FOEP at the Virtual March and April Meetings 2020

The physics community as a whole is very lucky to have many gems still shared from APS’ quick turn around of creating a virtual depository for the March meeting. If you have not seen their virtual website, you should! The virtual March meeting site is at: https://virtualmarchmeeting.com/. The Virtual April Meeting has some wonderful presentations and posters as well: https://april.aps.org/about/virtual/.

Although FOEPs sessions were cancelled for both meetings, we hope to have many of our speakers appear in 2021. One thing that went very well was submissions for FOEPs Thing Explain.

Thing Explain Your Research

Sponsored by the APS Forum on Outreach and Engaging the Public
Thanks to James Kakalios, Jon Schuller, Rebecca Thompson

PHYSICS – MADE SIMPLE…. TOO SIMPLE!

Physicists routinely employ technical language when discussing their research, but often this terminology is a barrier when communicating our results with the general public. The Forum on Outreach and Engaging the Public of the APS has challenged physicists to explain their work in simple words. VERY simple words. They were asked to translate their research titles using ONLY the one thousand most commonly used words in the English language.

Inspired by Randall Munroe’s book “Thing Explainer: Complicated Stuff in Simple Words,” physicists were asked to translate the title of one of their talks at the March meeting (contributed or invited), but they could ONLY use the 1000 most common words in English, as found at https://splasho.com/upgoer5/!

(Warning: this list does NOT include the words: Topological, Insulator, or Graphene.)
We received MANY great submissions, and a panel selected a Baker’s Dozen of Thing Explained titles for a contest

Each Thing Explain title would be paired with the actual title of the researcher’s talk, along with two other titles from the same session at the APS March Meeting

A panel of Awesome Judges: John Anderson, Dennis Overbye, Diandra Leslie-Pelecy, Michael Rudolph and Ainissa Ramirez, would then guess which actual title corresponded to the Thing Explained title.

Contestants would win fabulous prizes, and illustrate the challenges of science communication We were all set for a public event Wednesday evening, March 5 at the APS meeting, and then……

The March Meeting was cancelled over concerns regarding the COVID-19 coronavirus. But we had these great submissions – and we are all set for a contest. So, instead of a panel of judges, why not have YOU be the judge?

What follows is some of what we would have used at the THING EXPLAIN YOUR RESEARCH event. Only now, you have to guess which is the correct title.

Keep track of your score, and see how you rank as a “Science Translator”

A few of the Thing Explained title submissions are on the left and the actual titles are somewhere on the right. Match the real title to the submission and see how you did. (View answers and scoring)

Ready, Fearless Reader? Let’s Get to Work!

  1. Using really small guns to find out how heavy a thing is by looking at just one bit of the thing at a time
  2. Studying a Thing with Uses in Tomorrow's Computers by Hitting it with Other Stuff
  3. The getting wider and drying of drops sitting on a table
  4. Hot stuff carried by bits of sound shakes around when it goes through some stuff that can pick up other like stuff
  5. Explaining Different Stuff with the Same Thing
  6. See small things that move! They will do the work for us, If we can find them.
  7. Pulling over and over "the thing we love the most" makes its life-lines straight
  8. Looking at and pulling on the body's building blocks, one at a time
  9. Lock the ball with full of cool way; Fa la la la la la, la la la. Flip the bit with brush of shock in; Fa la la la la la, la la la.
  10. Some places are better than others. If there are too many couples, they can dance in two rooms instead of one and things can become hot
  11. Why do balls get stuck when you try to push them through a box of rocks?
  12. Looking at things which are locked together in a confusing way using other things which are locked together in a confusing way
  13. How to make the very, very tiny bits in the stuff-we-study ride clean waves, that repeat over and over again, and look exactly how we want them to look by putting the stuff-westudy between other things like it while keeping every layer completely straight
  1. Interrogating Entangled Matter with Entangled Probes
  2. Interrogating collagen mechanics at the single-molecule level
  3. Characterizing the Superconducting State of CuxBi2Se3 Through Muon-Spin Relaxation/Rotation
  4. Periodically strained graphene lattice: flat bands
  5. A doping-dependent switch from one- to two-component electron-hole superfluidity with high transition temperatures in coupled TMD monolayers
  6. Engineering Low-Disorder Superlattice Potentials in Graphene-Based Van der Waals
  7. Relating Electrical Properties of Highly Disordered Insulating Materials via the Dispersion
  8. Magneto-oscillations in the Thermal Conductivity of Kitaev Magnet RuCl3
  9. Single-Molecule Sensitivity in Mass Spectrometry Using Nanoscale Ion Sources
  10. Intruder dynamics in a 2D granular system: Effects of dynamic and static basal friction
  11. Electric field manipulation of the molecular spin state of a Fe(II) spin crossover complex
  12. Capturing In Operando Electronic Structure of Microscopic 2D Materials
  13. Spreading and evaporation of sessile droplets

Disclaimer – The articles and opinion pieces found in this issue of the APS Forum on Outreach & Engagement Newsletter are not peer refereed and represent solely the views of the authors and not necessarily the views of the APS.