So, you are saying this guy struck out with the old reliable “like hydrodynamics for chocolate” pickup line?

I think that is astounding, Phil. This proves that your wife is an astronomer.

Nerdar is good coinage.

*this whole thread is very interesting. probably the only civil place left in the blogosphere.*

I whole heartedly agree. I had thought I pointed to refining ones guess in the presence of actual data (note I started working with a blank slate) such as geography and my albeit glib statement concerning subject matter during conversation, but I can see how one could miss my thinking there. My fault for trying to rush through typing a comment…

However, as to what I see as the more crucial issue in my reply, my interest and hope remains that interest in physics has awoken in a more diverse crowd than it had been during my days of college.

Thanks for the response,
XP

If someone sees JoAnne or Clifford conversing with Physicists at a Physics conference and assumes that they are there in a secretarial or janitorial capacity is a different set of circumstances than seeing either of them in a public arena and not guessing they are Physicists.

In my undergraduate days, although there quite a few black people in other subjects, there were none majoring in physics (though refering to the references of women in physics..there were quite a few women. In fact, my wife is a physics doctorate I consider to be a better thinker than myself). In my graduate days, we did have several black people in the Ph.D. program, but, none of them were African American. The real issue which I think needs to be addressed here, is why the apparent lack of interest in the pursuit of physics within the African American community (I submit at the outset that it has nothing to do with ability)?

But going back to the subject of the post and to Devil’s Advocate’s point: If having nothing to go on I were forced to guess somebody’s career (usually a dangerous game to begin with, since appearance is often no indication at all), as a scientist, I would use levels of probability based on sample sets with which I am familiar. First, a relatively small set of people (in an absolute sense) go into physics, so that gets a low probability to begin with. Second, my limited experiences suggest that relatively very few African Americans pursue a career in physics, so being an African American would cause me to drop that probability a little further (though I’d be happy to be wrong). Factors influencing a guess would, of course, include geographic location…being in a university town, or near a national lab, for example (raises the chances, obviously). Naturally, if the person in question started talking about Boltzmann’s constant or the Lorentz transformation…well that would simply collapse the wave function, so to speak . Perhaps my thinking here is off..?

Now, as I said, I have been outside academia for some time, and perhaps, as I would hope, the situation for interest in physics has much improved among all communities.

cheers,
XP

Thanks,

-cvj