Here is the third and last of the music videos I produced together with Apostolos Vasilidis and Timo Alho, sponsored by FQXi. The first two are here and here.
In this video, I am be-singing a virtual particle pair that tries to separate, and quite literally reflect on the inevitable imperfection of reality. The lyrics of this song went through an estimated ten thousand iterations until we finally settled on one. After this, none of us was in the mood to fight over a second verse, but I think the first has enough words already.
With that, I have reached the end of what little funding I had. And unfortunately, the Germans haven’t yet figured out that social media benefits science communication. Last month I heard a seminar on public outreach that didn’t so much as mention the internet. I do not kid you. There are foundations here who’d rather spend 100k on an event that reaches 50 people than a tenth of that to reach 100 times as many people. In some regards, Germans are pretty backwards.
This means from here on you’re back to my crappy camcorder and the always same three synthesizers unless I can find other sponsors. So, in your own interest, share the hell out of this!
Also, please let us know which video was your favorite and why because among the three of us, we couldn’t agree.
As previously, the video has captions which you can turn on by clicking on CC in the YouTube bottom bar. For your convenience, here are the lyrics:
Not A Toy
We had the signs for taking off,
The two of us we were on top,
I had never any doubt,
That you’d be there when things got rough.
We had the stuff to do it right,
As long as you were by my side,
We were special, we were whole,
From the GUT down to the TOE.
But all the harmony was wearing off,
It was too much,
We were living in a fiction,
Without any imperfection.
[Bridge]
Every symmetry
Has to be broken,
Every harmony
Has to decay.
[Chorus]
Leave me alone, I’m
Tired of talking,
I’m not a toy,
I’m not a toy.
Leave alone now,
I’m not a token,
I’m not a toy,
I’m not a toy.
[Interlude]
We had the signs for taking off
Harmony was wearing off
We had the signs for taking off
Tired of talking
Harmony was wearing off
I’m tired of talking.
You have all been waiting for this. The first ever song about quantum entanglement, Boltzmann brains, and the multiverse:
This is the second music video produced in collaboration with Apostolos Vasilidis and Timo Alho, supported by FQXi. (The first is here.) I think these two young artists are awesomely talented! Just by sharing this video you can greatly support them.
In this video too, I’m the one to blame for the lyrics, and if you think this one’s heavy on the nerdism, wait for the next ;)
Here, I sing about entanglement and the ability of a quantum system to be in two different states at the same time. Quantum states don’t have to decide, so the story, but humans have to. I have some pessimistic and some optimistic future visions, contrast determinism with many worlds, and sum it up with a chorus that says: Whatever we do, we are all in this together. And since you ask, we are all connected, because ER=EPR.
The video has subtitles, click on the “CC” icon in the YouTube bottom bar to turn on.
Lyrics:
(The cat is dead)
We will all come back
At the end of time
As a brain in a vat
Floating around
And purely mind.
I’m just back from the future and I'm here to report
We’ll be assimilated, we’ll all join the Borg
We’ll be collectively stupid, if you like that or not
Resistance is futile, we might as well get started now
[Bridge]
I never asked to be part of your club
So shut up
And leave me alone
[Chorus]
But we are all connected
We will never die
Like Schrödinger’s cat
We will all be dead
And still alive
[repeat Chorus]
We will never forget
And we will never lie
All our hope,
Our fear and doubt
Will be far behind.
But I’m not a computer and I'm not a machine
I am not any other, let me be me
If the only pill that you have left
Is the blue and not the red
It might not be so bad to be
Somebody’s pet
[repeat chorus 2x]
[Interlude]
Since you ask, the cat is doing fine
Somewhere in the multiverse it’s still alive
Think that is bad? If you trust our math,
The future is as fixed, as is the past.
Since you ask. Since you ask.
I have many shortcomings, like leaving people uncertain whether they’re supposed to laugh or not. But you can’t blame me for lack of vision. I see a future in which science has become a cultural good, like sports, music, and movies. We’re not quite there yet, but thanks to the Foundational Questions Institute (FQXi) we’re a step closer today.
This is the first music video in a series of three, sponsored by FQXi, for which I’ve teamed up with Timo Alho and Apostolos Vasileiadis. And, believe it or not, all three music videos are about physics!
You’ve met Apostolos before on this blog. He’s the one who, incredibly enough, used his spare time as an undergraduate to make a short film about gauge symmetry. I know him from my stay in Stockholm, where he completed a masters degree in physics. Apostolos then, however, decided that research wasn’t for him. He has since founded a company – Third Panda – and works as freelance videographer.
Timo Alho is one of the serendipitous encounters I’ve made on this blog. After he left some comments on my songs (mostly to point out they’re crappy) it turned out not only is he a theoretical physicist too, but we were both attending the same conference a few weeks later. Besides working on what passes as string theory these days, Timo also plays the keyboard in twobands and knows more than I about literally everything to do with songwriting and audio processing and, yes, about string theory too.
Then I got a mini-grant from FQXi that allowed me to coax the two young men into putting up with me, and five months later I stood in the hail, in a sleeveless white dress, on a beach in Crete, trying to impersonate electromagnetic radiation.
This first music video is about Einstein’s famous thought experiment in which he imagined trying to catch light. It takes on the question how much can be learned by introspection. You see me in the role of light (I am part of the master plan), standing in for nature more generally, and Timo as the theorist trying to understand nature’s working while barely taking notice of it (I can hear her talk to me at night).
The two other videos will follow early May and mid of May, so stay tuned for more!
Update April 21:
Since several people asked, here are the lyrics. The YouTube video has captions - to see them, click on the CC icon in the bottom bar.
[Chorus] I am part of the master plan
Every woman, every man
I have seen them come and go
Go with the flow
I have seen that we all are one
I know all and every one
I was here when the sun was born
Ages ago
[Verse]
In my mind
I have tried
Catching light
Catching light
In my mind I have left the world behind
Every time I close my eyes
All of nature's open wide
I can hear her
Talk to me at night
In my mind I have been trying
Catching light outside of time
I collect it in a box
Collect it in a box
Every time I close my eyes
All of nature's open wide
I can hear her
Talk to me at night
[Repeat Chorus]
[Interlude, Einstein recording]
The scientific method itself
would not have led anywhere,
it would not even have been formed
Without a passionate striving for a clear understanding.
Perfection of means
and confusion of goals
seem in my opinion
to characterize our age.
I spent the holidays watching some tutorials for video animations and learned quite a few new things. The below video collects some exercise projects I did to answer a question Gloria asked the other day: “Was ist Phykik?” (What is phycics?). Embarrassingly, I doubt she learned more from my answer than how to correctly pronounce physics. It’s hard to explain stuff to 6-year olds if you’re used to dealing with brainy adults.
Thanks to all the tutorials, however, I think this video is dramatically better than the previous one. There are still a number of issues I'm unhappy about, notably the timing, which I find hard to get right. Also, the lip-synching is poor. Not to mention that I still can’t draw and hence my cartoon child looks like a giant zombie hamster.
Listening to it again, the voiceover seems too fast to me and would have benefited from a few breaks. In summary, there’s room for improvement.
Complete transcript:
The other day, my daughter asked me “What is physics?”
She’s six. My husband and I, we’re both physicists. You’d think I had an answer. But best I managed was: Physics is what explains the very, very small and very, very large things.
There must be a better explanation, I said to myself.
The more I thought about it though, the more complicated it got. Physics isn’t only about small and large things. And nobody uses a definition to decide what belongs into the department of physics. Instead, it’s mostly history and culture that marks disciplinary boundaries. The best summary that came to my mind is “Physics is what physicists do.”
But then what do physicists do?
Now that’s a question I can help you with.
First, let us see what is very small and very large.
An adult human has a size of about a meter. Add some zeros to size and we have small planets like Earth with a diameter of some tenthousand kilometers, and larger planets, like Saturn. Add some more zeros, and we get to solar systems, which are more conveniently measured with the time it takes light to travel through them, a few light-hours.
On even larger scales, we have galaxies, with typical sizes of a hundred-thousand light years, and galaxy clusters, and finally the whole visible universe, with an estimated size of 100 billion light years. Beyond that, there might be an even larger collection of universes which are constantly newly created by bubbling out of vacuum. It’s called the ‘multiverse’ but nobody knows if it’s real.
Physics, or more specifically cosmology, is the only discipline that currently studies what happens at such large scales. This remains so for galaxy clusters and galaxies and interstellar space, which fall into the area of astrophysics. There is an emerging field, called astrobiology, where scientists look for life elsewhere in the universe, but so far they don’t have much to study.
Once we get to the size of planets, however, much of what we observe is explained by research outside of physics. There is geology and atmospheric science and climate science. Then there are the social sciences and all the life sciences, biology and medicine and zoology and all that.
When we get to scales smaller than humans, at about a micrometer we have bacteria and cells. At a few nanometers, we have large molecular structures like our DNA, and then proteins and large molecules. Somewhere here, we cross over into the field of chemistry.
If we get to even smaller scales, to the size of atoms of about an Angstrom, physics starts taking over again. First there is atomic physics, then there is nuclear physics, and then there is particle physics, which deals with quarks and electrons and photons and all that.
Beyond that... nobody knows. But to the extent that it’s science at all, it’s safely in the hands of physicists.
If you go down 16 more orders of magnitude, you get to what is called the Planck length, at 10^-35 meters. That’s where quantum fluctuations of space-time become important and it might turn out elementary particles are made of strings or other strange things. But that too, is presently speculation.
One would need an enormously high energy to probe such short distances, much higher than what our particle accelerators can reach. Such energies, however, were reached at the big bang, when our universe started to expand. And so, if we look out to very, very large distances, we actually look back in time to high energies and very short distances. Particle physics and cosmology are therefore close together and not far apart.
Not everything in physics, however, is classified by distance scales. Rocks fall, water freezes, planes fly, and that’s physics too. There are two reasons for that.
First, gravity and electrodynamics are forces that span over all distance scales.
And second, the tools of physics can be used also for stuff composed of many small things that behave similarly, like solids fluids and gases. But really, it could be anything from a superconductor, to a gas of strings, to a fluid of galaxies. The behavior of such large numbers of similar objects is studied in fields like condensed matter physics, plasma physics, thermodynamics, and statistical mechanics.
That’s why there’s more physics in every-day life than what the breakdown by distance suggests. And that’s also why the behavior of stuff at large and small distances has many things in common. Indeed, methods of physics can, and have been used, also to describe the growth of cities, bird flocking, or traffic flow. All of that is physics, too.
I still don’t have a good answer for what physics is. But next time I am asked, I have a video to show.
I spent the holidays playing with the video animation software. As a side-effect, I produced this little video.
If you'd rather read than listen, here's the complete voiceover:
It has become a popular defense of science deniers to yell “argument from authority” when someone quotes an experts’ opinion. Unfortunately, the argument from authority is often used incorrectly.
What is an “argument from authority”?
An “argument from authority” is a conclusion drawn not by evaluating the evidence itself, but by evaluating an opinion about that evidence. It is also sometimes called an “appeal to authority”.
Consider Bob. Bob wants to know what follows from A. To find out, he has a bag full of knowledge. The perfect argument would be if Bob starts with A and then uses his knowledge to get to B to C to D and so on until he arrives at Z. But reality is never perfect.
Let’s say Bob wants to know what’s the logarithm of 350,000. In reality he can’t find anything useful in his bag of knowledge to answer that question. So instead he calls his friend, the Pope. The Pope says “The log is 4.8.” So, Bob concludes, the log of 350,000 is 4.8 because the Pope said so.
That’s an argument from authority – and you have good reasons to question its validity.
But unlike other logical fallacies, an argument from authority isn’t necessarily wrong. It’s just that, without further information about the authority that has been consulted, you don’t know how good the argument it is.
Suppose Bob hadn’t asked the Pope what’s the log of 350,000 but instead he’d have asked his calculator. The calculator says it’s approximately 5.544.
We don’t usually call this an argument from authority. But in terms of knowledge evaluation it’s the same logical structure as exporting an opinion to a trusted friend. It’s just that in this case the authority is your calculator and it’s widely known to be an expert in calculation. Indeed, it’s known to be pretty much infallible.
You believe that your friend the calculator is correct not because you’ve tried to verify every result it comes up with. You believe it’s correct because you trust all the engineers and scientists who have produced it and who also use calculators themselves.
Indeed, most of us would probably trust a calculator more than our own calculations, or that of the Pope. And there is a good reason for that – we have a lot of prior knowledge about whose opinion on this matter is reliable. And that is also relevant knowledge.
Therefore, an argument from authority can be better than an argument lacking authority if you take into account evidence for the authority’s expertise in the subject area.
Logical fallacies were widely used by the Greeks in their philosophical discourse. They were discussing problems like “Can a circle be squared?” But many of today’s problems are of an entirely different kind, and the Greek rules aren’t always helpful.
The problems we face today can be extremely complex, like the question “What’s the origin of climate change?” “Is it a good idea to kill off mosquitoes to eradicate malaria?” or “Is dark matter made of particles?” Most of us simply don’t have all the necessary evidence and knowledge to arrive at a conclusion. We also often don’t have the time to collect the necessary evidence and knowledge.
And when a primary evaluation isn’t possible, the smart thing to do is a secondary evaluation. For this, you don’t try to answer the question itself, but you try to answer the question “Where do I best get an answer to this question?” That is, you ask an authority.
We do this all the time: You see a doctor to have him check out that strange rush. You ask your mother how to stuff the turkey. And when the repair man says your car needs a new crankshaft sensor, you don’t yell “argument from authority.” And you shouldn’t, because you’ve smartly exported your primary evaluation of evidence to a secondary system that, you are quite confident, will actually evaluate the evidence *better* than you yourself could do.
But… the secondary evidence you need is how knowledgeable the authority is on the topic of question. The more trustworthy the authority, the more reliable the information.
This also means that if you reject an argument from authority you claim that the authority isn’t trustworthy.
You can do that. But it’s here’s where things most often go wrong.
The person who doesn’t want to accept the opinion of scientific experts implicitly claims that their own knowledge is more trustworthy. Without explicitly saying so, they claim that science doesn’t work, or that certain experts cannot be trusted – and that they themselves can do better.
That is a claim which can be made. But science has an extremely good track record in producing correct conclusions. Questioning that it’s faulty therefore carries a heavy burden of proof.
So. To use an argument from authority correctly, you have to explain why the authority’s knowledge is not trustworthy on the question under consideration.
But what should you do if someone dismisses scientific findings by claiming an argument from authority?
I think we should have a name for such a mistaken use of the term argument from authority. We could call it the fallacy of the “omitted knowledge prior.” This means it’s a mistake to not take into account evidence for the reliability of knowledge, including one’s own knowledge. You, your calculator, and the pope aren’t equally reliable when it comes to evaluating logarithms. And that counts for something.
I know you’ve all missed my awesome chord progressions and off-tune singing, so I’ve made yet another one of my music videos!
In the attempt to protect you from my own appearance, I recently invested some money into an animation software by name Anime Studio. It has a 350 pages tutorial. Me being myself, I didn’t read it. But I spent the last weekend clicking on any menu item that couldn’t vanish quickly enough, and I’ve integrated the outcome into the above video. I think I kind of figured out now how the basics work. I might do some more of this. It was actually fun to make a visual idea into a movie, something I’ve never done before. Though it might help if I could draw, so excuse the sickly looking tree.
Having said this, I also need to get myself a new video editing software. I’m presently using the Corel VideoStudio Pro which, after the Win10 upgrade works even worse than it did before. I could not for the hell of it export the clip with both good video and audio quality. In the end I sacrificed on the video quality, so sorry about the glitches. They’re probably simply computation errors or, I don’t know, the ghost of Windows 7 still haunting my hard disk.
The song I hope explains itself. One could say it’s the aggregated present mood of my facebook and twitter feeds. You can download the mp3 here.
I wish you all a Happy Thanksgiving, and I want to thank you for giving me some of your attention, every now and then. I especially thank those of you who have paid attention to the donate-button in the top right corner. It’s not much that comes in through this channel, but for me it makes all the difference -- it demonstrates that you value my writing and that keeps me motivated.
I’m somewhat behind with a few papers that I wanted to tell you about, so I’ll be back next week with more words and fewer chords. Meanwhile, enjoy my weltschmerz song ;)
Ich war am Montag in Regensburg und habe dort einen öffentlichen Vortrag gegeben zum Thema “Wissenschaft auf Abwegen” für eine Reihe unter dem Titel “Was ist Wirklich?” Das ganze ist jetzt auf YouTube. Das Video besteht aus etwa 30 Minuten Vortrag und danach noch eine Stunde Diskussion. Alles in Deutsch. Nur was für eche Fans ;)
2015 was the International Year of Light. In May, I came across this video by the Max Planck Society, in which some random people on the street in Munich were asked whether light is a wave or a particle. Most of them answered in German, but here is a rough translation of their replies:
“Uh, physics. It's been a long time. I guess it’s... a particle. — Particle. — Particle. — A particle. — A particle. — Light is... a particle. — I had physics up to 12th class. We discussed this a whole year. But I still don’t know. — A wave. — A wave? — Is this a trick question? — It’s both! Wave-particle duality. You should know that. — The duality of light. — It acts as both. — It’s hard to quantify what it is. It’s energy. — I am fascinated that nature has paradoxa. That one finds out through physics that not everything can be computed.”
So I thought some explanation is in order:
This is the first time I’ve tried the new green screen. As you can see, it has indeed solved my eye-erasure problem. (And for the experts, I hope you apologize my sloppiness in specifying the U(1) gauge group.)
On that occasion, I also want to wish you all Happy Holidays!
Like what you find on my blog? I want to kindly draw your attention to the donate button in the top right corner :o)
I have made a slide-show of my Monday talk a the Munin conference and managed to squeeze a one-hour lecture into 23 minutes. Don't expect too much, nothing happens in this video, it's just me mumbling over the slides (no singing either ;)). I was also recorded on Monday, but if you prefer the version with me walking around and talking for 60 minutes you'll have to wait a few days until the recording goes online.
I am very much interested in finding a practical solution to these problems. If you have proposals to make, please get in touch with me or leave a comment.
Since I had the blue screen up already, I wanted to try out some things to improve my videos. I'm quite happy with this one (finally managed to export it in a reasonable resolution), but I noticed too late I should have paid more attention to the audio. Sorry about that. Next time I'll use an external mic. I have also decided to finally replace the blue screen with a green screen, which I hope will solve the problem with the eye erasure.
I know you can hardly contain the excitement about my new lipstick and the badly illuminated blue screen, so please enjoy my newest release, exclusively for you, dear reader.
I actually wrote this song last year, but then I mixed myself into a mush. In the hope that I've learned some things since, I revisited this project and gave it a second try. Thought I'm still not quite happy with it (I never seem to get the vocals right), I strongly believe there's a merit to finishing up things. Also, if I have to hear this thing once again my head will implode (though at least that would set an end to the concussion symptoms and neck pain I caused myself with the hair shaking). Lesson learned: hitting your forehead against a wall isn't really pleasant. If you feel like engaging in it, you should at the very least videotape it, because that justifies just about anything stupid.
When a few weeks ago someone in a waterpark jumped into my left side and cracked a rib, I literally got a crash course in human anatomy. I didn't really appreciate just how often we use our torso muscles, which I was now painfully made aware of with every move. I could neither cough, nor run, nor laugh without wincing. Sneezing was the worst, turning over in bed a nightmare. I also had to notice that one can't sing with a cracked rib. And so, in my most recent song, I've left the vocal track to Ed Witten.
If you want to know more about the history of string theory, I can recommend watching the full lecture, which is both interesting and well delivered.
The rib has almost healed, so please don't expect Ed to become a regular, though he does have an interesting voice.
String Theory and the Scientific Method
By Richard Dawid
Cambridge University Press (2013)
“String Theory and the Scientific Method” is a very interesting and timely book by a philosopher trying to make sense out of trends in contemporary theoretical physics. Dawid has collected arguments that physicists have raised to demonstrate the promise of their theories, arguments that however are not supported by the scientific method as it is currently understood. He focuses on string theory, but some of his observations are more general than this.
There is for example that physicists rely on mathematical consistency as a guide, even though this is clearly not an experimental assessment. A theory that isn’t mathematically consistent in some regime where we do not have observations yet isn’t considered fundamentally valid. I have to admit it wouldn’t even have occurred to me to call this a “non-empirical assessment,” because our use of mathematics is clearly based on the observation that it works very well to describe nature.
The three arguments that Dawid has collected which are commonly raised by string theorists to support their belief that string theory is a promising theory of everything are:
Meta-inductive inference: The trust in a theory is higher if its development is based on extending existing successful research programs.
No-alternatives argument: The more time passes in which we fail to find a theory as successful as string theory in combining quantum field theory with general relativity the more likely it is that the one theory we have found is unique and correct.
Argument of unexpected explanatory coherence: A finding is perceived more important if it wasn’t expected.
Dawid then argues basically that since a lot of physicists are de facto not relying on the scientific method any more maybe philosophers should face reality and come up with a better explanation that would alter the scientific method so that according to the new method the above arguments were scientific.
In the introduction Dawid writes explicitly that he only studies the philosophical aspects of the development and not the sociological ones. My main problem with the book is that I don’t think one can separate these two aspects clearly. Look at the arguments that he raises: The No Alternatives Argument and the Unexpected Explanatory Coherence are explicitly sociological. They are 1.) based on the observation that there exists a large research area which attracts much funding and many young people and 2.) that physicists trust their colleagues’ conclusions better if it wasn’t the conclusion they were looking for. How can you analyze the relevance of these arguments without taking into account sociological (and economic) considerations?
The other problem with Dawid’s argument is that he confuses the Scientific Method with the rest of the scientific process that happens in the communities. Science basically operates as a self-organized adaptive system, that is in the same class of systems as natural selection. For such systems to be able to self-optimize something – in the case of science the use of theories for the descriptions of nature – they must have a mechanism of variation and a mechanism for assessment of the variation followed by a feedback. In the case of natural selection the variation is genetic mixing and mutation, the assessment is whether the result survives, the feedback is another reproduction. In science the variation is a new theory and the assessment is whether it agrees with experimental test. The feedback is the revision or trashcanning of the theory. This assessment whether a theory describes observation is the defining part of science – you can’t change this assessment without changing what science does because it determines what we optimize for.
The assessments that Dawid, correctly, observes are a pre-selection that is meant to assure we spend time only on those theories (gene combinations) that are promising. To make a crude analogy, we clearly do some pre-selection in our choice of partners that determines which genetic combinations are ever put to test. These might be good choices or they might be bad choices and as long as their success hasn’t also been put to test, we have to be very careful whether we rely on them. It’s the same with the assessments that Dawid observes. Absent experimental test, we don’t know if using these arguments does us any good. In fact I would argue that if one takes into account sociological dynamics one presently has a lot of reasons to not trust researchers to be objective and unbiased which sheds much doubt on the use of these arguments.
Be that as it may, Dawid’s book has been very useful for me to clarify my thoughts about exactly what is going on in the community. I think his observations are largely correct, just that he draws the wrong conclusion. We clearly don’t need to update the scientific method, we need to apply it better, and we need to apply it in particular to better understand the process of knowledge discovery.
I might never again agree with David Gross on anything, but I do agree on his “pre-publication praise” on the cover. The book is very recommendable reading both for physicists and philosophers.
I wasn’t able to summarize the arguments in the book without drawing a lot of sketches, so I made a 15 mins slideshow with my summary and comments on the book. If you have the patience, enjoy :)
What I do in the library when I have a bad hair day ;)
The shirt was a Christmas present from my mother. I happened to wear it that day and then thought it fits well enough. It's too large for me though, apparently they don't cater to physicists in XS.
My voice sounds like sinus infection because sinus infection, sorry about that.
I have a post about "The rising star of science" over at Starts with a Bang. It collects some of my thoughts on science and religion, fear and wonder. I will not repost this here next month, so if you're interested check it out over there. According to medium it's a 6 minutes read. You can get a 3 minutes summary in my recent video:
We wish you all happy holidays :)
From left to right: Inga the elephant, Lara the noisy one, me, Gloria the nosy one, and Bo the moose. Stefan is fine and says hi too, he isn't in the photo because his wife couldn't find the setting for the self-timer.
Last month, a group of Australian researchers from the life sciences published a paper that breaks
down the duration of talks at a 2013 conference by gender. They found that while the overall attendance and number of presentations was almost equally shared between men and women, the women spoke on the average for shorter periods of time. The main reason for this was that the women applied for shorter talks to begin with. You find a brief summary on the Nature website.
The twitter community of women in science was all over this, encouraging women to make the same requests as men, asserting that women “underpromote” themselves by not taking up enough of their colleagues’ time.
Now a lot of what goes around on twitter isn’t really meant seriously, see the smiley in Katie Hinde’s tweet. I remarked one could also interpret the numbers to show that men talk too much and overpromote themselves. I was joking of course to make a point, but after dwelling on this for a while I didn’t find it that funny anymore.
Women are frequently told that to be successful they should do the same as men do. I don’t know how often I have seen advice explaining how women are allegedly belittling themselves by talking, well, like a woman. We are supposed to be assertive and take credit for our achievements. Pull your shoulders back, don’t cross your legs, don’t flip your hair. We’re not supposed to end every sentence as if it was a question. We’re not supposed to start every interjection with an apology. We’re not supposed to be emotional and personal, and so on. Yes, all of these are typically “female” habits. We are told, in essence, there’s something wrong with being what we are.
Here is for example a list with public speaking tips: Don’t speak about yourself, don’t speak in a high pitch, don’t speak too fast because “Talking fast is natural with two of your best friends and a bottle of Mumm, but audiences (especially we slower listening men) can’t take it all in”. Aha. Also, don’t flirt and don’t wear jewelry because the slow men might notice you’re a woman.
Sorry, I got sick at point five and couldn’t continue – must have been the Mumm. Too bad if your anatomy doesn’t support the low pitches. If you believe this guy that is, but listen to me for a moment, I swear I’ll try not to flirt. If your voice sounds unpleasant when you’re giving a talk, it’s not your voice, it’s the microphone and the equalizer, probably set for male voices. And do we really need a man to tell us that if we’re speaking about our research at a conference we shouldn’t talk about our recent hiking trip instead?
There are many reasons why women are underrepresented in some professions and overrepresented in others. Some of it is probably biological, some of it is cultural. If you are raising or have raised a child it is abundantly obvious that our little ones are subjected to gender stereotypes starting at very young age. Part of it is the clothing and the toys, but more importantly it’s simply that they observe the status quo: Childcare is still predominantly female business and I yet have to see a woman on the garbage truck.
Humans are incredibly social animals. It would be surprising if the prevailing stereotypes did not affect us at all. That’s why I am supportive of all initiatives that encourage children to develop their talents regardless of whether these talents are deemed suitable for their gender, race, or social background. Because these stereotypes are thousands of years old and have become hurdles to our selfdevelopment. By and large, I see more encouragements for girls than I see for boys to follow their passion regardless of what society thinks, and I also see that women have more backup fighting unrealistic body images which is what this previous post was about. Ironically, I was criticized on twitter for saying that boys don’t need to have a superhero body to be real men because that supposedly wasn’t fair to the girls.
I am not supportive of hard quotas that aim at prefixed male-female ratios. There is no scientific support for these ratios, and moreover I witnessed repeatedly that these quotas have a big backlash, creating a stigma that “She is just here because” whether or not that is true.
Thus, at the present level women are likely to still be underrepresented from where we would be if we’d manage to ignore social pressure to follow ancient stereotypes. And so I think that we would benefit from more women among the scientists, especially in math-heavy disciplines. Firstly because we are unnecessarily missing out of talent. But also because diversity is beneficial for the successful generation and realization of ideas. The relevant diversity is in the way we think and argue. Again, this is probably partly biological and partly cultural, but whatever the reason, a diversity of thought should be encouraged and this diversity is almost certainly correlated with demographic diversity.
That’s why I disapprove of so-called advice that women should talk and walk and act like men. Because that’s exactly the opposite from what we need. Science stands to benefit from women being different from men. Gender equality doesn’t mean genders should be equal, it means they should have the same opportunities. So women are more likely to volunteer organizing social events? Wtf is wrong with that?
So please go flip your hair if you feel like it, wear your favorite shirt, put on all the jewelry you like, and generally be yourself. Don’t let anybody tell you to be something you are not. If you need the long slot for your talk go ahead. If you’re confident you can get across your message in 15 minutes, even better, because we all talk too much anyway.
About the video: I mysteriously managed to produce a video in High Definition! Now you can see all my pimples. My husband made a good camera man. My anonymous friend again helped cleaning up the audio file. Enjoy :)
My first international physics conference was in Turkey. It was memorable not only because smoking was still allowed on the plane. The conference was attended by many of the local students, and almost all of them were women.
I went out one evening with the Turkish students, a group of ten with only one man who sucked away on his waterpipe while one of the women read my future from tea leaves (she read that I was going to fly through the air in the soon future). I asked the guy how come there are so few male students in this group. It’s because theoretical physics isn’t manly, it’s not considered a guy thing in Turkey, he said. Real men work outdoors or with heavy machinery, they drive, they swing tools, they hunt bears, they do men’s stuff. They don’t wipe blackboards or spend their day in the library.
I’m not sure how much of his explanation was sarcasm, but I find it odd indeed that theoretical physics is so man-dominated when it’s mostly scribbling on paper, trying to coordinate collaborations and meetings, and staring out of the window waiting for an insight. It seems mostly a historical accident that the majority of physicists today are male.
From the desk in my home office I have a view onto our downstairs neighbor’s garden. Every couple of weeks a man trims her trees and bushes. He has a key to the gate and normally comes when she is away. He uses the smoking break to tan his tattoos in her recliner and to scratch his breast hair. Then he pees on the roses. The most disturbing thing about his behavior though isn’t the peeing, it’s that he knows I’m watching. He has to cut the bushes from the outside too, facing the house, so he can see me scribbling away on my desk. He’ll stand there on his ladder and swing the chainsaw to greet me. He’s a real man, oh yeah.
After I finished high school, I went to the employment center which offered a skill- and interest-questionnaire, based on which one then was recommended a profession. I came out as landscape architect. It made sense – when asked, I said I would like to do something creative that allows me to spend time outdoors and that wouldn’t require many interpersonal skills. I also really like trees.
Then I went and studied math because what the questionnaire didn’t take into account is that I get bored incredibly quickly. I wanted a job that wouldn’t run out of novelty any time soon. Math and theoretical physics sounded just right. I never spent much time thinking about gender stereotypes, it just wasn’t something I regarded relevant. Yes, I knew the numbers, but I honestly didn’t care. Every once in a while I would realize how oddly my voice stood out, look around and realize I was the only women in the room, or one of a few. I still find it an unnatural and slightly creepy situation. But no, I never thought about gender stereotypes.
Now I’m a mother of two daughters and I realized the other day I’ve gone pink-blind. Before I had children, I’d look at little girls thinking I’d never dress my daughters all in pink. But, needless to say, most of the twin’s wardrobe today is pink because it’s either racing cars and soccer players on blue, or flowers and butterflies on pink. Unless you want to spend a ridiculous amount of money on designer clothes your kids will wear maybe once.
The internet is full with upset about girl’s toys that discourage an interest in engineering, unrealistic female body images, the objectification of women in ads and video games, the lack of strong female characters in books and movies. The internet is full with sites encouraging women to accept their bodies, the bodies of mothers with the floppy bellies and the stretch marks, the bodies of real women with the big breasts and the small breasts and the freckles and the pimples – every inch of you is perfect from the bottom to the top. It’s full with Emma Watson and He for She. It’s full of high pitched voices.
But it isn’t only women who are confronted with stereotypical gender roles and social pressure. Somebody I think must stand up and tell the boys it’s totally okay to become a string theorist, even though they don’t get to swing a chainsaw - let that somebody be me. Science is neither a boy thing nor a girl thing.
So this one is for the boys. Be what you want to be, rise like a phoenix, and witness me discovering the awesomeness of multiband compression. Happy Halloween :)
After the ios 8 update you can now use your iPhone entirely hands-free if the phone is plugged in and you speak the magic words "Hey Siri." I know this because last weekend my phone was on the charger next to my microphone as I was working on one of my pathetic vocal recordings, when suddenly Siri offered the following wisdom
"Our love is like two long shadows kissing without hope of reality."
I cursed, stopped the recording, and hit playback. And there was Siri's love confession over my carefully crafted drum-bass loop. It was painfully obvious that whoever processed these vocals knew, in contrast to me, what he or she was doing. They're professionally filtered, compressed and flawlessly de-essed. In short, they sound awesome, even after re-recording.
I then had a little conversation with my phone, inquiring what this shadow business was all about. Siri stubbornly refused to repeat her lyrical deepity, but had some other weird insights to offer.
Enjoy :)
PS: No, my lyrics do of course not contain the words "Hey Siri". I'm not sure what caught her attention, but I recommend you don't sing to your phone.
I had some help with the audio mix, but the friendly savior of my high frequency mush prefers to go unnamed. Thanks to him though, you can now put the thing on your stereo and it will sound reasonably normal. I like to think that I have made some progress with the vocal recording and processing. I am not happy with the percussion in that piece, have to work on that. If you go through my last few videos you can basically hear which tutorial I read at which point. So far I believe I am making progress, but you be my judge!
As to the video, I spent some money on an inexpensive video camera, and it has made my video recording dramatically easier because it has an auto zoom. As a result, the new video is more dynamic than the previous ones, it looks considerably better to me. It would have been even better hadn't I been wearing a blue shirt on the blue-screen day, some neurons failed me there.
I still haven't found a good way to deal with the problem that the video tends to go out of synch with the audio after exporting it. In fact I noticed that the severity of the problem depends on the player with which you watch the result which I find particularly odd. And after uploading the thing to youtube the audio again shifts oh-so-slightly. In the end, no matter what I do, it never quite fits.
And since I was asked a few times, yes I do have a soundcloud account, under the name "Funny Mommy". You can find all the tracks there. It's just that I am not in the mood to play the social network game on yet another platform, so I have a total of three followers or so, all of which are probably spam-bots. That's why I use YouTube. I am totally open to suggestions for other artist names :) And yeah, I am also on Ello, as @hossi, not that it seems to be good for anything.
