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I work for a physics journal and when we make articles for the public to describe findings we have the opposite problem when it comes to authors. Scientists esp

I work for a physics journal and when we make articles for the public to describe findings we have the opposite problem when it comes to authors. Scientists especially in theory are reluctant to ascribe much at all to their research other than the phenomenon shown. In research this is a good thing, but when we want to show the public what these very theoretical or specialist discoveries mean to our total understanding of physics it is not as helpful. Just getting anyone to speculate what a finding means is hard. In this case, this is something that might explain a CP violation that can explain why we exist in a universe of matter. To a physicist, explaining it is a CP violation is grandiose enough. But in reality the title is not at all misleading as CP parity is one of the biggest unsolved problems in physics, and yes it is a mystery as to why we have a universe of matter that exists. So while it may seem ambitious to a person in the field, it is indeed truthful and exciting research.

yk 9y ago
Quite simply, when the specialist tell you that it is not news worthy, then it is probably not news worthy. Otherwise we get all these new particle discovered clickbait, where the journalists just neglect to mention that the "particle" in question is a compound state that was well studied in the 60ies or that the particle in question is just an oscillation mode of a crystal. (I am not joking, both are examples that were well upvoted on HN.) And that is just the ideal case, where journalists report on experiments. In theory most articles are just as interesting as someone created a branch on a github project, that is the very first step towards something that may develop into something interesting, or it may not. So yeah, "just getting anyone to speculate what a finding means is hard," because everybody knows that science journalists try to feed the public bullshit. Seriously, every single climate change denier I ever discussed with has given me page after page of links to popular science reporting where the entire problem was, that the journalist found someone who was willing to speculate and these speculations turned out to be wrong.

yk 9y ago

Quite simply, when the specialist tell you that it is not news worthy, then it is probably not news worthy. Otherwise we get all these new particle discovered clickbait, where the journalists just neglect to mention that the "particle" in question is a compound state that was well studied in the 60ies or that the particle in question is just an oscillation mode of a crystal. (I am not joking, both are examples that were well upvoted on HN.) And that is just the ideal case, where journalists report on experiments. In theory most articles are just as interesting as someone created a branch on a github project, that is the very first step towards something that may develop into something interesting, or it may not. So yeah, "just getting anyone to speculate what a finding means is hard," because everybody knows that science journalists try to feed the public bullshit. Seriously, every single climate change denier I ever discussed with has given me page after page of links to popular science reporting where the entire problem was, that the journalist found someone who was willing to speculate and these speculations turned out to be wrong.