That is awesome, we need some more amazing scientists in the public eye to inspire the young. I know there are a lot of amazing scientists, but somehow need to get them on tiktok or something? Can you share the story?
I developed a hobby of reading up on and sharing factoids I found online, and found one about the 'god particle'. At first I thought it was cool because it seemed to basically talk about a particle that causes mass (of course, this was actually wrong, but that didn't really matter to a 10 year old), but reading about how it was predicted 40-50 years ago and the largest single machine humanity had built was being used to try to find it made it my favorite factoid and I'd excitedly start talking all about it the moment anyone showed even the slightest bit of interest.
In 2012 when the detection was announced, we were on a short 2-3 day vacation in Dubai and were having breakfast in the hotel. The TV was right next to us, and seeing the news I was trying (and failing) to explain to my parents how the Higgs boson had been predicted 50 years ago and it took that long for the technology to finally catch up to be able to verify it, and how this would represent one of the last remaining pieces of the standard model (although back then I didn't quite grasp that the standard model was not a full theory of everything). I was trying to explain to them the size of the LHC, how it was the biggest single machine we've built, how when they were turning it on for the first time, there were fears about it creating micro-black holes which might swallow the Earth.
I think that while we need scientists in the public eye, we don't need them as social media entertainers, a lot of well known science communicators on social media come off as attention-seeking charismatic fakes/frauds to me (eg NDT). Stuff like the interviews and documentaries Stephen Hawking had appeared in (or to a lesser extent, the ones Michio Kaku has appeared in) did much more for me in being inspired, even without having known what research they were known for.
I think we could also do with more books like Hawking's 'A Brief History of Time' and encouraging kids to read them. Also, instead of over-simplifying everything and passing off scientists as geniuses in the traditional sense, we should be more open in showing that the people who made these discoveries or predictions were not inherently born with it, the vast majority of them were completely normal people who worked very hard to build skills in the thing they enjoyed.
Another discovery I feel was somewhat similar is that of discrete time crystals, casually predicted in 2012, turned out to actually be possible in 2018 and has a similar 'cool' factor.
The truth is that young people are mostly on TikTok et al, so this type of content needs to get there.
It is a difficult balance to strike, but science should be
> as simple as possible, and no simpler
The hard truth is that any simpler means inaccurate, which means when educating the public there __are__ inaccuracies. So the balance to strike is accuracy vs understanding. Most people do not understand the Schrodinger's Cat thought experiment, wave-particle duality, or many similar things (like how one of my namesake's Incompleteness Theorem, Super Position, and the Halting Problem are linked) yet will confidently correct explanations given that do hold more accuracy (even "teaching" those where it is clear one side is vastly more qualified than the other).
But think about it this way, the people getting mad at the over-simplification are not a force preventing public explanation but rather a pressure to find a better and more accurate explanation. The problem is when we frame these things as adversarial in the sense of enemies fighting rather than adversarial in the sense of improving one's self/group's position/arguments/discourse. Both sides can benefit from a reframing of these interactions by not holding the positions as equivalent to one's intellect but rather recognize that statements are independent. We are better as a coalition than separated, even with disagreement (especially with). It is clear here that everyone is on the same side after all, as all parties involved are seeking the same goal: better public education. It then becomes the duty to read between the lines to extract what the actual complaint is, because this is often also difficult to express (without a lengthy process) given we do not know one another's priors. We should not confuse critiques for attacks or dismissals. Nor should we dismiss or attack when we should critique! Though it is acceptable when errors are egregious or when people intentionally mislead. Unfortunately there is a large amount of that, but let's also distinguish idiocracy from maliciousness, as the former can be fixed (if we formulate with the above framing).
On the other side, while yes, NDT is problematic, I think there is a value to people who are great science communicators without being great scientists. Sagan was arguably a great science communicator and not a great scientist per se. But his communication to the public was inspiring and educational, with enough rigor but not too much complexity, with a sense of wonder but not too far into speculation presented as science, with intuitive explanations but without too disastrously overburdened metaphors. There's the view that his talent for communication and broad intuitive understanding was such that even his contributions to research came primarily from his ability to be, in Kuiper's words about him, a "liaison between sciences". But even when just to the public, someone devoted to that sort of work, and good at it, is not less valuable than a scientist.
NDT, embarrassingly, often is just plain wrong. He treats “science” as a side, not an investigation into the wonder of the natural world.
I feel like the problem is that he is (whether its because he feels he must or some other pressure) "on" 24/7 thanks to social media. Other science communicators would pop up for some cool, edited, scripted, interviews or a documentary and slip away. What you get would be their best side 100% of the time in reruns on discovery or whatever. NDT seems to think that literally everything is an unmissable opportunity to advance science literacy and will jump in on literally anything to try.
If it wasnt for people sharing his dumbest tweets, I would only know him from the one documentary series, which was actually really impressive (to me). We really don't need "Ah but actually did you know transformers is impossible" or whatever every 15 minutes.
What I am saying is NDT please log off sometimes and let me remember the good bits.
In oz we have Dr Karl who can get a bit like NDT sometimes too. It really feels like he will repeat whatever the government hands him (he has repeated the governments misinformation about vapes, despite most of it coming from lobby groups and not scientists). And he clowns on socials and interviews. But because of that they have him mainly targeted at school age audiences.
Neil did not make sufficient progress at Texas. Then he did something weird, where he wasn't ready to defend yet got a postdoc at (iirc) Princeton. Princeton had to rescind the offer because you (ahem) need a doctorate to be post doctorate. Then he got into Columbia's program and finally finished.
He had a lot of hobbies and interests other than astronomy, and he is actually a very smart guy, but it took him a bit longer to get his shit together. I think he's found his calling and is quite good at he does.
His X shenanigans don't help either, where he has a reputation of engagement farming by posting dumb somewhat condescending "but akschually" type comments on things people are enjoying. Eg, when the last American total solar eclipse happened in 2017, he posted something along the lines of "ignore people when they tell you eclipses are rare", it's technically correct that eclipses happen fairly often, but he obviously had to know that what makes them exciting is that they're rare for the location the viewers are at. It's become somewhat of a meme to call someone NDT when they're being a buzzkill.
I'm just curious about when you found out what he really did, and if you had known earlier if you would have been a diplomat today rather than a scientist.
It's hard to say if I would've been a diplomat if I had known earlier. I feel like being a diplomat is harder to innocently romanticize and turn into hobbies for a child in the way that 'scientist' can be.