The floor is yours.
Good. Can you hear me and see my slides? Yes, yes. Okay. Thank you. So yeah, I was
just I have some experience of writing. I'll say what that amounts to during the
talk. But I really just going to talk about science writers or science
scientists who writes and I guess if you get one thing from the talk, in the end,
you'll be really clear about what I think the differences. So here's his top four, I
see we have quite a lot of people connected. And it's kind of interesting
among giving a communications talk, you know, LSE physics meeting. So I have to
make some assumptions. It's obviously for you since you're listening, I hope you get
something from it. But who am I assuming you are? I'm assuming the idea sir,
essentially interested in particle physics, actually, particularly the Elysee
interested in science communication and interested in the writing aspects in
particular science communication, but there will be some very different mixes in
the audience. So there'll be some very experienced professionals. Some just
starting or thinking of starting. And I mean by that, you know, there'll be some
very experienced physicists and we're thinking of starting more communication
activities, probably some very experienced communications professionals who are maybe
not so experienced in physics or maybe a new to studying science communication
about particle physics. So that's who I think you are, who am I? This one, I'm
more sure. I guess. I'm a physicist on the ATLAS experiment, the LSE. I'm also an
academic in the UK. You've already seen the UCL logo a few times and I'm another
UCL person. We took over the city of education from the previous talk a couple
years ago.
We merged with
the UN I'm also an author. So as an author, that's multiple roles. We I
am an author of scientific papers, both as part of Atlas and previous large
collaborations, and also shorter author this papers. I'm an author of courses and
lectures in my teaching role at UCL. Both of undergraduate and postgraduate. I,
myself have not written any textbooks, or at least probably people in the audience
who haven't. It's an important aspect of writing for science communication. And I
also write on the science, about science. For the layperson. I have a blog column
articles and books. And it's this one that the main focus of the talk will be on,
although I say a little bit about the first two, what I am not as a journalist,
I don't do journalism. And this is something even I've written in a British
newspaper, not as a journalist. Obviously, journalism is very important, but it's a
different thing. I will say a little bit about it, because I've been on kind of the
receiving end of journalism. I've done many interviews with journalists and
things over the time. So I'll say a little bit about all four of these, sorry about
the helicopter in the background.
But I will focus on the third one.
So some I'm going to try and give you some personal experiences and opinions which
might be useful or interesting. I'm going to focus as I said, on writing for
laypeople. I hope for some challenge in this course. from people with different
experiences because I'm aware this is very much ad hominem This is about my personal
perspective. And many people have different journeys through this kind of
world. So one slide on journal papers. When we're writing scientific papers, we
give priority to important detail and avoidance of ambiguity. That said, we
still an ambiguity is a useful tool, sometimes in making people want to read
what you write. So we don't want that in our scientific papers. However, we should
still write them as if we want them to be read or readable. Not sure that's high
enough upon our agenda sometimes when we're writing these papers, but I think it
should be. And so in my view, actually a bit more clearly identified speculation
and enthusiasm in the discussion paths would sometimes be good. But it's very
difficult when you have a large author list. And of course, we have to be very
careful not to overhype our own results. The main point and point of these papers
is to report facts. left some courses, kind of similar in some ways in that it's
about communicating often quite technical detail. But I think as teachers, we all
place a lot more emphasis on engaging the enthusiasm and the activity of the
audience. Because as we papers, you can only do a certain amount by putting facts
in front of people, you need them to engage with them and digest them and
explore them. We hope our scientific colleagues are all teed up to do that when
they're reading the paper. We are trying to encourage our students to do the same
thing. Depending on the level, we have various levels of success. The
mathematical methods is quite a tricky one to do that with sometimes but that's what
that's our goal. Okay, so then the main core of the talk science for the
layperson. And this is really about my personal experiences. I'm not trying to
make any universal statement here, but I have I think there are some themes that
might be useful to people that might come out and just of interest maybe it all
started for me with life and physics.com WordPress blog that I wrote, and that
blog, in fact, stimulates you by a series of videos called colliding particles,
which you can still find on Vimeo there, which were funded by stfc, and directed
and filmed a marketer, Mike Patterson, not scripted, they were completely just, he
would point the camera at us and talk to us. And I featured my student at the time,
Adam Davidson, who's now head of data science at the economist, Gavin salon, who
many of you will know and Matthew Rubin who was his student at the time. And it
started in the run up to the LSE turn on, thousand seven, eight, finished just
included the fake turn on in 2000. In fact, it finished the stuff that Higgs
discovery and it was aimed in the UK at the kind of how science works, the
curriculum. So it wasn't about trying to teach people particle physics. He was
trying to teach people what scientific researches and how it works, which is was
very interesting, actually very good. But I started a blog down to try to explain
more what the science actually was because I got lots of particle physics. Questions
on the back of those videos. And the videos didn't really explain the particle
physics. So I was trying to do that in the blog. And it ended up also talking about
how science works. And it also ended up banging on about politics occasionally
because unfortunately it's not ignorable. And I still write it occasionally. And the
best thing about that whole experience is that we I got lots of feedback from
readers and plenty of time to try and what works with different audiences and what
doesn't, and also to learn that you can't possibly please everyone all the time.
Picture down on the right there, that's that's me on an aeroplane. If you remember
aeroplanes, we're trying to do some work. And that's the header of the blog page,
which is as it is now. And that's the kind of forward love that map picture is
something that we'll come back to shortly.
So the blog, then,
led to the guardian. The Guardian is one of the UK's leading national newspapers
with presence also the US Australia required Like, international readership,
The Guardian size team in 2010 ish with olive jar who's also now The Economist,
actually, who was keen on starting a blog network for the paper ideas sample, you
may have seen his book, The called massive, which was he was writing about
the Higgs before we actually found it. And he's a big fan of particle physics. So
they saw my WordPress blog initially bought some articles off me to post on the
guardian. And then in the end, they offered to host it. This is really good
experience. Some worries about whether you're actually displacing science
journalists by doing this, but they actually paid me for it a reasonable rate.
So we were not doing we're not undermining the, the living of journalists that way.
And also, as I say, we were not actually doing journalists. So journalism, so there
was a really quite a distinct role. This was reporting from the inside, not from
the outside. Journalists clearly have to retain some more distance from the subject
than I do. When I'm writing a blog. For instance, those article had a fantastic
experience a whole new bunch of reader feedback and chances to try things out
again and fail and fail better. Unfortunately, the new editor once on
Rusbridger left and the new editor eventually noticed this blog network, she
closed the whole thing down as part of the vision, I mean, it shouldn't really
complain because the garden is not at least not going bankrupt anymore. But it
was a bit of a shame. I think it was a missed opportunity. But I'm very grateful
for the seven years we've had doing that. And I carry on now In other media. So once
you get on a journalist contact list, of course, you will come back to so many
stories to consult and discuss sometimes not related. And it's quite important to
say no, this is not something I wish to talk about because either is stupid, or
there's 10 other people that are qualified here and I'll get I'll give you their
names. I've written for the new scientists, nature, news and views on
various others, but a lot of interviews and they're very different. The even if
the interview ends up being almost entirely things you said to the
journalist, you have no control over what they're going to say at some level, they
will sometimes fact check but there's no guarantee. So it's a little more nerve
wracking in some ways. And not just print media but this is also talking about TV
radio podcasts. We did horizon program on the Higgs and chat shows, which not that
many science chat shows, but there is one quite well known in the UK, which is the
infinite monkey cage and that's Robin Hanson, Brian Cox to do that. But transfer
Linda Burton run this thing called cosmic shambles with Robin, with a lot of overlap
with what the people including Brian have people who go on Infinite monkey cage, and
when the Guardian shut their
network down.
These guys basically took over at least the blog so they were going concerns that
they wanted including mine. There's a nice website mixes science, music and comedy
very active during the lockdown. They do podcasts and little video. It notes and
things as well. And as I say, they're now hosting several of the old Guardian books,
including mine. I don't actually use that really as a blog, though I tend to know
write articles for them that are more fully formed and use the blog is more of a
stream of consciousness stuff. And then finally books. I'll say a little bit about
how I got into but what I will say now, the key thing if you want to write a book
that people will actually read is, first of all, get an agent and then get an
editor. And I got an agent. This is at least my experience, I got an agent
because of the blog and the guardian. Because she saw as Diane banks have
nothing talents and facts, and she saw that I could write and saw that people
wanted to read what I could write. So I think the main message here is if you want
to write things, then start writing and put them out there for people to read and
learn the lessons and then you have a portfolio to show an agent and then the
agent. If they're good. We'll get you the editor, which is what Diane did for me. So
the first book I wrote with smashing physics, which is called most once a
particle in the United States and Canada is a member personal Academy, the Higgs
discovery. He drew heavily on the blog, although it was completely rewritten the
blog was a fantastic backbone for this. It was published by Hachette in the UK and
experiments a little publishing house in the US and translated into a few
languages. And as I said, the experience of writing this The concept was quite well
defined it was the editor was quite hands off, but obviously helpful because he
would, he helped me pull the background flesh out the backbone, if you like and
turn it into stuff people could understand give the book a more continuous narrative
on of the narrative was really provided by you know, the the point of the book is
what was it like to be involved in discovering the Higgs boson and that was
that's kind of writes itself in terms of the plot development there. But the editor
was fantastic and in basically tried to make sure that I didn't disappear into
physics and I was very keen not to be fascinated about this, I wanted to be
real, I wanted to give the real physics and the real experience. And as we know,
some of that can be difficult and elitist, and, and also boring sometimes, in fact,
having an editor, try to stop you doing all those things is very useful. And then
the second book, The only other one I've read so far was a map of the invisible,
which is called lots of land in the US and Canada and Italy and France. And this is a
more playful journey through particle physics is a lot less personal. It's not
really, I'm not really in this book, I'm all over the place in setting physics. And
it uses exploration of the metaphor is published by those people around the
world. And the concept in this case was a different publisher in the UK, in fact,
and the concept was developed much more in tandem with the editor and eventually with
the illustrator as well. And that was a very different experience and equally
interesting and rewarding, but very, very different. The industry This is where
these maps come from. This is drawn by Chris wormald, who's the illustrator that
does the book illustrations for Philip Pullman, His Dark Materials books, which I
was very honored to get him to draw physics. For me. This was a lot of fun
drawing this kind of stuff. And it seems to have seems to work well in terms of
making people less frightened of reading about particle physics because they see
the cartoons, this kind of Tolkien esque map. So they're so I'm aware that a lot of
that is very individual and just about where I happen to do this, but maybe,
maybe in different we do collect enough anecdotes, we do get some kind of data.
I'm not sure about that. But I think there are some thoughts and conclusions
absolutely worth drawing from it. Writing from the public for the public is hard
work, but it's enjoyable, at least. I don't think you should probably do it if
you don't enjoy it, and I do very much. I find it really rewarding and interesting
to see professional editors, journalists, agents, publicists the work may come as a
shock to us particle physicists can do everything. We are very smart, but we
don't know anything. It's seriously been a real privilege working with some of the
people involved in these fields.
More Personally, I find the writing code and papers competes directly with writing
other stuff. So those books and most of the blog were written while I was doing
more management roles, I was head of department at UCL. And that was before
that it was head of a physics group on Atlas. And I didn't have my own live
analysis, then I wasn't actually writing science paper. Because myself I was more
overseeing, facilitating other people doing that. Now, after a year sabbatical,
stepping down from those and writing a lot more science and a lot more code. And I'm
finding it much harder to actually write other things. I hope that changes at some
point, I hope I can manage to do both. But I find I'm using the same creativity when
I spend the day right doing writing code and doing physics. I'm too tired to write
a blog. Whereas when I spent a day in management meetings, I was kind of eager
to write the blog. It's an interesting class I didn't really expect that I must
say. And finally, I haven't really talked about science writers and journalists in
general, I think I have enormous respect for the writers who research new areas,
and then write about them. And people like Philip ball, and Jim Baggett and various
other people in our area who do this, I really only write about my own research.
So I've done most of the hard work already, because that's my job as a
particle physicist. And then all I have to do is put it down on paper. So I think
this is the thing about scientists who write and science writers, I am a
scientist who can write hopefully reasonably well, about my own stuff. But
that's very different from writing about someone else's stuff, which means you also
have to understand it. You have to go out there and research the topic before you
write the data. And research is obviously made in particle physics is obviously my
day job. So it's done already. Okay, I hope that was useful and interesting to
sort of you, I'm happy to talk about
Thank you very much. Do we have a couple of questions about writing about science,
science writing?
See, there is one. Okay. So Matthew.
I was just interested in how, at this point, there have been lots of books
written about astrophysics in our field. And it seems that, you know, ground has
been covered. So, whoo, how do you find something new to write about, or how do
you find something, a way to put things across that hasn't been done before?
Yeah, I wish I wish knew how to do that reliably because there's a reason I've
ever heard, because I can't think of a new angle. You're absolutely right. A lot of
things have been done. I mean, the first book, that was a no brainer, because well,
first of all, the Higgs discovery was new, and no one had written about it that
anyway, lots of people were, of course, but no one had. So I had like the unit, it
was a personal account. And that was good. And that was clear. The second one was how
to work. And that's why, as I said, the concept was kicked around more with the
editor. I think in that case, I was a little fed up of the fact that the idea
that we're, we're taking off boxes in the theoretical world, you know, that we tick
a box with the Higgs and things and I wanted to really use a metaphor for
exploration, which is actually a metaphor I use in my own work and I use in
seminars, and I felt that that was under not not fully not well enough understood.
We, a lot of popular science books talk about the fundamental. You're going to
prove string theory, you're going to prove that The existence of this kind of stuff.
And I wanted to make the point that actually we're exploring that. So that was
the underlying idea. And the maps was just a joy when we came up with that idea that
was actually in discussion with the editor, that we came up with that idea,
and then he found the illustrator. So those two things work that way. I haven't
most of a preferred way of working. So if you've got a good idea, go for it.
All right, then, maybe in the interest of time, if there's any other questions
coming up for john, then we can maybe take them after everyone gave their talk.
Thanks again, john. Okay, and then we can come to alter. Another aspect of doing
outreach we thought is networks national networks and