Are lay person questions annoying to professional scientists?

[Galteeth]

I am a "lay" person. I understand that I lack the mathematics knowledge necesary to fully understand advanced concepts in physics. Nevertheless, I find theoretical physics fascinating, and want to learn more. I have learned much from reading this board, and then using what i have read as a jump-off to look more deeply into topics. It is possible to have a general understanding of something (like relativity for example) without knowing all the specific math.

Do the physicists here find it frustrating when people are looking for non-techinal answers?

EDIT: There are also ALOT of misconceptions about physics amongst the general public! Even amongst science teachers!

 

[Pengwuino]

This question irritates me.

hehe :)

I think most people here enjoy helping people further their understanding. If anything, I only notice people get irritated when "lay" person thinks their uneducated ideas are correct and fiercly defend them in the face of people who have spent many years or decades researching and living in the field. Of course, when I say uneducated, i literally mean ideas from people who simply have no formal training, just like i have uneducated ideas about... art history or something.

 

[Pythagorean]

I think it's a case-by-case thing.

There's some cases where you can call on Einstein:
"You do not really understand something unless you can explain it to your grandmother. "

In which case, the only physicists that get frustrated by the question are the ones that don't really understand the answer.

But there's a lot of things in quantum physics that aren't graspable in an intuitive way, so we can call on Schroedinger:
"If you think you fully understand quantum mechanics...then you haven't thought about it hard enough."

 

[arunma]

Nah, I don't get annoyed by laypeople. The exception, which Pengwuino mentioned, is when they starte defending ideas that are just plain wrong. Once in awhile, somebody will send a random email to people in my physics department, pitching their latest idea. Just last week someone sent an email to all of the grad students in the physics department, suggesting that the Sun was the only luminous body in the universe, and that everything we see in space is the result of reflections from a "space mirror." That sort of stuff does tick me off. But for the most part, I'm always happy to explain physics to laypeople.

 

[turbo]

There are some professionals in every field that are quite accessible and friendly. If they have the time and see some value in your question, you're probably not annoying them. Years back, I had written a letter to a popular magazine on astronomy, and referenced the work of a professional astronomer WRT to the subject matter of a recent article. A couple of weeks later, there was an air-mail envelope in my mailbox from said astronomer with a nice long personal letter addressing the subject matter and giving me encouragement along with some additional insights regarding the current state of the research.

Another time, I emailed a researcher, who was working in NASA's propulsion breakthrough project at the time, with a question regarding the nature of vacuum. That started a months-long chain of correspondence regarding the expectation value of the vacuum energy, possible tests, theoretical considerations that might shed light on why the observed vacuum energy (in conventional cosmology) appears to be suppressed by >120 OOM...

I'm not saying that you should pester experts in a field that you are interested in, but there are professionals who welcome contact. I did not initiate contact in the first instance, and asked just one simple question about a published paper in the second instance, only to find our correspondence going far afield and much deeper as the exchange progressed.

 

[Galteeth]

Ok, thanks. I wasn't going to be writing letters to people, more so posting questions on this forum.

 

[ZapperZ]

I am a "lay" person. I understand that I lack the mathematics knowledge necesary to fully understand advanced concepts in physics. Nevertheless, I find theoretical physics fascinating, and want to learn more. I have learned much from reading this board, and then using what i have read as a jump-off to look more deeply into topics. It is possible to have a general understanding of something (like relativity for example) without knowing all the specific math.

Do the physicists here find it frustrating when people are looking for non-techinal answers?

EDIT: There are also ALOT of misconceptions about physics amongst the general public! Even amongst science teachers!

Yes, and No.

First of all, I do a lot of outreach program, and I also host many "tours" by students and general public to the facility that I work in. I've enjoyed interactions with the "lay person" a lot, so much so that I've volunteered my time as much as I can for such causes. Our Open House at Argonne last month was a tremendous success, and I think both the scientists and the public got a lot out of such event. So no, in these cases, I don't mind them asking such questions. After all, it is their opportunity to get answers directly from the experts without having them reported by another person in the media. In my opinion, the more the general public get access to the experts, the better informed they will be.

The "No" part is when the "lay person" either already has an "agenda" or a particular point of view about certain things stuck in his/her head. This is worse when the question isn't that easy to answer mainly because it requires a lot of "prerequisites" to explain something clearly. The issue of the LHC and "catastrophic black hole" is one example that I can think of. I've had people who clearly want to know about this, and I've had others who had already made up their minds that physicists are going to destroy the world, no matter what answer I gave them. The latter annoys me mainly because I've just wasted my time and effort for nothing. I can't even carry a rational discussion with them. If this was a disagreement between physicists, I could at least argue something based on physics grounds. But how does one do that with a lay person when you know it will go well over his/her head?

The other thing that often annoys me is when a lay person gets "defensive" when I come back and ask him/her to clarify the question. For example, the question "Is the electron real?" (or whatever entity of the month is) will always get a response from me with another question "What do you mean by real? Is your mother real? What criteria do you use to know that she's real?" Inevitably, someone gets annoyed by that as if I'm evading the question, whereas all I'm trying to understand is to what extend does this person even understands his/her own question, and whether he/she has a set of criteria or a set of entities that has already been accepted as being "real". My approach has always been to use what that person knows, at the level that he/she knows, and use that as the foundation to explain and answer the question. So if this person says "My mother is real because such and such", then you can use that criteria to make a comparison with how we know about the properties of an electron. Knowing what the question is is one of the most important aspect of physics, because we need to clearly define what we are trying to seek the answer to. It is how many revolutionary aspect of physics came about, when we realize that our questions in certain situation simply make no sense, or invalid, and we must redefine them to learn more.

Interestingly enough, this last part is also the http://news.cnet.com/8301-13772_3-10364928-52.html?tag=TOCmoreStories.0"! Read the last part of the article:

"The most important thing to get straight is the question you're trying to ask in the first place," Hyneman said. "It seems like a simple thing, but it's hard to get to that point and, a lot of times now, we're spending much more time defining that question before we do anything else."

So this isn't unique to physics, but rather a characteristics of trying to get answers out of a complex idea or situation.

Zz.

 

[WhoWee]

I've found that if you engage by asking questions you can participate in nearly any thread on PF. If you are courteous, more often than not, someone will take the time to explain complicated posts.

 

[maverick_starstrider]

It depends really on how the question is asked. I find explaining things to people whose agenda it is to NOT understand something very frustrating.

 

[Moonbear]

I agree with the others who have responded. If you are just genuinely trying to increase your understanding, and just ask for things to be explained in a more non-technical way, that is just fine. I enjoy being able to educate the general public about science, and am even chairing a fairly newly formed committee in our department that now coordinates the outreach activities of our departmental faculty.

As others have pointed out, if the questions are less about learning, and more about trying to tell us how someone undereducated in the sciences thinks something should be, and looking for verification rather than accepting they may be completely wrong in their understanding, then it gets annoying.

 

[Pengwuino]

But there's a lot of things in quantum physics that aren't graspable in an intuitive way, so we can call on Schroedinger:
"If you think you fully understand quantum mechanics...then you haven't thought about it hard enough."

Reminds me of a quote i heard that went something to the effect of "The number of people who truly understand General Relativity can be counted on your hand. The number of people who truly understand Quantum Mechanics is 0, including the people who created it."

 

[Galteeth]

Reminds me of a quote i heard that went something to the effect of "The number of people who truly understand General Relativity can be counted on your hand. The number of people who truly understand Quantum Mechanics is 0, including the people who created it."

And what they're talking about there is that the nature of "observation" isn't well defined in the theory?

 

[maverick_starstrider]

Reminds me of a quote i heard that went something to the effect of "The number of people who truly understand General Relativity can be counted on your hand. The number of people who truly understand Quantum Mechanics is 0, including the people who created it."

Blah. I hate quotes like that. GR and QFT are perfectly well "understood" in the sense that we use the word. Did we ever know WHY the universe obeyed Newton's Laws? No. But we said it was "understandable" to us. How is quantum or GR any different. We have a nearly complete and incredibly accurate and predictive theory. How is that not understanding? We never understood the epistemological or ontological.

 

[maverick_starstrider]

I've always found the person who reads "Elegant Universe" or a "Brief History of Time" to be incredibly annoying. Those book make a person feel like they've conveyed so much when they've really conveyed so little. Not that I'm saying that a better layman book could be written but it's the nature of knowledge and understanding that it only comes with time, patience and discipline. There's no short cut to intuition of advanced physics/mathematics.

 

[Pythagorean]

Blah. I hate quotes like that. GR and QFT are perfectly well "understood" in the sense that we use the word. Did we ever know WHY the universe obeyed Newton's Laws? No. But we said it was "understandable" to us. How is quantum or GR any different. We have a nearly complete and incredibly accurate and predictive theory. How is that not understanding? We never understood the epistemological or ontological.

'Understanding' is meant as 'intuitive' here...

F=ma is incredibly intuitive... Schroedinger's equation is not. This may be a matter of personal intuition, but I can understand how the same force results in a lower acceleration in bigger masses. I experience it every day. I'm used to it. It's familiar. That's the point. The model of probability wave functions... not so intuitive.

 

[maverick_starstrider]

'Understanding' is meant as 'intuitive' here...

F=ma is incredibly intuitive... Schroedinger's equation is not. This may be a matter of personal intuition, but I can understand how the same force results in a lower acceleration in bigger masses. I experience it every day. I'm used to it. It's familiar. That's the point. The model of probability wave functions... not so intuitive.

Yes, but last time I checked "repetitive experience with" was not synonymous with "understanding"

 

[Pythagorean]

Yes, but last time I checked "repetitive experience with" was not synonymous with "understanding"

you're being difficult... obviously you don't 'repetitive experience' my point.

 

[Vanadium 50]

As others have pointed out, if the questions are less about learning, and more about trying to tell us how someone undereducated in the sciences thinks something should be, and looking for verification rather than accepting they may be completely wrong in their understanding, then it gets annoying.

I was going to write something, but couldn't possibly have expressed my thoughts this well. Bravo.

 

[ZapperZ]

Blah. I hate quotes like that. GR and QFT are perfectly well "understood" in the sense that we use the word. Did we ever know WHY the universe obeyed Newton's Laws? No. But we said it was "understandable" to us. How is quantum or GR any different. We have a nearly complete and incredibly accurate and predictive theory. How is that not understanding? We never understood the epistemological or ontological.

I concur with maverick. It is irresponsible to make statements like that, and certainly, perpetuating it without CONTEXT. Why? Because the term "understood" means different things to different people, just like the word "theory". It can be bastardized.

Would you want to put your life and the lives of your loved ones based on something that we don't understand? I don't understand medicine. Would you want me to perform surgery on you? Yet, you DO put your lives on many things that are based on Quantum Mechanics! So the people who utter such things have to do a lot of serious explanation on such a paradoxical statement. And if someone tells me that Feynman himself said something like that without citing the context of that quote, I'll smack that person on the back of his/her head! Would Feynman claim that they gave him the Nobel Prize for doing something he didn't understand? Seriously?! He did, after all, got the award for his work in QED!

Zz.

 

[ZapperZ]

The next off-topic, catfight post will get a very generous infraction! Never say that you haven't been warned.

Zz.

 

[maverick_starstrider]

The next off-topic, catfight post will get a very generous infraction! Never say that you haven't been warned.

Zz.

What. I think it very much plays into the discussion of whether "lay person questions are annoying to professional scientists". It's irritating if you've gotten your thinking all tied up in knots because you've been avoiding putting in the time to learn things quantitatively. Then you're essentially asking the "expert" to put in the effort so you don't have to.

 

[leroyjenkens]

The next off-topic, catfight post will get a very generous infraction! Never say that you haven't been warned.

Zz.

Calm down, you could have said something before. My first response was perfectly relevant to the thread. It was the others that were backing up some irrational guy with a short fuse that made it into a "catfight".

 

[ZapperZ]

What. I think it very much plays into the discussion of whether "lay person questions are annoying to professional scientists". It's irritating if you've gotten your thinking all tied up in knots because you've been avoiding putting in the time to learn things quantitatively. Then you're essentially asking the "expert" to put in the effort so you don't have to.

I know it's frustrating, and I agree with you. However, the discussion you two were having veered also into the content of the question. I would suggest you continue this in the thread in question. Besides, the "discussion" was getting nasty, and there's enough material there already to send out infractions to a number of people. We don't want that, do we?

Zz.

 

[ZapperZ]

Calm down, you could have said something before. My first response was perfectly relevant to the thread. It was the others that were backing up some irrational guy with a short fuse that made it into a "catfight".

I DID say something before, right after your LAST post!

Zz.

 

[Pengwuino]

Oh man too bad one of those posts was deleted because it had something I'd like to have quoted. The poster said it wasn't easy to give an explanation of something in 10 minutes that takes 15 years to understand on your own. I need to remember that next time someone asks me about GR or ST. Then i can go on to say since I'm only 23, I do not have the requisite 15 years to answer their question and walk off.

 

[leroyjenkens]

I know it's frustrating, and I agree with you.

Pretty much everything can be explained in really simple terms. If you find it frustrating that you can't seem to dumb it down enough for somebody, then it's not the fact that it can't be dumbed down anymore, it's the fact that YOU don't know how to dumb it down anymore. That's a problem with your teaching skills.
I can watch a Nova science now episode on anything and I'll understand it completely. They make everything easy to understand.

Besides, the "discussion" was getting nasty, and there's enough material there already to send out infractions to a number of people.

There was no name calling or anything. It was pretty civil. What forum rules were we breaking?

I DID say something before, right after your LAST post!

I didn't see it. I posted, came back a few minutes later, still seeing leroyjenkens as the last poster on the topic list, then suddenly I saw yours which was after you deleted the posts and issued the threat.

 

[maverick_starstrider]

Oh man too bad one of those posts was deleted because it had something I'd like to have quoted. The poster said it wasn't easy to give an explanation of something in 10 minutes that takes 15 years to understand on your own. I need to remember that next time someone asks me about GR or ST. Then i can go on to say since I'm only 23, I do not have the requisite 15 years to answer their question and walk off.

Well I was counting from around high school math and science. In which case you've probably got 11 years (bow before my whopping 12 ;)). Anyways, I used to TA a drop-in centre for first year physics and the worst students for getting on my nerves were those who had an attitude that they were entitled to an answer and just zoned out through explanation and would say things like "I don't think we're supposed to know that, it wasn't covered in the lectures". That being said all around I really liked doing the drop-in centre (over the alternatives of lab TA or marking TA). It keeps you quick on your feet having all these random questions coming at you (a lot of students would ask about stuff that had nothing to do with the course material).

 

[ZapperZ]

Pretty much everything can be explained in really simple terms. If you find it frustrating that you can't seem to dumb it down enough for somebody, then it's not the fact that it can't be dumbed down anymore, it's the fact that YOU don't know how to dumb it down anymore. That's a problem with your teaching skills.
I can watch a Nova science now episode on anything and I'll understand it completely. They make everything easy to understand.

There was no name calling or anything. It was pretty civil. What forum rules were we breaking?

I didn't see it. I posted, came back a few minutes later, still seeing leroyjenkens as the last poster on the topic list, then suddenly I saw yours which was after you deleted the posts and issued the threat.

Please note that I haven't sent anyone anything yet. Continue with this and that will change very quickly.

Zz.

 

[maverick_starstrider]

Pretty much everything can be explained in really simple terms. If you find it frustrating that you can't seem to dumb it down enough for somebody, then it's not the fact that it can't be dumbed down anymore, it's the fact that YOU don't know how to dumb it down anymore. That's a problem with your teaching skills.
I can watch a Nova science now episode on anything and I'll understand it completely. They make everything easy to understand.

There was no name calling or anything. It was pretty civil. What forum rules were we breaking?

I didn't see it. I posted, came back a few minutes later, still seeing leroyjenkens as the last poster on the topic list, then suddenly I saw yours which was after you deleted the posts and issued the threat.

But that's kinda the point. You DON'T understand anything from a NOVA program. They may get you INTERESTED in knowing but they don't TEACH anything. I remember I came across "the ghost particle" (a NOVA episode on the neutrino) and it was so watered down that there was really nothing to be learned about the neutrino in it (although I did learn about Kamiokande which is crazy).

Saying "string theory is a potential unification theory that posits the existence of one dimensional strings vibrating in higher dimensional space" does absolutely zilch for understanding. The program could then tell you that string theories require higher dimensions and you may catalogue that away as "knowledge" but there's no understanding of why such a thing should be true, what is meant by doing that, etc. I always wonder with things like the "bowling ball on a rubber sheet" analogy to GR whether it's doing more harm then good.

 

[leroyjenkens]

Please note that I haven't sent anyone anything yet. Continue with this and that will change very quickly.

What are you doing? You basically said we were breaking the rules but won't tell me what rules we were breaking.
The catfight is done. You got your wish. Now what do you want me to do? Stop talking completely?

Sorry maverick, I can't continue the discussion. It was nice while it lasted.

 

[Evo]

Thread locked pending my moderation decision. Has anyone else not read the guidelines? There is a link at the top that says "Rules".