ScienceMakers Toolkit Manual - The History Makers

Physics
to made. You have the knowledge. You’re going to learn more, and you have to be able to depend on yourself to
make the right decisions about how to use it.
Clip 6 - Accessibility of Physics: One of the things we’re realizing belatedly is that this very “throw the baby
into the into the pool and see if they sink or swim” approach is really not very appropriate if you want to increase
the representation by women in particular but by minorities as well. And it’s because it does take that
kind of strength of personality that says, we’re not doing this because we want you to go away. This is what
everybody has to go through because that’s part of the training, this is how, this is how we do it. And I think
we could certainly fi gure out whether that’s the best way to do it, or whether or not there are ways in which
we could have a, for lack of a better term, a kinder, gentler introduction that would have it accessible to more
people who come from more background or more varied backgrounds. As scientists, it would be incumbent on
us to try and explore as we do everything else. Is there a better way to do it? Do we really understand how it
is that we lose people from the fi eld? Do we really understand how it is that we could gain more people again
from different backgrounds coming in, ‘cause that’s important for science, independent of what you think about
what society’s needs are and how many role models we need even if you didn’t care about those things. If you
care about the science, then you understand that without having the different points of view and the different
experiences of people coming into it, the science is just not as rich. It’s not as interesting, not as many new
ideas get tried because people don’t have the new ideas and therefore, it’s an important thing to try to do almost
independent of what you think the social good that comes out of just having more access to more people. You
ought to do it for the good of the fi eld.
Clip 7 - Fundamentals of the Universe: In the early history of the universe, there had to be equal amounts
of matter and antimatter. We don’t actually know how to create one without the other, but if I look around this
room, there’s all one type. It’s all matter. And in fact, it would be very bad for us if there were even small specs
of antimatter around because it annihilates [matter], all Star Trek fans know, it annihilates [matter] and creates
a huge amount of energy. It’s the equivalent of a murder mystery. The universe fi gured out a way to get rid of
all the antimatter, and yet leave the matter behind. We don’t know how that happened, and one of the things we
want to explore is to understand what happened to the antimatter, and whether or not the mechanism that nature
used refl ects again something that’s even deeper about either the mathematical aspects of the physical laws that
we come to understand and sort of base our beliefs on how the universe behaves on those. Or whether or not
this is just one aspect of the story of how the universe came to be. I mean, we couldn’t have a universe like the
one that we see, that has life in it and intelligence, if nature hadn’t fi gured out how to do this: get rid of the antimatter.
But maybe that was only one brief phase, and there isn’t anything deeper about it. It’s just a card trick.
It might have happened with some other universes, if they happened to be existing, or maybe it only happened
with ours, it’s a very rare occurrence and so there’s nothing deep, it’s the equivalent of the existential question:
it just is. But even that is a deep question. If you ask the philosophy of how likely is our universe, that’s a very
deep question. Einstein expressed it by saying, “I want to know whether God had any choice about how He
made the universe.” Once He set down these laws and they were mathematically fi rm, was He then constrained
in that this is the only way you can make a consistent universe that makes sense and has life and intelligence in
it, because there is no other way that you can logically put things together, that they actually do work or not. So,
we have that as a legacy, right? Are we going to try and make a sensible universe, or are we really just going to
accept what nature tells us, and not matter how preposterous it is, just decide that we are going to live with it.
That’s a huge philosophical question, and it’s not going to be resolved probably for 10 or 20 years, if ever, into
the future, because it requires us to get to the point where we either say Einstein was wrong, the universe isn’t
sensible and so there was a choice about how you could have made it, in that once you say that things don’t
have to make sense, you can choose, like making up a story, you can make up whatever story you want and
you’ve just got to live with the fi nal result; or if there really is some grand scheme and it all does make sense
at some very fundamental level that we haven’t seen yet, that would also be a great thing to expose. But we are
not going to know, right? Because one of these paths, you can never prove, and the other one, well, you can say
it’s the most fundamental; but again, you never know that if 100 years from now somebody might discover:
well there’s a cellar under the basement, right, that there’s something more fundamental under that.
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