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New York Times Style Article |
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The last lab report is in the form of a "New York Times Science
Section" article: you are to write an interesting exposition of the experiment that
is understandable to someone with no science background. |
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What you should say |
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Envision your audience to be made up of intelligent and otherwise well-educated
non-physicists. Assume that they are interested in science, but they have limited
background. They will be intrigued by a compelling logical and historical
description of this phenomenon, but have no interest in verifying or reproducing your
work, especially its mathematical derivation.You should describe your research and
explain to the reader
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Why it is
interesting, |
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Why it is
important, and |
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What you found
out. |
You must make it clear what the importance of the experiment is: to
science, to society, to the reader. You should also explain why it is interesting:
is it an unexpected result, an important example, a fun sideline? Finally, you must
not only explain to your audience what you did, but also what you found out
and how you know. Motivate your results and make the justification
for each claim explicit.
Note that your topic does not need to be current to be interesting. People
always struggle to make their aritcles seem newsworthy: after all, if it's in a newspaper,
it should be new, right? In fact, you shouldn't bother. The
topics this class covers are of enduring human interest; they are the central mysteries of quantum mechanics and the basis for understanding the
physical world. (They may admittedly seem
less sublime when you are struggling with your data analysis :). You do not have to
make them new to make them important or interesting.
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How you should say it |
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You should say it graphically and with analogies.
Since you cannot use equations and since the last thing your reader wants to see is a
table of meaningless numbers, your task is to make graphics so compelling that they carry
the weight of your explanations. We'll once again urge that you examine the
wonderful books by Edward Tufte
on the subject.
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Excellent
graphs are nearly always multivariate. |
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Tell the truth
about the data. |
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Maximize the
data-ink ratio. |
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Details improve
credibility. |
A significant part of your lab (non-writing) grade will be on your data
presentation: how well you use visual methods to communicate information.
You may want to use analogies to explain tough points, but be sure that there is a point
to the analogy and explain where the analogy stops. It's
easy to find examples of analogies that are more clever than helpful. A well-chosen
reference to a point of universal experience, however, can help the reader get a grip on a
hard problem.
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Why you should care |
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Any job in physics, from research to industry to teaching, will require you to explain
technical results in a lucid manner. The methods you learn here - to communicate
ideas to people with little or no background and minimal motivation - should be applied to
every paper you write.
To see some examples of students who got it right, look at Art Blair's
(Fall 1997) Superconductivity
New York Times Article. It has some clever analogies and many helpful graphics,
and shows a good balance between theory and applications. Geoff Matthews' (Spring
98) Solar Spectra NYT
Article manages to make the solar spectrum experiment not only newsworthy but
hilarious. Especially note the last paragraph, which clearly lays out where the
support for scientific results arise.
This exercise should be fun -- but it shouldn't be easy. To
sucessfully explain a scientific topic to a lay audience, you will need to write well and
to reason well. It is a great chance to sharpen your technical writing skills, and you
will find that you never really understand a topic until you have clearly
explained it to someone else. |
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