Comments on: Mainstream breakthrough

By: JoAnne

JoAnne — Thu, 03 Nov 2005 06:32:10 +0000

Danica, thanks for writing in and sharing your thoughts and experiences! However, I think every person’s story is different. For me, junior high and high school were great – could not have had more supportive teachers. I had problems in college, and even more so in grad school. I will post about that someday.

By: chimpanzee

chimpanzee — Thu, 03 Nov 2005 05:53:44 +0000

http://www.house.gov/science/mckellar_071300.htm

Recommendations to Attract More Women and Minorities into Science, Engineering,
and Technology

Thursday, July 13, 2000

Danica McKellar
Actress
Mathematics graduate from the University of California at Los Angeles
Los Angeles, California
————

[Moderator's note: extremely long excerpt deleted. Please try to keep comments at a reasonable length!]

————

I’d like to summarize the above with the following. You may have heard the phrase:

“People don’t buy Good Products, they buy GOOD MARKETING”
– business saying

Replace Product with “SET [ Science, Engineering, Technology ] career”, & Marketing with “PR, Role Models”:

“Students don’t buy-into a SET career, they buy-into GOOD role-models”

If you read the above, you (woman) just might want to goto UCLA rather than Harvard! I remember seeing M. Franklin’s comments about Harvard’s physics dept as “arrogant & rough”. I think the Larry Summers incident is a reflection of “elitism & arrogance” at these “top” schools.

I think the video-blogging thing could a be a really powerful tool (”Alternative Model”, video-blog, video podcast: mass-consumer device iPod over iTunes distribution network) for female scientists to do some pro-active outreach. The “Standard Model” of traveling & making speeches is old fashioned (time-consuming & localized reach):

http://www.e-guana.net/organizations.php3?action=printContentItem&orgid=87&typeID=946&itemID=10858&User_Session=cd03edc32d149dce94714043e03390a6

By: JoAnne

JoAnne — Thu, 03 Nov 2005 04:02:58 +0000

Hi Dennis,

Thanks for your reply. Indeed, I am well-known for being perhaps overly sensitive to the female martial status issue. Ever since I first started to walk, one of the things that really peeved me, was that women had to classify Miss vs Mrs, while men were just Mr. It STILL comes up at times, and when I am asked if I am a Miss or a Mrs I get peeved all over again. When asked, I always respond “Dr.”

By: dennis

dennis — Wed, 02 Nov 2005 17:42:40 +0000

In answer to JoAnne, in profiles, whether or men or women (you can check our for example Fred Kavli earlier this year) I do invariably do try to include such information as marital status and who their partners are if they have them.
As far as LHC goes, I agree that there is a lot more to be written about the work of discerning the signatures and who does it.

By: Sean

Sean — Wed, 02 Nov 2005 00:36:21 +0000

Shantanu– I have no idea, I hadn’t noticed the paper before. My impression was that weak-field gravity should be the same in RS models as in ordinary GR, but there’s always the possibility of someone turning up a subtle effect. And I think you’re right, we shouldn’t have to wait for GPB, the data are already there.

By: Sean

Sean — Wed, 02 Nov 2005 00:34:00 +0000

Michael– It’s because the other three forces are “confined” to the brane, while gravity leaks out into the bulk. A little more technical than that, but that’s the basic idea.

By: Shantanu

Shantanu — Tue, 01 Nov 2005 23:24:24 +0000

Sean, Joanne and others , I have a question on frame-dragging effects in Randall-Sundrum models.
The paper hep-th/0107201 (Page 4) says that Randall-Sundrum model predicts that Gravity probe B will see NO gravitomagnetic field. Is this really true?
or am I misinterpreting this paper or are the conclusions of the paper incorrect?
If they are right, wouldn’t that imply that RS model is ruled out since we have other evidence for frame dragging. If these authors are wrong, is there
areference where this has been correctly worked out.
Thanks

By: JoAnne

JoAnne — Tue, 01 Nov 2005 23:04:10 +0000

I respectfully disagree with Dissident on his second point. Determining the relevant experimental signatures of a model is a scientific art in itself. It takes alot of insight, intuition, creativity, and ideas. Once this phenomenological creativity has been applied, then it’s a matter of performing the technical calculations, but the calculations are not possible without the idea and insight of what one should do. (Not to neglect that the calculations are sometimes a technical tour de force.)

It has been my experience that the people with the model ideas are simply not that good at creating the signature ideas. There are two different types of creativity and it takes both to do science. (Actually, it takes three, since the experimentalist is just as crucial!)

Lastly, as Graviton383 noted, models are not worth much, until they can be tested. And that part is up to the phenomenologist’s creativity. Only the models with calculated, testable signatures become famous. And, I think that if the LHC signatures of a model are important enough to be covered in an article, or to have an entire book chapter devoted to them, then the people who created them should be cited.

By: Michael D

Michael D — Tue, 01 Nov 2005 22:59:36 +0000

why is it that gravity is rescaled in our universe, but the other 3 forces aren’t?

or is it related to the distances of which the forces operate?

By: LM

LM — Tue, 01 Nov 2005 21:46:14 +0000

I think Sean’s review was overly generous to Kaku, who we all know is a publicity seeking poseur who hasn’t done worthwhile research in decades, though he somehow makes his way onto every PBS special involving physics that comes along. Of course, you can’t just come out and say such things in the American Scientist. But still, if left to his own devices, Kaku will continue to bridge the gap between physics and crackpot new age mysticism.