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One place this underestimate hurts, is judging the expertise adequate to create excellent insightful and accessible science education content. Say you want an

One place this underestimate hurts, is judging the expertise adequate to create excellent insightful and accessible science education content. Say you want an introduction to atoms for kindergarten. Surely a first-tier professor of physics is sufficient expertise for this, no? And yet, not so much. For example, it's possible to see an atomic nucleus with your naked eye. But only because their are a couple of oddballs, that can be made to fluoresce visibly. The very good rule of thumb is "high energy, can't see". And that's the confident answer you'll get from many a first-tier chemist and physicist. To reliably learn of the exception, you need someone whose focus is nucleus dynamics. A tiny community. But unless you engage them, you won't know you can include a "this is real! see the glowing dot!" photo. I don't know of any non-visitors at MIT with that focus. So my not-quite joke is that MIT has insufficient domain expertise to write a truly excellent kindergarten intro to atoms. One would need to draw on expertise more broadly for that. (A more common failure mode is being able to field cross-domain questions like "does this story convey the right insights? what might a better one look like?") So what might it take to pull together a massive breath of expertise to create content? The scale is daunting. A cell bio tome textbook publisher commented on their hundred+ authors, and I not-quite joked "great, and how many for the second page?". Incentives for researchers are a challenge. But a VR intro cell biology project, pulling in researchers with direct expertise for interviews, reported a recurring problem... of getting them to stop and leave. So intrinsic motivations are significant. Even recognition there's a need, let alone one worth funding, isn't well established. And the collaborative tech infrastructure to make this possible... that's not a small endeavor.

z2210558 6y ago
Can you give more detail about the fluorescing nucleus? I'm honestly amazed by this (and I have a degree in physics, which I guess is your point).
- mncharity 6y ago
  A couple of nuclei have spin-isomer (IIRC) decays that emit both the expected high-energy photon, but also a second visible one. I no longer remember which. :/ The challenge with seeing a single atom naked-eye, is getting visible photons fast enough. For some value of see - it's just a point source. I had a professor object "that's not seeing the nucleus - it's just a diffraction-limited dot". Funny thing was, they were about to travel to a big star party, to I guess "not see" stars. Sigh. Admittedly the argument for pedagogical value is limited. But at least the years-later long-exposure photo of a single atom was interesting enough for popular press. With an atom's electrons, the bottleneck is electron transition cycle time. So your photon budget is small and isotropic. And the retina requires localized hit(s) on deadline. With an pumped atom outside the eye, even with optics, my impression is you at best have a limits-of-perception experiment: "ok, I've a 50% confidence (my dark-adapted eyes) just saw a flash there". Nuclear transitions are plenty fast. But they're also higher energy, and you can't see X and gamma rays. Well, except for the flash of retinal cell death, as with cosmic rays in astronaut eyes. So with a nucleus that emits visible photons, you can tweeze, trap, strip and bombard an atom to fluorescence in a vacuum chamber, have a window that passes visible, and get a little dot, naked-eye visible with ambient room illumination. It's a cover photo somewhere IIRC, but I years back burned out on trying to re-find it. But it's a fun concept, isn't it? And makes for a compact example of needing expertise. More compact than say a marine bio professor, writing a children's picture book on photosynthesis, burning lab time to figuring out what bottlenecks world phytoplankton mass. But they're sort of toy examples. Real need is more like being able to ask "Instead of an atoms-up primary school learning progression, might we do nucleons-up to materials? What might that look like? What stories might we use? What cross-cutting ideas might tie it together?". I wish I knew how to make progress on this.

z2210558 6y ago

Can you give more detail about the fluorescing nucleus? I'm honestly amazed by this (and I have a degree in physics, which I guess is your point).

mncharity 6y ago
A couple of nuclei have spin-isomer (IIRC) decays that emit both the expected high-energy photon, but also a second visible one. I no longer remember which. :/ The challenge with seeing a single atom naked-eye, is getting visible photons fast enough. For some value of see - it's just a point source. I had a professor object "that's not seeing the nucleus - it's just a diffraction-limited dot". Funny thing was, they were about to travel to a big star party, to I guess "not see" stars. Sigh. Admittedly the argument for pedagogical value is limited. But at least the years-later long-exposure photo of a single atom was interesting enough for popular press. With an atom's electrons, the bottleneck is electron transition cycle time. So your photon budget is small and isotropic. And the retina requires localized hit(s) on deadline. With an pumped atom outside the eye, even with optics, my impression is you at best have a limits-of-perception experiment: "ok, I've a 50% confidence (my dark-adapted eyes) just saw a flash there". Nuclear transitions are plenty fast. But they're also higher energy, and you can't see X and gamma rays. Well, except for the flash of retinal cell death, as with cosmic rays in astronaut eyes. So with a nucleus that emits visible photons, you can tweeze, trap, strip and bombard an atom to fluorescence in a vacuum chamber, have a window that passes visible, and get a little dot, naked-eye visible with ambient room illumination. It's a cover photo somewhere IIRC, but I years back burned out on trying to re-find it. But it's a fun concept, isn't it? And makes for a compact example of needing expertise. More compact than say a marine bio professor, writing a children's picture book on photosynthesis, burning lab time to figuring out what bottlenecks world phytoplankton mass. But they're sort of toy examples. Real need is more like being able to ask "Instead of an atoms-up primary school learning progression, might we do nucleons-up to materials? What might that look like? What stories might we use? What cross-cutting ideas might tie it together?". I wish I knew how to make progress on this.