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Category: Physics
Posted on: November 17, 2008 8:18 PM, by Chad Orzel
Nobody reading blogs, anyway. Doug Natelson asked for comments on a recent workshop on iron arsenide superconductors yesterday, and the count of comments still stands at zero.
The under-representation of condensed matter physicists among bloggers and blog readers, relative to their abundance in the general population, really is amazing.
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Comments
Under-representation in blogs? What about under-representation in Nobel Prizes?
Ooohh! Burn!!
Solid state is also so fractured that it's hard for such a community to flourish.
Posted by: Justin M | November 17, 2008 10:07 PM
More important than bloggers and blog readers: why isn't there more popular literature about condensed matter? I can go to any Borders and find fifteen different books about particle physics and cosmology and string theory, but where are the books about Mott insulators and antiferromagnets and cuprates?
Posted by: onymous | November 17, 2008 11:24 PM
I care about superconductivity, I do.
It's one of those subjects that sits right at the nexus between beautiful theory and potentially exciting practical applications.
But as a nonscientist, I don't know enough to have an opinion, or to ask an informed question.
I have a dear friend who's a computational physical chemist, doing really interesting research that's way beyond my comprehension. (It has something to do with applying finite difference methods to quantum states of complex biological molecules with respect to ion channels in cell membranes, or something. Whew! And that's the extent of my understanding.)
I've talked up science blogging to him, and he digs that I'm a "fan," but I haven't gotten him to the point where he's reading and responding to blogs.
He's not a physicist, but I bet he could ask interesting questions. I can't even do that.
Posted by: HP | November 18, 2008 12:04 AM
It's not just bloggers...a profound disinterest in all things condensed matter permeates the intersection of physics and society. Consider the Perimeter Institute for Theorectical Physics in Waterloo, which does an admirable job of raising the profile of physics - but seems to have been conceived as a condensed-matter free zone. Fortunately, solid-state physics is being dragged in the back door thanks to a growing interest in quantum information!
Personally, I find condensed matter physics fascinating, and I have to work hard to give other types of physics their fair due on our web pages.
Posted by: Hamish Johnston | November 18, 2008 3:46 AM
Ask about the week when High Tc was filtered out to public knowledge. The preprints were faxed and refaxed around the world during a couple of days. Hundreds of measurements, variations and replications happened in a few weeks. Teachers stopped the normal schedule to read the papers aloud to undergraduate classrooms.
Now, the day-to-day of a solid state researcher is a lot more boring. They fight for space for a machine, then for money for the machine, then they keep using the machine, which is devised for a single specific kind of measurement, for years and years.
Posted by: Alejandro Rivero | November 18, 2008 10:13 AM
To be fair, I basically asked for comments from people who went to the workshop, and that's not a very big number. My blog's readership isn't nearly as large as Chad's.
onymous - I'm with you. I think one could write a popular-level book about some CM-related things and make it interesting. The challenge is that it doesn't have the immediate profundity of, e.g., the Origin of Matter.
Posted by: Doug Natelson | November 18, 2008 11:26 AM