As The Toast searches for its one true Gal Scientist, we will be running a ton of wonderful one-off pieces by female scientists of all shapes and sizes and fields and education levels, which we are sure you will enjoy. They’ll live here, so you can always find them. Most recently: When a Scientist Tries to be Funny.
I can’t pinpoint exactly when, but at some point in the six years between the first physics class I ever took and the day I started my first adult job as a physicist, something horrible happened: physics became cool. Not nerdy cool or geek chic cool, but actually mainstream cool, or at least mainstream to someone who spends a lot of time on the internet.
I don’t want to be the crotchety, liked-it-before-it-was-cool person who has a problem with this. I want to think it’s lovely that more people are taking an interest in physics. I want to be proud that my field’s outreach efforts are really paying off. I want to focus on the positive impact this good press could have for increased funding in science and for attracting more diversity to physics. But really, I mostly just want to vomit a little every time I overhear someone explaining “The God Particle” at a party.
As a freshman in college, when I told friends and acquaintances that I had decided to become a physics major, I would usually get surprised looks or blank stares. Part of that common reaction was likely because I didn’t (and still don’t) look or behave like an archetypical physicist, but a lot of it was simply that for most people, physics was a conversational cul de sac. Physics either reminded them of some terribly-taught high school class or that image of Albert Einstein with the wacky hair, and they couldn’t tie me to either of those associations. My best guess was that they thought I was smart and maybe a little weird, and to be honest, I was pretty ok with that reaction.
In just a few years the response has completely changed. Although I still occasionally get the bewildered stare, I can divide most of the responses into two categories. Category 1: “So you’re just like Sheldon from The Big Bang Theory, right?” Category 2: “Oh, you’re a physicist? That’s really cool! I’m so jealous. I love reading about particle physics in my spare time. I’d love you to explain [insert quantum mechanical phenomenon] sometime if you could.”
What interests me about this response is that it almost always comes from the same demographic: young, confident, internet-savvy men. What irks me about this response is that its deliverer seems to think that reading science writing in his spare time has given him enough of an understanding of what physicists do, and consequently what I do, to say that he’s jealous of it. This is mildly annoying but mostly harmless, on the same level as the guy I went out with a few times who texted me out of the blue to ask what an anyon was (I didn’t know, but Wikipedia did) or those silly Neil deGrasse Tyson memes. The effect of the newfound popular science fascination with physics is less tolerable when it intersects with the mansplainers of the world.
After a few summers working at a science museum for children, I grew convinced that scientific mansplainers start at a very young age and continue loudly misinforming anyone who will listen up through adulthood. That job let me see the evolution of the trait from the kids to their dads and now, thanks to celebrity physicists like Brian Cox and Carl Sagan, I get to witness it in my own generation.
To their credit, mansplainers don’t mansplain physics to me if they know I’m a physicist, so for the most part I can only observe from a distance, usually in the form of men (mis)describing physical phenomena to their wide-eyed girlfriends (I overhear this a lot working on the science side of a college campus). I’ve gotten a more interesting perspective the few times I’ve happened to end up in a pop-science discussion in which no one knew my background.
Although I usually try not to chime in on these conversations, every now and then I just can’t help myself. I remember once when I was on the skirts of a conversation between two archaeology students trying to out-mansplain ground penetrating radiation to each other, I caught one of them describing it as, “Just like radio, only with light waves instead of sound.” When I gently reminded them that radio waves are also light, they looked at me like a bug to be squashed, and spoke to me accordingly. I remember wondering just what it was about my looks or demeanor that led them to assume I was so obviously incorrect (when, of course, I was so obviously correct). They were both good guys in that sort of blustery, well-intentioned but still mildly-sexist way, and they were appropriately chastened when they found out about my physics background later that day. Still, I will never forget how I felt when they baselessly tried to shut me down.
I want to stress that whatever annoyance I have with the mansplaining that the increased popularity of physics has spawned is an infinitesimally small price to pay for the amount of kids that are getting excited about physics because of this trend. On the whole, popular attention is a great thing for physics. And it’s difficult to express why I get annoyed with these well-meaning physics hobbyist guys (and really, they are almost always guys) without sounding terribly elitist. The crux of it, though, is simple: physics is hard. Not insurmountably hard, not unapproachably hard, but hard enough that it is virtually impossible for someone with no physics foundation to have a deep conceptual understanding of high-level modern physics. Any cutting-edge research important enough to warrant extensive journalistic coverage is at all odds going to be difficult to parse, even for PhD-level physicists, and even more difficult to convey to the layperson. Because of this, science writers have a very difficult job when it comes to writing about the latest advances in physics. Some do a much better job of it than others, but all of them rely to a certain extent on detailed analogies and metaphors.
The first piece of science writing I read on the Higgs boson coincided with the first time (of many to come) that a physics hobbyist asked me to explain phenomena which I was in no way qualified to describe. I was a sophomore in college, it was the second day of classes, and, in the middle of a discourse on William Blake, one of my literature professors turned at me and said, “Ginny, you’re a physics major. Explain the Higgs boson for us.” At that point I’m not even sure I knew what the Higgs was, and I certainly did not understand what it had to do with William Blake. I muttered some excuses and said that I would read up on it and get back to him. The article I read as a result of his awkward question compared the Higgs particle to Lindsay Lohan (she was more popular and less of a mess at the time) and the Higgs field to a crowded party through which she was trying to move. Something about the way the crowd bunched around her as she made her way across the room was supposedly analogous to the mechanism for creating matter.
I’m sure it was a valiant attempt at an analogy, but I won’t pretend to understand the physics or the analogy well enough to evaluate its effectiveness. My bachelor’s degree in physics does not qualify me to understand cutting-edge physics research to which I’ve had no exposure. It is, however, a huge help in interpreting journalism about physics, because it gives me a greater perspective on what I don’t understand, the ways in which I don’t understand things, as well as some intuition as to where the author is stretching his or her understanding or analogies.
This is actually something that I love about higher-level physics: it forces its student to relax and make peace with their ignorance. It is so difficult to parse, so unknowable in language and concept that in order to gain anything from attempting to study higher-level concepts you must let go of your attachment to answers and content yourself with questions and occasional insights (and, of course, lots of math). Richard Feynman, in an introduction to a lecture on quantum mechanics, put it this way: “I think I can safely say that nobody understands quantum mechanics. So do not take the lecture too seriously, feeling that you really have to understand in terms of some model what I am going to describe, but just relax and enjoy it.”
So perhaps I am finally hitting on what is so irksome about the way it’s become cool to casually, confidently explain the latest hot topic in physics news to friends. The assumption that you could understand any of it at all is hubristic and antithetical to everything that I barely grasp about the nature of studying higher-level physics. Read about physics if you like, but do please remember not to understand any of it.
Tags: gal science, ginny perkey, physics, science
This is pretty excellent writing and I have nothing to add except a tiny, overly-embroidered and mis-symbolled LaTeX flag. Waving! Waving a high-five to you.
There is something about physics that is uber-attractive to confident dudes. While I attended my (tiny!) undergrad, nearly all of the physics majors were good-looking guys with affluent families and nice cars. I am not sure what they all grew up to become, but one plays guitar at a Margaritaville in Florida.
There is no moral to my story, but I very much like the moral to yours. I think it’s important for new scientific findings to be made as legible as they can be made to laypersons, but new science is necessarily conveyed by metaphor, and it’s important not to confuse metaphor with equivalence.
Speaking from my own social set in college, the confident ones all initially went into finance as quants (until that went belly-up). They now are among the army of Y Combinator bros.
Ew. That’s why the brogramming got worse…
Oh lord, the brogramming. I have learned this one simple trick to avoid wanting to beat people up at work: don’t talk about things you really care about. Obviously this isn’t specific to the tech industry, but there is a sense of entitlement that comes with the territory that sets my teeth on edge.
I really enjoyed this – the power to embrace your ignorance while still embracing your vast knowledge and training has got to be vital in most every field of thought, but especially physics.
Which isn’t to say I wouldn’t totally use that Lohan analogy if the Higgs came up in my own conversation some time.
For some reason, maybe because I’m in the UK, the analogy I’ve always heard was Margaret Thatcher at a party.
This piece is rad, thank you, and I winced in empathy throughout. I cannot count the number of times I’ve been shelving near the physical sciences section of the bookstore and heard some dude mansplaining quantum theory to some poor woman. This actually happens in every section of the store, though mercifully not too often. Philosophy? Someone’s mansplaining Heidegger. Fiction? Someone’s mansplaining why Bukowski is, like, sooooo important. I have also been mansplained to about why the shop should carry x writer, have an event for y poet, publish z local author who wrote a book about, I don’t know, juice fasts.
MANSPLAINING, IT CURSES US ALL
I think I’m going to start my own anti-charm school that teaches girls and young women to walk away from these bros mid-sentence. No explanation provided, or something like “I have to go check the dates on my dairy products now. Have a nice day!” Not that it’s women’s fault that men do this, BTW.
My brother-in-law mansplained how to merge in traffic to me a few weeks ago, and I’m still livid. I’ve been driving for 20 F*CKING YEARS, longer than he has, I’m a very good driver, never gotten in an accident, can count the number of tickets & being pulled over on one hand, and I’ve driven with him countless times and usually do the bulk of the driving.
**nods** I feel a bit like this now that “urbanity” and “sustainability” etc etc etc are all becoming such trendy things.
Also I 100% cop to being one of those people who listens to Radiolab episodes with physics stuff, or reads some article, and just enjoys the feeling of hearing about stuff that is like the basis of reality or something!?!?! idk what I’m talking about
Would it be mansplainer of me to agree and describe how I humbly talk about physics the right way by not pretending to know all the answers? It’s just, I get the magazine Physics Today in the mail because I’m a member of The Acoustical Society of America and when physics comes up I usually say something like: “I read this Physics magazine even though I only loosely grasp portions of it and skip over a bunch of words. It’s still interesting though.” It’s like playing a complicated game for the first time, you start to think you get it but then a move is made and you’re like “whaaaa ttthe?” but it’s still fun. It’s brain exercise.
Also, just read this and I think I totally get it: http://www.theonion.com/articles/nabisco-snack-ph…
I think it’s okay! I got really happy when my next door neighbor’s 13-year old son started asking questions about my husband’s experiment, when they ran a feature on it in Popular Science. Curiosity and humility go hand in hand!
If this comment is mansplaining, then it’s a kind I approve of. Congratulations on reading physics right!
Copping out to not knowing things is probably one of my favorite things to do. I love to talk about things that I’ve read, heard about, etc. but almost never feel confident enough to really put it out there, so I almost always start with “I could be completely wrong about this, but I believe this is what I read in xyz.” I realize that probably gets annoying too, but I see absolutely no point to just acting like a hotshot.
I also love answering “I don’t know,” especially to my boss. I realize that is probably not good work ethic, but I do not see the benefit of making up answers just to appease someone – particularly if it’s not something that I should already have the answer to. (Is so-and-so at her desk? I have no idea, I’m not her keeper.) Of course if I’m at work I follow it with “but I’ll find out,” but there’s no point to pretend that I have the answer and then be wrong.
You’re doing it exactly right. It’s more than alright to say you don’t know, it’s a sign that you are trustworthy. More people should embrace this. Most people are not a leading expert in one field of study, let alone EVERY DAMNED THING, so shut up Mr. Know-it-all.
I’m also a big fan of interrupting whoever’s talking (um… if it’s a two-person convo, not like, in a group) to just say straight up “I don’t know what that(/s/he) is.”
YES!! all the time. It drives me nuts when people assume I know of things/people/events that I should not necessarily know about.
I’m a (female) PhD student in Physics myself, and I just wanted to tell you how much I love this article. I’ve been there so many times. I once had someone ask me to explain how quantum mechanics relates to a Catholic view of God (a question which, I think, spawned from the awful “God particle” nomenclature). I honestly had no idea what to tell them.
Aww man, this happens to me with my field (Psychology) too. Especially after anything has happened in the news that people have a difficult time making sense of. Sample party conversation “So JurassicBabe, why did that kid shoot all those other kids? What’s going on there and how can we PREVENT it.” I usually just pretend to faint.
Psychology has got to be second worst to physics in terms of nonsense questions. I feel for you.
All things that people say when they find out what you do and they know nothing about it are annoying. “Oh, you study Middle English? Say something in Middle English!”
It’s…basically just English with a weird accent, guys. It’s not a language that I’ve taken a conversation class in. What do you want from me??
Hah, my boyfriend gets that too. As well as, of course, “are you analyzing me during this conversation!?!?”
Haha! Oh my goodness yes! Of course as soon as someone asks if I’m analyzing them I immediately think “What are you worried I’ll see?” I cannot even help it. That question just shoots me right into therapist mode.
That’s probably the perfect answer, 90% of people would high tail it out of that conversation.
Oh, but that 10%…that’s the percentage you gotta worry about…
Yes, I get this one ALL THE TIME. Although sometimes it’s “Are you reading my mind right now?” which like… at what point did psychologists figure out how to do that, because no one told me.
My brother is an astrophysicist and my father as well – my childhood was filled with dinner conversations that were way over my head, but they made their strongest attempts to avoid mansplaining because ultimate they were really upfront about being ignorant! That’s why I too get really mad when some guy who doesn’t know my dad or bro tries to mansplain science to me. It’s the worst. Loved this, thank you!
Yeah, idk. This seems to have its cake and eat it too, i.e., “don’t ask me about physics, it’s really hard to explain to you non-physicists” but also, “don’t try and understand and/or explain physics without the proper background, especially if you have a penis.” Well, the last part is fine.
There feels like a lot of elitism loaded into the statements in the article, which is not to take away from reasonable condemnation of people (a) misplaining / (b) mansplaining. Try reading this article substituting Proust, “What irks me about this response is that its deliverer seems to think that reading the NYRB in his spare time has given him enough of an understanding of what literary critics do, and consequently what I do, to say that he’s jealous of it.”
I’ll grant that physics is harder than Proust, but as the child of (and friend of) many scientists who are much brighter in than fields than me, I love reading about and hearing about science, even (or especially) through inelegant analogies. And it feels weird to tie that wide-eyed wonder and wanting to know about how the world works (in a physicalist sense), with the dickish guy telling me wide-eyed something wrong. The two are different.
To be fair, it’s really damn hard to explain some physics concepts to people. Understanding stuff like quantum mechanics requires a lot of math and some fairly abstract conceptual leaps. There’s a certain level of heuristic explanation you can give to stuff, like Schroedinger’s cat, “The Higgs works like a celebrity attracting guests at a party” or “Neutrinos change into different types as they travel.” But after a certain point you are going to hit a barrier where things get damn complicated: “But how does the Higgs do that?” and “WHY do neutrinos change their type?”. Curiosity is great, and it’s nice to see people asking questions, but I’m still gonna get flustered if we’re at a cocktail party and you’re asking me to explain spontaneous symmetry breaking. It *is* elitist, because it takes tons of work to learn this stuff. I’m actually afraid of explaining stuff outside my field for that very reason, because fuck, what if I get it wrong? Breaking these things down into simple terms can be really, really hard, and sometimes feels like being asked to perform. Sometimes I just wanna enjoy my drink, smile, and say “It’s complicated.”
Yes. Agree completely. I’ve been trying to practice explaining my dissertation research to laypeople for 10 years now (I was told that you fully understand your research when you can explain it to your grandmother– this is complete bullshit), and I can never tell if I’m titrating it to the right level. Really, without at least a bachelors degree in science, you’re not going to get it at all. Maybe that’s elitist, but it’s true! Most of the time I feel like I’m dumbing it down too much and I feel like an asshole, but if I start to insert any of the (necessary) technical language in, the eyes start to glaze and the heads start to tilt. I’ve started to only explain the sexy parts of my research, which seems to work pretty well.
Unless I’ve been drinking. I never talk science if I’m drinking.
You should be entitled to your drink and a shrug, or a “well, that’s wrong, but the explanation for why is really complicated!” I don’t mean to suggest that there’s an obligation to explain, just that the asking doesn’t seem all that problematic in and of itself, unless they’re asking with some shitty “perform, circus seal physicist” type motivation.
ymmv, but I work in finance now, and people say batshit stuff about economics all the time (and/or ask me to explain monetary policy that a) I don’t understand and b) I think often is more a political science question than an econ question). Potentially this is about privilege and being a dude and therefore being judged to still have authority even when saying stuff like, “Nah, that’s wrong, but I don’t want to draw a bunch of curves on a cocktail napkin,” and not worrying about ceding authority if I don’t answer or committing too large of an error if I answer incorrectly.
So, I guess, patriarchy, kind of, or different comforts with different approaches of knowledge based privilege. To a world where you can enjoy your drink.
Yeah, I think a lot of people feel similar to the author when they’re in a high-profile field. I imagine that celebrities would like to wring the neck of people who ask them the same questions the last 300 people they met, or were interviewed by, asked them. Maybe what the author is lamenting is the ‘celebrity’ factor that’s suddenly become part of physics for her, but it’s not specific to science or to men and their ‘splaining.
For what it’s worth, I hate being asked about my job, too and people always make the same two stupid remarks that they think are original and thoughtful. (Without going into it, one has to do with the apparently remarkable survival of my field and the other with people’s nostalgic memories of my company.) So, again, people are basically annoying.
That all sounds reasonable to me, and I would definitely not discourage you from continuing to ask scientists questions at parties! (As long as we don’t look too tired and grumpy, but that goes for most jobs, hehe.) Frankly, I’m much happier when I say I’m a physicist and someone responds with a question, rather than “OH.” Here’s to a world of non-awkward cocktail parties!
I love reading about pop science stuff too:) I hear where you’re coming from about the elitism piece, but I do think some things are so complex that they cannot be understood or explained in a layman’s terms or in a brief period of time. I think it would be elitist to say “No one can ever learn about or understand physics except these specific people” but I don’t think it’s elitist to acknowledge that some things require specific training and education to understand at a higher level. I have spent a lot of time studying a social science related field and I would expect to need to put that same time and effort into Proust before I would understand it at the level of a literary critic. I would also expect that I wouldn’t be able to get that training on my own, and would need the guidance of an expert. I can understand how it would be annoying for the author to put so much time and effort into understanding one part of one field, and then have people assume they can reach that same level of understanding via a 10 minute impromptu lesson from her, or through pop science. I don’t think that should dissuade people from trying to learn about any field they are genuinely interested in though, nor does that seem to be her message. It seems like she’s more frustrated with the late of humility that has sprung up as physics has become more accessible.
I UPVOTED MYSELF BY ACCIDENT! The shame.
I kind of had the same feeling. To me, it didn’t seem so much about mansplaining overall as, more, “Don’t ever imagine you know as much about physics as I do, but don’t burden me with your questions because you couldn’t understand and also there are a lot of things I don’t know.”
However, one might also need to know about me that my physicist father tried to explain some things about basic physics way before I was ready or interested to know, so I might have an attitude.
I think a more accurate literary example, it’s like being a literary scholar, and people keep asking you to explain the works of some poet you’ve never heard of, because books and poetry are both words on a page so if you know one surely you know the other. And then saying they feel Proust is overrated because they read a blog post about the thing that Proust wrote about eating a cookie and the blog post had some criticisms that sounded pretty good and while they haven’t actually READ Proust, the blog post had some excerpts…
Yeah, this isn’t the first time I’ve heard someone with a STEM background get defensive that amateurs are talking about their field, as if science is unique in being misunderstood or that science is uniquely important such that you shouldn’t talk about it if you don’t fully understand it. But like, people talk out of their asses about EVERYTHING. And most people will never personally make a poor decision based on their incomplete knowledge of the Higgs boson, whereas people are taking out loans and voting for elected officials based on their misconceptions of how other things in the world work ALL THE TIME.
But science misconceptions DO have consequences. Maybe not the Higgs Bosun, but people restrict the reproductive rights of women based on shit “science”, or work against anti-global warming policies that will affect millions, they use their misunderstanding of science to shore up racist, sexist, homophobic ideology, they make poor medical decisions for themselves and their children. People who don’t understand science waving their made-up bullshit “science learnings” hurt people all the time.
I’m not saying that they don’t. But people act like scientific ignorance is separate from, and more of an ~Issue~ than, other forms of ignorance. It takes all kinds of knowledge to make informed decisions.
It actually is more of an issue because people do stuff like die and kill other people as a direct result of scientific ignorance (see: anti-vaxxers; high risk home births; quack non-docs recommending treatments that kill or maim people).
Unless we’re talking about more basic skills like the ability to read and comprehend language, for most other skills, nobody actually dies if a person says supposably or nukuler, or if they don’t know the difference between a metaphor and simile, or if they wear multiple patterns of the same scale. (But god does kill a kitten every time somebody uses the word literally.)
Of course there are other areas of ignorance that are tangibly harmful (innumeracy being one of them), but lack of scientific knowledge is uniquely harmful because of the information it contains.
But, that’s the thing – anti-vaxxers aren’t exactly scientists. Nor are most pro-vaxxers.
I’ll talk about vaccine, and explain how it works (to the best of my understanding) even though I’m not an expert. Partly because I trust that the scientists do know more than me, and unfortunately these pop magazines are the best insight I have to the wonderful knowledge that they know but I can’t understand.
And partly because I believe that *not* talking about it does more damage than the incorrect information I might accidentally-but-with-good-intentions spread. (Plus, I’ll encourage them to read up for themselves, and not present myself as an expert.)
People who wave made-up bullshit science will continue to do so.
If everyone who isn’t an expert shuts up and doesn’t try to understand or explain the concepts to everyone else, then we’re leaving a few actual experts surrounded by a sea of pretending-to-be-expert charletans.
I’m not saying that real scientists “need” the herd to bleat out their phrases. I’m saying things like global warming policies, reproductive rights etc. are a topic that everyone can and should be involved in while the governments that (theoretically) represent everyone are making those decisions.
We should seek our science. We should try to understand it as well as we can. We should try to spread the knowledge we *do* have with the people who *seem* to not have that knowledge. We should try to assume that something isn’t correct just because it supports “our side” of the debate. We should listen to counter-points, research them, and see if they are valid.
We shouldn’t misrepresent ourselves as experts when we aren’t. But we shouldn’t be afraid of learning about or disussing a topic even if we’re not specialist experts in the topic.
And yeah, that leads to me often “mansplaining” – I’ll try to answer my children’s questions, or give them information about the world. Often my information is (unintentionally) wrong, but I’m doing my best, and I have a wide-eyed sense of wonder that I’d love to share. And I’d love others to share with me. And when someone corrects something incorrect that I believed – that only increases my sense of wonder.
(It’s also humbling to live with an astrophysicist. Humbling and awesome.)
Honestly, I can worry about ‘mansplaining’ about anything I might want to say. I’m not a world expert at any given topic. But hey, isn’t everyone suffering from imposter syndrome? Telling people not to talk about the things they love – even if they don’t understand thost things – doesn’t help. And doesn’t help us clear up the misconceptions about science.
Get them talking about science first. Then write a blog post about things people misunderstand. Then people will talk about that blog post, and share that new, corrected information.
Leave them not talking about it, and they’ll… well, still believe wrong things. And not self-correct because they won’t care when you post the corrections.
I don’t think it’s elitist to suggest that laypersons aren’t equipped to discuss physics at the same level the author is–especially since she made the point that she is not equipped to explain the kinds of physics things she does not specialize in. It’s a question of specialization. Specialists become so by way of years of training, and speak to other specialists in shorthand so that they don’t have to recap their years of shared knowledge every time they tackle a physics question. The rest of us cannot understand it on those terms, not because we lack the capacity but because we lack the years of background. Not that this limitation makes it less fun to think and talk about.
As a recovering academic and uni press marketer, this is a sore spot for me–I spend a lot of time in conversation with friends and authors distinguishing between rewriting scholarship for trade audiences and “dumbing it down.” It’s not about intellect! And although education often gets equated with intelligence and/or with class, they are both conflations to avoid.
Read about physics if you like, but do please remember not to understand any of it.
DONE AND DONE.
(I really enjoyed reading this article though!)
haha almost jinx
I marvel at your patience. I’m a biologist with a bit of a background in the evolution of animal behaviour and I have spent many conversations thinking some variation on “that is not how evolution/biology/science in general works” from somebody trying to explain some bullshit through evolutionary psychology despite having only the foggiest idea of the basics of evolution. People think they can jump past figuring out the fundamental basics to the exciting stuff, and for some reason even some sciencey people never really seem to take the time to get their understanding of evolution solid.
“People think they can jump past figuring out the fundamental basics to the exciting stuff”
Yes! Also, I think I broke up with someone for this exact reason. I was in grad school for engineering and my research was not going well. My bf at the time loved to enthusiastically tell me in an oversimplistic manner about random sciency things he read. At one point, I may have said “That’s not that cool. It’s just the periodic table! You might be able to impress a college freshman though”. Ugh.
“do please remember not to understand any of it.”
Done and done. (and I mean done!)
This was great though. It reminded me of a conversation I had with Mr Iceberg where he was asking me to tell him some fonts in a category that just… wasn’t a way in which any designer ever categorizes fonts – I don’t remember what it was but I was like “well, fonts aren’t measured in that way” and he kept being like “Just tell me some fonts that are [X characteristic]!!!”
And what about dudes trying to explain antimatter and dark matter? “You see, there’s matter and then there’s don’t matter, this is me talking about the latter.” Hey that rhymes!
“You see, there’s matter and there’s don’t matter, me talking is the latter…”
I accept and congratulate your edit. A one-liner is born.
This is actually something that I love about higher-level physics: it forces its student to relax and make peace with their ignorance.
Oh maaaaaaaan I once had to excuse myself from an astronomy class in college because I had to go to the bathroom and have a fit of hysterical awed laughter over something or other. The scale of the universe, maybe? I think that might have been it. My main regret about college is probably that I thought I was lousy at science for so long that I put off the required classes as late as possible, then discovered that I was great at it (like, I wasn’t aware it was possible to get an A+ in something at my school, rather than just an A, that’s how great I was) and absolutely loved it for just the reason you verbalized, but it was too late for me to change my major by that point.
Ginny, I could talk about this all day. This essay is the best. I’m a physical biochemistry professor, and I am infinitely annoyed by my [always male, usually freshman] students who try to hijack my lectures with (to quote a This American Life episode) modern jackass questions. Science hobbyist questions. I can only imagine how much worse those questions are in a physics class. When I first started teaching, this really got to me– made me annoyed, defensive and self-doubting– but a few years in, I’ve gotten pretty good at shutting this behavior down, whether I know the answer or not. The Feynmann quote always kicks off my quantum lecture!
I’ve realized that for some of these young men, I’m their first exposure to a [young, reasonably attractive, maybe even kind of cool] female hard scientist who knows her shit and has the credentials to back it up. Combine this with a genuine curiosity in science and you’ve got the perfect formula for classroom mansplaining. The most extreme case I’ve seen was my weekly Q&A power struggle with a biochemistry student who finally got to the point of bringing the latest issue of Nature to class to prove how little I knew about current research on prions. He just couldn’t let me be the expert in the room!
“bringing the latest issue of Nature to class to prove how little I knew about current research on prions.”
:-O
and also
*headdesk*
Can I ask what kind of research a physicist who is not fully conversant with the latest top-level theoretical advances might do? Are there workaday branches of physics where people are making valuable and interesting discoveries or do you pretty much have to scale the heights of conceptual craziness to be able to make a contribution? (I’m thinking about other sciences where there is this kind of division, but it’s hard for me to imagine what the non-cutting-edge-theory stuff might look like in the physics world..)
I think part of what the author is trying to convey is that any one field is so big that you can spend a lifetime learning a tiny subset of it and still never understand what the particle lab across the hall is doing all day. It’s like asking someone who studies earthquakes to explain how the mars rovers work — reading the newspaper might be the depth of that person’s insight on that topic too.
I think it’s especially easy for people in math heavy fields to be snotty about bad science explanations. The real answer to a “Why?”question is often buried in difficult equations that took the scientist years to learn to interpret. Sadly that’s the worst part for scientist to get annoyed about explaining since it’s also the part where we can say, “we now know so much that no one can master a single field an yet there are beautiful things being discovered everyday.”
Oh I got that — it just got me thinking about the kind of work physicists actually do, as compared to other sciences. I’m not any kind of Hard Scientist but it seems like in, say, biology you could do valuable research that doesn’t necessarily push the boundaries of knowledge/theoretical understanding, like say sequencing the genome of a kind of fish or something. Obviously we know how to do that kind of thing now but it’s still a valuable contribution to the science and to knowledge in general. I was just wondering if this kind of work exists in the physics world too — like are there people plugging away on, I dunno, *really really* understanding how lasers work — or are those mainly engineering problems, and “real physics” is all about scaling that huge mental mountain to where the crazy cutting-edge theory stuff is happening before you can make an original contribution? (Sorry for the late reply, for some reason I didn’t get a notification)
There is a lot of that, especially in experimental and applied physics. Spectroscopy is a big thing for that (and is kind of close to *really really* understanding how lasers work), just figuring out new ways and applications of shining light through things to figure out what they’re made of. But your research typically has to either obviously be aimed at answering some problem in industry, or helping make big strides in the big questions and cutting edge, or it’s hard to get funded. There’s also just applying well known stuff to new problems, which kind of overlaps with engineering, but for example a few labs are working on using atom interferometry (reasonably well understood) to do things like measure the local gravity as a way of detecting geologically interesting things.
So, it’s true that most people don’t have a clue what the (stupidly named) “God Particle” is, or how it really works. But you could say the same about many things. (Like engineering, or literature, or the Bible. It’s hard being a polymath.)
I want to like this article, but it doesn’t draw enough of a line between mansplain-y dudes trying to talk down women in science versus the run-of-the-mill people who read a magazine article about the Higgs boson and are excited. Sure, it’s a little silly when people think they have a grasp on high-level science, but isn’t it better to have more people interested in physics (even at a basic level) than not?
This is how we ensure the all-important investment in STEM fields: by getting people talking about topics like the Higgs boson, even if they don’t have a degree in physics.
I study the molecular biology of sleep and this is one of the hardest things to communicate: it’s not what we know about sleep that makes it, and science in general, so fascinating – it’s what we are still in the process of figuring out.
Ginny, I could talk about this all day. This essay is the best. I’m a physical biochemistry professor, and I am infinitely annoyed by my [always male, usually freshman] students who try to hijack my lectures with (to quote a This American Life episode) modern jackass questions. Science hobbyist questions. I can only imagine how much worse those questions are in a physics class. When I first started teaching, this really got to me– made me annoyed, defensive and self-doubting– but a few years in, I’ve gotten pretty good at shutting this behavior down, whether I know the answer or not. The Feynmann quote always kicks off my quantum lecture!
Oops, sorry for the double post!
I am wildly applauding over here. It’s great that physics is becoming less of a daunting field to enter, and that more people are learning about it, but oh my goodness the way it’s often talked about is so awkward and frustrating.
On the mansplaining front: my best is the time a dude once tried to mansplain (wildly incorrectly) what a binary system is to me. I have a Masters in gravitational physics, and my thesis involved, in part, descriptions of binary system. It was something else.
Relevant, if you haven’t already seen it. IT IS AN EPIDEMIC.
I used to read that regularly until it was too depressing :/ It is totally an epidemic.
Fun fact: my fiance posted a link to this article on his facebook with an enthusiastic recommendation to read it. The first comment is from a male friend of his, explaining that the entire phenomenon of mansplaining is “crap.” And then they spent the next five years digging me out from the AVALANCHE OF IRONY.
I heard you like mansplaining, so I put some mansplaining in your mansplaining in your mansplaining, etc.
WHY DOES THIS ALWAYS HAPPEN
There must be a name for this phenomena.
Mansplanomenon:
The unique and wondrously ironic event in which mansplaining is mansplained.
I just… I don’t know, I have to say that I’m not enjoying the attitude from scientists I’m seeing here that people who want to know about your work are so annoying. I get the problem with mansplaining and hijacking your college lectures, but would you rather no one ask you about your work? They’re not allowed to have enthusiasm for your field at a low-level understanding? (well, maybe they’re allowed to, but not to bother you with it. people are so tiresome.) What is so bad about someone saying that they’re jealous of your job because they’d like to do it, too, even if it is exasperating that they don’t understand what they’re saying? (and you’re secretly saying to yourself, please leave me alone to drink my drink, because you’re not capable of discourse on my level.) Yes, I accept that social intercourse is really frustrating, and one may not enjoy many interactions, but as far as this being about a Gal Scientist, I’m not seeing what the main issue is here that is specific to science. I think that when writing about being a scientist for a general audience like this one, the writer might show a little more zest for the subject and her audience. The present slant on the topic, I fear, is how annoying people like us are.
lolllllllll “they’re not allowed to have enthusiasm for your field”
I think it’s frustrating in any field to hear people confidently explaining something about your profession incorrectly, but it happens an awful lot with science– and I think Ginny did a good job of articulating why and how that happens on an irritatingly regular basis. But I didn’t get that she was annoyed overall about people wanting to learn or talk about physics– more about people wanting to explain physics when they are totally wrong.
I work in a more accessible layperson-friendly realm of science (currently cancer prevention, previously vaccinations and cancer screening) and I related to this a lot.
I think context counts for something.
I admit I cringe a little at the invocation of Feynman in this context, as more than maybe any other person in all of modern science, he strove to make the hardest of hard accessible to the lay person. Hawking wrote A Brief History of Time, but Feynman basically solved and explained to the world the whole Columbia disaster by throwing a washer into a glass of ice water. It’s actually hard to think of a person who legitimately knows more complex sh!t but is at the same time more interested in the great unwashed understanding (I’d argue that the quote provided in the article is actually sleight of hand/ so-called reverse psychology in that regard).
HOWEVER. I think it needs to be said that women in the hard sciences (e.g., physics and chemistry) are under uniquely heavier attack than maybe every other field except maybe comp sci (gaming being the hyper-mutated clusterfuck to end all clusterfucks in terms of misogyny). You have entire swaths of students, faculty and employers who not only accept as fact that “girls” [sic]can’t do math and science, but are actively hostile to the mere notion of a woman trying either. It wears on a person after a time, and I see it all the time, despite the fact that I’m a dude.
I am all about making science accessible to the lay person, and I both know and love Feynman’s work to that end! I basically build and think up physics demonstrations for a living, both for outreach and all levels of undergraduate classes. I spend a lot of time thinking of ways to better communicate physics to people, and I’m really passionate about it. But some concepts can be understood pretty well through a good demo (like the Columbia disaster) or a metaphor, and some things are just too complicated. In that latter case, a demo or a metaphor may get you a little closer to an understanding, but it’s crucial to remember that it’s an approximation.
I said in my article that physics has become cool, but, more specifically, it’s splashy research in particle physics, advanced quantum theory, cosmology and other modern fields that’s really gotten the bulk of the attention. This kind of physics just cannot be explained or understood all that easily. The Feynman quote is in no way meant to be a sleight of hand, because it is specifically referring to quantum mechanics. If he had said that about classical mechanics (which is also difficult) he would have been laughed out of the room! (I mean, because he’s Richard Feynman, maybe not, but still. At the very least, I would not have quoted it in the article.)
Maybe I should have been more explicit about what kind of trendy physics I was referring to, but let’s face it, it’s way cooler to read science writing about dark matter than to pick up an intro physics textbook and read about the Newtonian mechanics that you’d need to understand why it’s thought to exist. And again, it’s totally great if people want to read about the kind of physics that is difficult to understand without picking up any sort of textbook. I just think people should approach it with the attitude of getting out of it what they can and accepting that they probably don’t and won’t get 100% of it, which is why I thought that Feynman quote perfectly supported my point.
Sidenote: have you seen the Feynman video where he talks about magnetism? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wMFPe-DwULM You should watch it. It’s great, and I suspect that it totally jives with my point, but I’m too lazy at the moment to think and type an argument as to why.
Ha, I was just going to link that same Feynman video.
So, I recently had the opportunity to hang out with a bunch of physics Ph.D.s (in process and finally finished, lady and man physicists) in a social setting, and these are the laypeople things I learned about physics grad school and cutting edge physics research:
1) Advanced graduate classes have problem sets that are essentially made up of other people’s dissertations. So, you have to solve not one, but several problems that other people spent +/- 7 years of their lives studying. Multiple times. Before you can start doing research.
1a) So, much like most of the other “hard” sciences, research topics are sort of fractal shaped. I’m going to get this wrong, but if you think of, say, all the stuff Feynman explained so clearly as a trunk, then research has branched, and branched, and branched, and you as a Ph.D. student are out there on some teeny tiny limb trying to grow a new bud on the physics tree. And the guy one bud over might understand your research, but someone one branch over will only sort of get it, and those of us hanging out on the trunk will maybe understand “I’m trying to figure out the smallest number of molecules of water it takes to solvate something,” but not how mind-shatteringly hard it is to figure that out and explain why it is so.
2) And, in the mind-shatteringly hard line: Sometimes, in physics research, you’re trying to explain things for which the math doesn’t exist. Their are physicists who have had to wait for the mathematicians to catch up so they can explain their observations. If you can’t explain it with math, I’m guessing it’s really, really hard to explain with words.
3) If you find someone doing a physics Ph.D, buy them a drink. They need it.
*not a scientist, just related to some and friends with others.
the fractal explanation made my DAY, that’s 100% what it’s like.
I’m thinking I’m having a semantic issue. I’ve always understood mansplaining as something quite specific; as something rather more precise than the usual, random, run of the mill, verbal diarrhea of the modern mysogynist male dumb ass.
My understanding (and admittedly I am drunk as I write this. Solidarity forever, Toasties! Yoooooooo! Shit! Spilt my beer. Damnit.) of mansplaining is this:
A woman educated, articulate, eminently qualified, an expert in her field – makes a straight forward, direct statement which is true, which is supported by the evidence, which supported by the science, which is supported by the preponderance of opinion, which is correct in every respect. This true and correct and intelligent and eminently sensible statement is directed to a specific audience with whom the woman is engaged in communication.
Immediately following this statement, a man – usually less educated, usually less articulate, usually less insightful – who happens to be in the vicinity of the said communication – perhaps as a participant of the conversation, perhaps as a some dude aimlessly wandering by – will then take it upon himself to interpret for the audience what it is the woman has just said.
For example: the woman (in my imagination, an incandescently hot femme, with brilliant teeth and a super-abundance of long, glossy, flowing hair and several graduate degrees) will observe to her audience, “The earth revolves around the sun.”
The Mansplainer will then intercede with this same audience in order to clarify the obvious obscurity of this statement. (And this is the moment of Mansplaining as I understand it in my inebriation which is rendering me curiously articulate…)
The Mansplainer will then interpret for this audience (often composed of other mans, sometimes younger mans, sometimes less educated mans, but usually less informed or less intelligent mans, or other somehow inferior mans) the meaning which this poor, benighted, badly educated, unintelligent, semi-literate, inarticulate woman was TRYING to say.
He will do so by observing that the earth does indeed revolve around the sun. His privilege and his penis and his stubble will lend authority and legitimacy and credibility and validation and science and money and tenure track and a hundred cents on the dollar to the “opinion” expressed by the woman when she offered the speculative suggestion which really amounted to no more than the merest uneducated, damned lucky guess that the earth revolves around the sun.
That is what I have always understood Mansplaining to mean.
I am usually so taken aback when a man mansplains me that I say nothing to the Mansplainer. I am always dumbstruck, it seems, by the appalling lack of manners displayed by Mansplainers, the lack of collegiality, the misogyny, the ignorance, the insecurity of the obviously defensive and accordingly inferior little mind.
Dumb. Struck.
I am working towards the day, however, when I shall dismember the Mansplainer, ripping it out at its root, and shoving said member down his throat so far he SHUTS THE FUCK UP FOREVER when in the company of women. (That I should live so long, I pray the gods.)
And oh, wow! Well, that veered off just a little. Cough.
In any event, am I wrong on the whole Mansplaining thing? Have I been operating all these years under an erroneous assumption? Have I been misinformed? Do I need to find a man to mansplain the whole Mansplaining phenomenon to me?
Am I alone in this, You Guys?
Bridging the gap between high-level concepts and engaging and enthusing ‘laypeople’ is one of the big challenges in science communication, fraught with criticism from all sides. I think the oversimplication of cutting-edge research is a problem, yes, but mainly because we haven’t prepared people with a decent understanding of the base concepts and the humility and curiosity to admit what they don’t know (which is in turn linked to the practice of putting Science on a pedestal and not emphasising enough that it’s something everybody can and should have access to in some way or another).
Not every scientist should have to be an ambassador for science, but it would be nice if more of them were. I totally get the author’s annoyances but it comes across as a pretty negative view of science communication and makes me wonder why she wants to write this column. Maybe I’m too taken in by Feynman and Cox but I l like a little awe and wonder in my physics – it helps the medicine go down. 😛
Oh and I wrote a blog about the topic of celebrity science communicators a couple months ago; it seems germane.
Man, to Physicist: “I’m really interested in [physics topic x]. Would you explain it to me?”
Physicist, to Man: “Stop mansplaining my field to me.”
Man, to Physicist: “But… I was asking if *you* would explain it.”
Physicist, to Man: “Check your privilege.”
I recently interviewed a number of students during interview week at the law firm where I work, and vehemently nixed a popular candidate who mansplained science during his interview on the basis that he would annoy and alienate “senior lawyers” and clients. Listen, I’ll be a senior lawyer one day.
“usually in the form of men (mis)describing physical phenomena to their wide-eyed girlfriends”
I am that girlfriend, although I am barely ever “wide eyed.” I am mostly rolling my eyes over in annoyance. My boyfriend literally thinks he knows everything because he is a physicist. He basically told me in simple terms that, “physics is the basis of everything, therefore I pretty much know everything.” I don’t know how to deal with this and it’s pretty super annoying. He does his best to over explain simple physics concepts or try to sound important babbling a physics explanation to something totally unrelated, because after all physics is the basis of everything. How do I counter this? It’s draining.