and workings of the six quarks, six antiquarks and eight gluons – all particles governed by the strong nuclear force.

Ninety years after Rutherford announced the discovery of the proton by shooting alpha particles through slices of mica and columns of air, scientists switched the world’s largest physics experiment – the Large Hadron Collider – on to study the fundamental constituents of reality by smashing protons into other protons. Using it, they have proved that the Higgs boson is real as well as have studied intricate processes with insights into the very-early universe and have pursued answers to questions that continue to baffle physicists.

Through all this, scientists have endeavoured to improve our understanding of QCD, especially by studying how quarks, antiquarks and gluons interact during a collision, knowledge that is crucial to ascertain the existence of new particles and deepen our understanding of the subatomic world.

Physicists have also been using collider experiments to examine the properties of exotic forms of matter, such as colour glass condensates, glasma and quark-gluon plasma, narrow the search for proposed particles to explain some basal discrepancies in the Standard Model of particle physics, make precision measurements of the proton’s properties for its implications for other particles (such as this and this) and explore unsolved problems concerning the proton (like the spin crisis).

And fully – rather only – 100 years after the proton was first sussed out, particle physics itself looks very different from the way it did in Rutherford’s time, and a large part of the transformation can be attributed, one way or another, to the proton. Today, physicists pursue other, very different particles, dream of building even larger proton-smashing machines and are busy knitting together theories that describe a world much smaller than the one of quarks and gluons. It’s a different world of different mysteries, as it should be, but it’s also great that there are mysteries at all.

¹An alpha particle is actually a clump of two protons and two neutrons – i.e. the nucleus of the helium-4 atom.

Featured image credit: Kjerish/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0.

You probably haven’t heard of the Chladni effect but you’ve likely seen it in action. Sprinkle some grains of sand on a thin metal plate and play a violin bow across it, and you’ll notice that the grains bounce around for a bit before settling down into a pattern, and refuse to budge after that.

This happens because of a phenomenon called a standing wave. When you drop a rock into a pond, it creates ripples on the surface. These are moving waves taking the rock’s kinetic energy away in concentric circles. A standing wave on the other hand (and like its name implies) is a wave that rises and falls in one place instead of moving around.

Such waves are formed when two waves moving in opposite directions bump into each other. For example, in the case of the metal plate, the violin bow sets off a sound wave that travels to the opposite edge of the plate, gets reflected and encounters a newer wave on the way back. When these two waves collide, they create nodes – points where their combined amplitude is lowest – and antinodes – pointes where their combined amplitude is highest.

In 1866, a German physicist named August Kundt designed an instrument, now called a Kundt’s tube, to demonstrate standing waves. A short demonstration below from user @starwalkingphoenix:

The tube is made of a transparent material and partially filled with a soft, grainy substance like talc. One end of the tube opens up to a source of sound of a single frequency while the other end is stewarded by a piston. As the piston moves, it can increase or decrease the total length of the tube. When the sound is switched on, the talc moves and settles down into the nodes. The piston is used to identify the resonant frequency: it is used to increase or decrease the tube’s length until the volume suddenly increases. That’s the sweet spot.

In the Chladni effect, the sand grains settle down into the nodes of the standing wave formed by the vibrations induced by the violin bow. These nodes are effectively the parts of the plate that are not moving, or are moving the least, even as the plate as a whole hosts vibrations. Here is a nice video showing different Chladni patterns; notice how they get more intricate at the higher frequencies:

The patterns and the effect are named for a German physicist and musician named Ernst Chladni, who experimented with them in 1787 and used what he learned to design violins that produced and emitted sound better. The English polymath Robert Hooke had performed the first such experiments with flour in the late 17th century. However, the patterns weren’t attributed to standing waves until the early 18th century by Sophie Germain, followed by Horace Lamb, Michael Faraday and John Strutt, a.k.a. Lord Raleigh. (The term ‘standing wave’ was itself coined only in 1860 by [yet] another German physicist named Franz Melde.)

Now, both Chladni and Faraday had separately noticed that while the patterns were formed most of the time, they did not when finer grains were used.

A group of scientists from a Finnish university recently rediscovered this bit of strangeness and piled some more weirdness on top of it. They immersed a square silicon plate 5 cm to a side in a tank of water and scattered small diamond beads (each 0.75 mm wide) on top. When they applied vibrations at a frequency of 9,575 Hz, the beads moved towards the parts of the plate that were vibrating the most instead of the least – i.e. towards the antinodes instead of the nodes.

This doesn’t make sense – at least not at first, and until you stop to consider what you might be taking for granted. In the case of the metal plate, the sand grains are bounced around by the vibrations, and those that are thrown up do come back down due to gravity – unless they’re too light or the breeze is too strong, and they’re swept away.

Water is over 800-times denser than air and would exert a stronger drag force on the diamond beads, preventing them from being able to move around easily. Then there’s also the force due to the vibrations and gravity. But here’s the weird part. When the scientists combined the three forces into a common force, they found that it always pushed a bead towards the nearest antinode.

And this was just at the resonant frequency: the frequency at which an object is most amenable to vibrate given its physical properties. In other words, the resonant frequency is the frequency of the vibration that consumes the least amount of energy to cause in the body. For example, the silicon plate resonated at 9,575 Hz and 11,175 Hz.

But when the scientists applied vibrations at a non-resonant frequency of 10,675 Hz, the diamond beads moved around in swirling patterns that the scientists call “vortex-like”.

In 2016, another group of scientists – this one from France – had reported this swirling behaviour with polystyrene microbeads on a polysilicon membrane, both suspended in ultra-pure water. On that occasion, they had compared the beads’ paths to those of dancers performing a farandole, a community dance popular in Provence, France (see video below).

The scientists from the Finnish university were able to record over 96,000 data points and used them to try and figure if they could obtain an equation that would fit the data. The exercise was successful: they obtained one that could locate the “nodal, antinodal and vortical regions” on the silicon plate using two parameters (relatively) commonly used to model magnetic fields, called divergence and curl. Specifically, the divergence of the “displacement field” – the expected displacement of all beads from their initial position when a note is played for 500 milliseconds – denoted the nodal and antinodal regions and the curl denoted the parts where the diamonds would do the farandole.

However, to rephrase what they wrote in their paper, published in the journal Physical Review Letters on May 10, the scientists can’t explain the theory behind the patterns formed. Their equations are based only on experimental data.

The French group was able to advance some explanation rooted in theoretical knowledge for what was happening, although their experimental conditions were different from that of the Finnish group. Following their test, Gaël Vuillermet, Pierre-Yves Gires, Fabrice Casset and Cédric Poulain reasoned in their paper that an effect called acoustic streaming was at play.

It banks on the Navier-Stokes equations, a set of four equations that physicists use to model the flow of fluids. As Ronak Gupta recently explained in The Wire Science, these equations are linear in some contexts and nonlinear in others. When the membrane vibrates slowly, the linear form of these equations can be used to model the beads’ behaviour. This means a certain amount of change in the cause leads to a proportionate change in the effects. But when the membrane vibrates at a frequency like 61,000 Hz, only the nonlinear forms of the equation are applicable: a certain amount of change in the cause precipitates a disproportionate level of change in the effects.

The nonlinear Navier-Stokes equations are very difficult to solve or model. But in the case of acoustic streaming, scientists know that the result is for the particles to flow from the antinode to the node along the plate’s surface, then rise up and flow from the node to the antinode – in a particulate cycle, if you will.

Derek Stein, a physicist at Brown University in Rhode Island, wrote in an article accompanying the paper:

… this migration towards antinodes is a hallmark of particles being carried in acoustically generated fluid streams, and the authors were able to rule out alternative explanations. … [The] streaming effect in a liquid is only observable within a restricted window of experimental parameters. First, the buoyancy of the beads has to closely balance their weight. Second, the plate has to be sufficiently wide and thin that its resonant vibrations have large amplitudes and produce high vertical accelerations. The authors also noticed that tuning the driving frequency away from a resonance coaxed the particles to move in regular formations. This motion begged to be anthropomorphised, and the authors duly likened it to the farandole…

After this point, both research papers break off into discussing potential applications but that’s not why I am here. My favour part at this point is something the Finnish university group did: they built a small maze and guided a 750-μm-wide glass bead through it simply by vibrating its floor at different frequencies. They just had ensure that at some frequencies, the node/antinode would be to the left and at others, to the right.

https://videopress.com/v/h0f0Cxmv

And because they also possessed the techniques by which they could induce a particle to travel in straight lines or in curves, they could the move the beads around to trace letters of the alphabet!

The debate about whether it is fair for scientists to expect science journalists to let them proofread articles in which they are quoted before going to print has reared its head once more, at least on Twitter, following one round of exchanges last year. The central animus is the same: journalists believe – rightly – that editorial independence is a non-optional component of their jobs and some scientists believe that it isn’t too much at all to expect journalists to let scientists they have quoted check their drafts before publication.

Even though this is playing out on Twitter, I don’t want to jump in there because I don’t want to deal with too many notifications right now. Instead, I’m logging my thoughts here. TL;DR version: I agree with Priyanka Pulla. If you are struggling to get your facts right, pre-approval is okay; if opinions are in play, pre-approval is a no-no.

1. When you are writing about a particularly tricky topic with multiple facts working together to feed the larger picture, it is good practice to run it past a topical expert and make sure you have got it all right.
2. It is okay for a scientist to make sure they have been quoted right. I am okay with sharing their quotes back to them together with a little bit of the context in which the quotes will be appearing (e.g. one of the preceding and succeeding lines or with an explanatory note from the journalist).
3. Scientists often want to change what they have already said because, for example, because they have been more blunt than they would have liked. This is also okay. But if they want to change what they have said altogether, talk to them and find out why they are backtracking. It is possible they are nervous about being misquoted or quoted out of context, and it is often possible to reassure them that you are going to get it right.
4. Scientists throw tantrums more often than you think about having a certain topic explained a certain way or being quoted a certain way. This understandable with direct quotes but – in India at least – they need to acknowledge that it is possible what they are trying to say can be said better – more effectively, clearly, economically. Journalists have a commitment to accuracy as well as to a reader, so if something can be said better, it should be.
5. There are different kinds of science pieces: a) explainers; b) paper-based, short, straightforward; c) chronicle of an issue with multiple viewpoints; d) op-ed. (This is a non-exhaustive list but suffices for my illustration.) It is okay to share (a)-type pieces freely with a scientist before publishing, and to share individual-specific parts of (b)-type pieces with some preset limitations on what can/can’t be edited. It is not at all okay to share (c)- and (d)-type pieces with the people who are quoted in it before publication.
6. However, when dealing with a particularly tricky topic, I share (c)- and (d)-type pieces with an expert who has not been quoted in the piece for what I call a “hygiene check”. These are people who have a good sense of what I am asking of them: to check if a piece is legitimate, not if they agree with it. And I let the scientists who are quoted in the piece know that I am doing this (without naming any names).
7. The boundaries around (a), (b), (c) and (d) types of stories are fluid, not fixed, and often blur into each other. So ultimately, journalists should work with their editors to figure out what is okay and what is not. If they don’t have an editor, then reach out to one for a consultation.
8. If you feel you have good reason to ‘break’ a rule, do so – but don’t take unilateral action if/when you are working with an editor. No matter how strongly you feel about your position, your commissioning editor and the publication they are working for have a say.
9. For scientists: I would say this Twitter thread hits the nail on the head, with one addition: the ‘media’ is not a monolithic entity, and it is not at all fair to spite The Hindu, The Telegraph, The Wire, etc. because you have been screwed over by The Daily Mail, Times of India, The Sun, etc. Take time out to sample the media space, read the right writers and save your time and energy for people you trust. We’re all working with different goals here.

In case you are a scientist: The Wire performs a form of fact-check that has proven effective but doesn’t match up to the New Yorker in intensity; I highly recommend you read this to understand why. We have commissioned, edited, reported and published some excellent long-form science articles (e.g. this, this and this). Most of all, we are reflexive and will make corrections if requested, often promptly.

Where did we come from?

That’s a really big question for anyone to answer. And if we want to answer such questions, we’re going to have to break it down into smaller questions, and then break the smaller questions further until we have something we know we can pin down.

One of the smaller questions we’ll need to answer to unravel the mystery of our origins is why the universe is made of matter and not antimatter. To be fair, this is still a pretty big question, so scientists have been looking for clues in the way fundamental particles work. After all, you really can’t get smaller than that.

On March 21, physicists announced that they’d observed one such particle display peculiar behaviour. The observation is one of the small things that need to fall in line to one day explain where all the antimatter went.

The universe is made entirely of matter today even though there were equal quantities of matter and antimatter at the moment of its birth.

The discovery was announced at the Rencontres de Moriond, an annual particle physics conference that happens in Italy, as well as at a special CERN seminar. CERN is the European lab for nuclear research that runs the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the world’s largest physics experiment and where the physicists made their discovery.

The ‘peculiar behaviour’ is called CP violation, and is believed to be responsible for the universe losing all its antimatter as it evolved, before the first atoms formed.

‘CP’ stands for charge-parity. If our universe adheres to CP symmetry, then a particle replaced with its antiparticle and its spin replaced with its mirror-spin should behave the same way as the original particle. To rephrase Patrick Koppenburg, a member of the collaboration that made the discovery, “antimatter seen in a mirror should look like matter”.

However, our universe violates CP symmetry. Antimatter seen in the mirror doesn’t look like matter, and this aberration could have helped wipe out the universe’s supply of antimatter.

CP violation has previously been observed in two kinds of mesons. Mesons are particles made of one quark and one antiquark of different types.

In all, there are six kinds of quarks – and six kinds of anti-quarks: up, down, top, bottom, charm, strange. And they combine to form dozens of different kinds of mesons. For example, a kaon is a meson made of one strange quark and one up/down antiquark; a B meson is a meson made of one bottom antiquark and one up/down/strange/charm quark. And physicists have observed kaons and B mesons violating CP symmetry in the 1960s and in 2001, respectively.

On March 21, physicists working with a detector called the LHCb, at the LHC, announced that a third particle had joined this group: the D0 meson, discovered in the 1970s. Each D0 meson is made of a charm quark and an up antiquark. This is the first time a particle comprising the charm quark has showed signs of violating CP symmetry.

But even though we now have three instances of CP violation, the matter-antimatter problem isn’t considered solved. This is because the instances aren’t enough by themselves to explain why all of the antimatter has gone away. We need other, perhaps stronger ‘sources’.

For example, CP symmetry violation has thus far been observed only in particles containing quarks and/or antiquarks. We also need to find proof of this violation in the ‘lepton sector’ – i.e. observe electrons and neutrinos violating CP symmetry – and in interactions involving the strong nuclear force. And this is just in the Standard Model of particle physics, which is a set of rules physicists use to understand the currently known elementary particles.

Key to uncovering all of these is figuring out why the violation happens in the first place in the particles already in the dock.

The crime at the heart of the CP symmetry violation is committed by a fundamental force called the weak nuclear force. This force is famous for causing radioactivity in heavy atoms like those of uranium and plutonium. The same force also preferentially interacts with left-handed quarks, and ignores right-handed quarks.

So in a series of reactions involving quarks and antiquarks, among other particles, the weak force ensures that processes that produce matter happen more often than those that produce antimatter. This way, there is a lot of matter still left over after some of it has combined with antimatter and turned into pure energy.

Matt Strassler, a theoretical physicist, called the discovery of CP violations in D0 mesons a “real coup” for the LHCb in a blog post, as well as that it was “consistent with expectations”.

The Standard Model of particle physics already predicts that these violations should occur in different particles. However, the predictions are somewhat approximate – not with as many decimal places as we’d like.

This is because, as mentioned earlier, there are three expected sources of CP violations: quark sector, lepton sector and interactions involving the strong nuclear force. So when a D0 meson violates CP symmetry, the extent of its violation has two contributions: some from the quark sector and some from the strong nuclear force, the force that holds quarks together. And calculations involving the strong nuclear force are extremely complicated, so physicists make approximations on the road to finding an answer.

As a result, we don’t know how well the extent of violation spotted by the LHCb and the extent of violation predicted by the Standard Model match up. If they’re close, then that’s okay; the discovery of CP violation in D0 mesons will have been something we already saw coming. But if it’s not close – i.e. if the extent of violation seen by the LHCb is greater than what the Standard Model predicts – then it becomes very, very interesting.

So far, the Standard Model has explained the behaviour of all known fundamental particles: leptons, quarks and bosons. But it doesn’t have answers to questions about why the particles’ properties are what they are, why there are six types of quarks, what dark matter is, etc. Many physicists expect there are more particles out there whose behaviour can help answer these questions. The physics of these particles is called ‘new physics’.

Long story short: we don’t know if the CP violation in D0 mesons is a sign of ‘new physics’ yet. If it is, it will then be a monumental result. But it’s not likely to be because the Standard Model is notoriously good at making accurate predictions.

But as Marco Gersabeck, a physics lecturer at the University of Manchester, wrote, “There’s every reason to be optimistic that physics will one day be able to explain why we are here at all.”

The Wire
March 22, 2019

A couple weeks ago, I had the pleasure of being interviewed – together with the amazing Nandita Jayaraj – by Pavan Srinath on the Pragati Podcast. Our conversation was about science journalism in India, and both Nandita and Pavan were excellent interlocutors.

I particularly liked Nandita’s observations on why we need to focus on the processes of science instead of outcomes and the plans she and Aashima Dogra have for The Life of Science. The entire episode is available to listen to here or on the player below.

The following is the text of a speech I prepared to deliver at the 11th Young Investigators’ Meeting in Guwahati on March 8, 2019.

I wanted to use this opportunity to speak about education, which is one of science communication’s less known yet more important goals.

I think it would be safe to argue that an accessible account of some scientific development in the Indian English media (and in many parts of the Indian language media) is more engaging and more digestible than an accessible account of a scientific development disseminated in school classroom.

This at least has been my experience, and the experience of thousands of people I went to school with. By the time you’re 14-15, it’s time to crack a few exams and break into the IITs — the wonder of the subject be damned.

So for most people who don’t go down the research career path, science journalism becomes the dominant source of scientific knowledge and even proper scientific thinking.

I would even wager that what science news we cover and how we cover it also influences the way school children build perceptions about what scientific research entails, what kind of person can undertake it, and what kind of impact it can have on the world.

So science journalism effectively complements science education. And for some people, it’s possible that it is a substitute for science education itself.

The ultimate takeaway here is that science journalists, and science writers and communicators, are all teachers in their own right. Sure, we may not have the responsibility to engage deeply with the young people, we are not responsible for their day-to-day development. But we contribute to it, and we know that if don’t perform our duties as communicators in a responsible manner, it could have a bad effect on the people who are reading us: young students, mid-level students, older students, all their parents, etc.

This fact, which is so specific to India, also has an implication for science journalism as it is commonly practised. From the newsroom’s point of view, and speaking as an editor here, there are certain common types of stories: there’s news, news features, op-eds, explainers, analytical pieces and longform.

The explainers here are used to unravel something that is in the news. But to me, that’s a limited view of what explainers can really do.

Your success as a science writer depends to a certain extent on the kind of audience you have. A less informed audience will allow you to succeed by pursuing a certain kind of story, and a more informed audience will allow you to succeed by pursuing a different kind of story.

But at the end of the day, it’s in your best interests as the writer or editor or journalist to move your audience from the position of ‘less informed’ to a position of ‘more informed’.

In this context, India’s higher education has left a very large number of news-readers less informed when it comes to science. This is what I call the ‘informedness problem’.

So science writers and journalists have an opportunity to succeed by doing the job that education was supposed to do but couldn’t (for various reasons) – by using explainers as a way of increasing their awareness as a people to different kinds of problems in the world. This is why explainers that are not connected to the news are a form of news for me, though most other editors will not agree.

By simply sharing what you have learned with more people – with no value addition other than clear thinking and good writing (both of which an editor can help you with) – you can be part of the news cycle. News is fundamentally something that is new, and you guys know a lot of things that are likely to be news to me, and to readers around the country.

And there is a lot of important value here: if you take to writing or videography or podcasts or illustrations, and become science communicators, you can effectively be educationists in your own right and at the same time you can help us journalists fix the informedness problem as well.

So you shouldn’t only pitch stories about papers that were recently published or stuff that could “disrupt” different markets or whatever. You should also pitch and discuss articles about something you know but which others might not. This could be anything from a day in the life of a scientist to some idea you think deserves greater recognition. You guys are best placed to determine what that could be.

In a country like ours, news can mean many things because it has the potential to do a lot of things, so let’s take advantage of that, and think up new kinds of knowledge and different ways to communicate them.

Thank you.

Warning: profanity

There are scientists who don’t want other scientists to communicate their work to the masses. There are scientists who want to but don’t have what they need to do it. And there are scientists who want to and are doing it. I love the last group. They are the best people to speak to when I want to learn something, and they are often eager to learn themselves.

However, this exact group of people seems to have a few members who have trouble believing that communicating (producing content/editing it) can be a specialised skill. That just because they have been expected to do it and are doing it, it requires nothing more than the will do so. This grates at me. And I used to think it ridiculous that this had to be spelled out. Now I think it is ridiculous that it has to be spelled out again and again.

It is valid to expect scientists to communicate science, to prod and nudge them to not restrict their actions to labs and to engage with the people who populate the world outside. This expectation comes with an acknowledgment that scientists will now be practising a craft that only those people who had trained to communicate used to, that scientists might even be better at conveying certain ideas than professional communicators have been.

But all the invitation, no matter how profuse, is not license to assume that you are now a consummate writer/editor. That just because you took the lateral route into communication, imagining it a two-part skill composed of topical knowledge and writing ability, and assuming you already have knowledge that we don’t have, and probably never will, and the will to communicate that we do, you are closer to the top of the pyramid than we are.

Just in the last two days, I have worked with no fewer than five scientists – two of whom I actually expected better from – assuming that I haven’t noticed grammatical imperfections in the copy but which they have, and – hey! – would like to let me know, too. How fucking sweet. Must have been those mistakes I was too dumb to notice after seven years doing nothing but edit science writing and – hey! – they’ve got my back after five hours on the job. How. Fucking. Sweet.

I think it is relevant to mention here that writing/editing ability has an unconventional learning curve. If it was a building with 10 floors, you would get to the eighth floor before you knew it, but to go from there to the ninth and tenth will take you many years, if not decades (depending on the competition, which is pretty steep considering the quality of writing available these days). And while the communicators’ view is only incrementally better than the scientists’, the former’s sensibilities are lightyears ahead. But who cares, eh?

The reason I’m putting this out here is to vent, and to ask you to please tell these people if you meet them that, in these moments of mansplaining (irrespective of gender), they are unqualified idiots. And if they want to know how to get better, please ask them to read more, like a lot more, and write a lot more! If they can’t, then ask them to trust the people who know something they don’t.

In sum: a) Scientists, please communicate more. b) I’m pissed right now about how I’m treated, but that said, if you treat me fairly, I promise you I will do the best I can to make your content shine. c) At no point is any part of this an exercise in self-effacement. We’d love to share space with you, scientists, but if you expect me to respect you, I damned well expect the same in return.

Featured image credit: ferdinand feng/Unsplash.