Several years ago I was sitting at the back of a classroom supporting a newly qualified science teacher. The lesson was going well, a pretty standard class on Hooke’s law, when a student leaned over to me and asked “Why are we doing this? What’s the point?”.

Having taught myself, this was a question I had been asked many times before. I suspect that when I was a teacher, I went for the knee-jerk “it’s useful if you want to be an engineer” response, or something similar. This isn’t a very satisfying answer, but I never really had the time to formulate a real justification for studying Hooke’s law, or physics in general for that matter.

Who is the physics curriculum designed for? Should it be designed for the small number of students who will pursue the subject, or subjects allied to it, at the post-16 and post-18 level? Or should we be reflecting on the needs of the overwhelming majority who will never use most of the curriculum content again? Only about 10% of students pursue physics or physics-rich subjects post-16 in England, and at degree level, only around 4000 students graduate with physics degrees in the UK each year.

One argument often levelled at me is that learning this is “useful”, to which I retort – in a similar vein to the student from the first paragraph – “In what way?” In the 40 years or so since first learning Hooke’s law, I can’t remember ever explicitly using it in my everyday life, despite being a physicist. Whenever I give a talk on this subject, someone often pipes up with a tenuous example, but I suspect they are in the minority. An audience member once said they consider the elastic behaviour of wire when hanging pictures, but I suspect that many thousands of pictures have been successfully hung with no recourse to F = –kx.

Hooke’s law is incredibly important in engineering but, again, most students will not become engineers or rely on a knowledge of the properties of springs, unless they get themselves a job in a mattress factory.

From a personal perspective, Hooke’s law fascinates me. I find it remarkable that we can see the macroscopic properties of materials being governed by microscopic interactions and that this can be expressed in a simple linear form. There is no utilitarianism in this, simply awe, wonder and aesthetics. I would always share this “joy of physics” with my students, and it was incredibly rewarding when this was reciprocated. But for many, if not most, my personal perspective was largely irrelevant, and they knew that the curriculum content would not directly support them in their future careers.

At this point, I should declare my position – I don’t think we should take Hooke’s law, or physics, off the curriculum, but my reason is not the one often given to students.

A series of lessons on Hooke’s law is likely to include: experimental design; setting up and using equipment; collecting numerical data using a range of devices; recording and presenting data, including graphs; interpreting data; modelling data and testing theories; devising evidence-based explanations; communicating ideas; evaluating procedures; critically appraising data; collaborating with others; and working safely.

Science education must be about preparing young people to be active and critical members of a democracy, equipped with the skills and confidence to engage with complex arguments that will shape their lives. For most students, this is the most valuable lesson they will take away from Hooke’s law. We should encourage students to find our subject fascinating and relevant, and in doing so make them receptive to the acquisition of scientific knowledge throughout their lives.

At a time when pressures on the education system are greater than ever, we must be able to articulate and justify our position within a crowded curriculum. I don’t believe that students should simply accept that they should learn something because it is on a specification. But they do deserve a coherent reason that relates to their lives and their careers. As science educators, we owe it to our students to have an authentic justification for what we are asking them to do. As physicists, even those who don’t have to field tricky questions from bored teenagers, I think it’s worthwhile for all of us to ask ourselves how we would answer the question “What is the point of this?”.

The post ‘Why do we have to learn this?’ A physics educator’s response to every teacher’s least favourite question appeared first on Physics World.

As proclaimed by the United Nations, 2025 is the International Year of Quantum Science and Technology, or IYQ for short. This year was chosen because it marks the 100th anniversary of Werner Heisenberg’s development of matrix mechanics – the first consistent mathematical description of quantum physics.

Our guest in this episode of the Physics World Weekly podcast is the Turkish quantum physicist Mete Atatüre, who heads up the Cavendish Laboratory at the UK’s University of Cambridge.

In a conversation with Physics World’s Katherine Skipper, Atatüre talks about hosting Quantour, the quantum light source that is IYQ’s version of the Olympic torch. He also talks about his group’s research on quantum sensors and quantum networks.

• There is much more about Heisenberg’s mathematical breakthrough in quantum physics here: “Return to Helgoland: celebrating 100 years of quantum mechanics”.

The post International Year of Quantum Science and Technology: our celebrations begin with a look at quantum networks and sensors appeared first on Physics World.

Each year, the International Association of Physics Students organizes a physics competition for bachelor’s and master’s students from across the world. Known as the Physics League Across Numerous Countries for Kick-ass Students (PLANCKS), it’s a three-day event where teams of three to four students compete to answer challenging physics questions.

In the UK and Ireland, teams compete in a preliminary competition to be sent to the final. Here are some fiendish questions from past PLANCKS UK and Ireland preliminaries and the 2024 final in Dublin, written by Anthony Quinlan and Sam Carr, for you to try this holiday season.

Question 1: 4D Sun

Imagine you have been transported to another universe with four spatial dimensions. What would the colour of the Sun be in this four-dimensional universe? You may assume that the surface temperature of the Sun is the same as in our universe and is approximately T = 6 × 10³ K. [10 marks]

Boltzmann constant, k_B = 1.38 × 10⁻²³ J K⁻¹

Speed of light, c = 3 × 10⁸ m s⁻¹

Question 2: Heavy stuff

In a parallel universe, two point masses, each of 1 kg, start at rest a distance of 1 m apart. The only force on them is their mutual gravitational attraction, F = –Gm₁m₂/r². If it takes 26 hours and 42 minutes for the two masses to meet in the middle, calculate the value of the gravitational constant G in this universe. [10 marks]

Question 3: Just like clockwork

Consider a pendulum clock that is accurate on the Earth’s surface. Figure 1 shows a simplified view of this mechanism.

A pendulum clock runs on the gravitational potential energy from a hanging mass (1). The other components of the clock mechanism regulate the speed at which the mass falls so that it releases its gravitational potential energy over the course of a day. This is achieved using a swinging pendulum of length l (2), whose period is given by

$T=2\pi \sqrt{\frac{l}{g}}$

where g is the acceleration due to gravity.

Each time the pendulum swings, it rocks a mechanism called an “escapement” (3). When the escapement moves, the gear attached to the mass (4) is released. The mass falls freely until the pendulum swings back and the escapement catches the gear again. The motion of the falling mass transfers energy to the escapement, which gives a “kick” to the pendulum that keeps it moving throughout the day.

Radius of the Earth, R = 6.3781 × 10⁶ m

Period of one Earth day, τ₀ = 8.64 × 10⁴ s

How slow will the clock be over the course of a day if it is lifted to the hundredth floor of a skyscraper? Assume the height of each storey is 3 m. [4 marks]

Question 4: Quantum stick

Imagine an infinitely thin stick of length 1 m and mass 1 kg that is balanced on its end. Classically this is an unstable equilibrium, although the stick will stay there forever if it is perfectly balanced. However, in quantum mechanics there is no such thing as perfectly balanced due to the uncertainty principle – you cannot have the stick perfectly upright and not moving at the same time. One could argue that the quantum mechanical effects of the uncertainty principle on the system are overpowered by others, such as air molecules and photons hitting it or the thermal excitation of the stick. Therefore, to investigate we would need ideal conditions such as a dark vacuum, and cooling to a few milli­kelvins, so the stick is in its ground state.

Moment of inertia for a rod,

$I=\frac{1}{3}m{l}^2$

where m is the mass and l is the length.

Uncertainty principle,

$\Delta x\Delta p\ge \frac{\hslash }{2}$

There are several possible approximations and simplifications you could make in solving this problem, including:

sinθ ≈ θ for small θ

${\cosh }^{-1}x=ln \left(x+\sqrt{x^2-1}\right)$

and

${\sinh }^{-1}x=ln \left(x+\sqrt{x^2+1}\right)$

Calculate the maximum time it would take such a stick to fall over and hit the ground if it is placed in a state compatible with the uncertainty principle. Assume that you are on the Earth’s surface. [10 marks]

Hint: Consider the two possible initial conditions that arise from the uncertainty principle.

• Answers will be posted here on the Physics World website next month. There are no prizes.
• If you’re a student who wants to sign up for the 2025 edition of PLANCKS UK and Ireland, entries are now open at plancks.uk

The post PLANCKS physics quiz – how do you measure up against the brightest physics students in the UK and Ireland? appeared first on Physics World.

Physics takes us from the far reaches of the universe to the subatomic scale. A passion for physics also takes us further than we imagined possible, building skills that set us up for life, no matter what path we follow in our careers.

If you’re a physicist or physics professional, your drive for the subject is invaluable. By sharing your passion, you show others how far physics could take them. It can be intimidating, but outreach is vital for nurturing the next generation of physicists, promoting public understanding of science and building a skilled physics community.

Outreach is also an important part of the mission of The Ogden Trust – a UK-based charitable organization that promotes the teaching and learning of physics. The trust has been supporting university physics outreach since 2005, with nearly all universities in England that offer physics undergraduate degrees – and several in Scotland and Wales too – having worked with the trust.

As well as providing funding for public engagement and outreach initiatives, the trust also supports universities through the Outreach Officer Network and annual Outreach Awards. So as a physicist, how can you get involved in outreach? Here are some tips and case studies to inspire you along your journey.

Starting out strong

Just as collaboration and shared tools are vital for physics research, there is also a wealth of support that physicists interested in outreach can draw on. No matter how ambitious your idea is, remember that others have been in your position before. Accessing shared resources and training will make starting out much easier (see box on the Physics Mentoring Project).

You could begin by signing up for The Interact Symposium, a biennial event for physical scientists seeking to gain new skills and share their experiences of public engagement. Run by the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC), the Institute of Physics (IOP), The Ogden Trust, the Royal Astronomical Society and the South East Physics Network (SEPnet), a bank of resources from the 2024 symposium is available online, including lots of examples of successful projects.

Meanwhile, many departments in universities, schools and workplaces have a specialist outreach co-ordinator whose experience you could tap into. If there isn’t, you might have a more experienced colleague who can advise you and share community or school links. You could also contact your local IOP branch committee or join the IOP’s Physics Communicators Group.

As with any scientific endeavour, it’s important to do your research. Attending local science festivals and community events will give you great ideas and inspiration. One day, they may even provide an opportunity to deliver your own outreach.

Strategic thinking

So, you’ve tried outreach for the first time and are eager to do more. It’s tempting to jump straight in. But before making any big commitments, it is worth making a long-term strategic plan.

Your department might have an engagement-specific strategy or other priorities that could be linked to your activities. If there is a dedicated outreach or public engagement professional in your organization, they can advise on this. If your workplace doesn’t have a strategy for outreach and engagement, you could advocate for one to be written (see box on the Institute of Cosmology and Gravitation, University of Portsmouth, UK).

In the UK, the quality of research in higher-education institutions is assessed by the Research Excellence Framework (REF), the results of which informs research funding allocations. Part of the exercise considers the impact of research on people, culture and environment. In REF 2021 around half the impact case studies submitted featured outreach and engagement activities.

In 2021 The Ogden Trust released the Taking a Strategic Approach to Outreach guide. In partnership with the STFC, the trust also funds an annual leadership training course for outreach and public engagement which equips academics and teaching staff with the skills to plan and deliver effective outreach.

The Institute of Cosmology and Gravitation

In 2017 the Institute of Cosmology and Gravitation (ICG) at the University of Portsmouth, UK, introduced an outreach and public engagement strategy, which has since guided significant changes in Portsmouth. The strategy was a short, easy-to-use resource, intended as a working document that could be updated if needed. It outlined outreach and engagement goals over a five-year period, with budget and staffing allocated accordingly.

A crucial part of the process involved consulting people across the department, particularly the ICG directors and those doing innovation and impact work, as well as external supporters of the department’s outreach and public engagement.

Since the strategy was introduced, the department has created a new school outreach programme focusing on a small number of schools where the need for outreach is greatest. The ICG has also invested significantly in Tactile Universe, a project that engages visually impaired school pupils with astronomy research (see pictures).

Thanks to this new approach, outreach and public engagement have become firmly embedded in the ICG. An updated OPE strategy was introduced in 2022.

At this point, you should also consider whether you have all the resources you need. It is often possible to deliver activities with equipment from your institution but, as you do more, the cost of travel, time and equipment can add up. You may be able to fund activities from your existing budgets, particularly if they are closely related to your work. However, you may also need to consider external funding opportunities.

Engagement funding is available through a number of organizations. For example, the STFC has created the Spark awards (£1000–15,000), Nucleus awards (£15,000–125,000) and other grants to engage the public with STFC science. The IOP public-engagement grant scheme awards £500-4000 to improve young people’s relationship with physics. The Royal Academy of Engineering, meanwhile, has its Ingenious grant scheme, which offers funding of £3000–30,000 for projects that engage under-represented audiences.

Remember that while one-off outreach activities can spark your audience’s interest, building long-term partnerships is often more effective. Outreach work with schools is ideally suited for this kind of approach – in fact, regular interactions with a school can tackle systemic inequalities in UK STEM education (see box on Orbyts).

Orbyts

Orbyts links university researchers with pupils in some of the most deprived areas of the UK, empowering them to do original research. Projects last a minimum of five months and involve regular meetings between pupils and researchers. Orbyts projects currently run in three universities across England and received funding from The Ogden Trust to scale their approach.

So far, Orbyts has created over 100 partnerships between researchers and schools, enabling more than 1500 school students to undertake research projects. Topics have included life in the universe, black holes, quantum computing and cancer. Here are some comments from those involved.

“In a tough year with significant professional challenges to overcome, this has been a real “get me out of bed in the morning” kind of project.”
Orbyts partner teacher

“The high-level provision offered by the Orbyts researchers raised enthusiasm and interest in STEM disciplines among our students. The researchers introduced our students to Python programming, as well as analysis and interpretation techniques of large data sets, skills that are of fundamental importance at research level in all areas of physics and STEM. Several of the female students taking part in Orbyts decided to apply to physics at university. They were inspired by the content and the overall experience, as well as by the high-calibre female researchers from Orbyts who visited our school every week for several months and acted as role models for them. Most of the students who took part in 2021/22 are now studying physics, engineering or material science at universities. Their participation in Orbyts was pivotal in making informed decisions about their academic future.”
Physics and maths teacher, Newham Collegiate Sixth Form, UK

“I’ve been fortunate enough to have been a part of Orbyts for the last two years. It has helped me gain invaluable skills and develop as a researcher in more ways than I ever expected. Orbyts has enabled me to gain confidence and ownership in my research, as well as providing opportunities to project manage and improve my public speaking and teaching skills in a proactive yet fun way. Working with students on an Orbyts project has been one of the most rewarding experiences of my research career. It has been incredible to see the students become more confident in their work and become enthusiastic researchers themselves across the short 14-week programme.”
Shannon Killey, space physics PhD student, Northumbria University

You should also think about your target audience. A lot of physics engagement takes place in schools but partnerships with community organizations can reach those who may not attend science festivals or talks. There may be an increased willingness to engage in physics outside of the classroom, where it can capture the imagination of young people who find a school environment challenging (see box on My Place, My Science).

Steps to success

As with any activity in which you are investing your time and energy, it is important to know whether you are achieving your outreach goals. Having a clear strategy will give you a clear idea of what success looks like, but effective evaluation should also be built into your project from the start.

This will also be valuable if you have to justify the time and money spent on a project or make funding applications. The STFC has a useful public engagement evaluation framework that you can follow. The Ogden Trust has also published an evaluation toolkit for working with young people that uses the science capital framework.

Bear in mind that evaluation doesn’t always mean surveys and quantitative data. You might instead get verbal feedback from participants or ask someone else to observe you. In a university, you could consult colleagues in education or social-science departments who are familiar with such methodologies. For larger projects or those for REF or business cases, you could turn to an external evaluator to  provide an independent perspective.

Physicists know that their subject impacts everything from space exploration to sustainable technology, but unfortunately many people don’t think physics is for them. Young people from disadvantaged backgrounds, in particular, struggle to see themselves as future physicists. Outreach can make a real difference by showing that you don’t need to belong to a specific group or demographic to be a physicist – all you need is a passion for the subject.

• For more information about The Ogden Trust or to sign up for its Physics Outreach Network newsletter, visit its website or e-mail outreach@ogdentrust.com.

The post Opening doors with outreach: using your physics skills to engage, inspire and break down barriers appeared first on Physics World.

Climate science and astronomy have much in common, and this has inspired the astrophysicist Travis Rector to call on astronomers to educate themselves, their students and the wider public about climate change. In this episode of the Physics World Weekly podcast, Rector explains why astronomers should listen to the concerns of the public when engaging about the science of global warming. And, he says the positive outlook of some of his students at the University of Alaska Anchorage makes him believe that a climate solution is possible.

Rector says that some astronomers are reluctant to talk to the public about climate change because they have not mastered the intricacies of the science. Indeed, one aspect of atmospheric physics that has challenged scientists is the role that clouds play in global warming. My second guest this week is the science journalist Michael Allen, who has written a feature article for Physics World called “Cloudy with a chance of warming: how physicists are studying the dynamical impact of clouds on climate change”. He talks about climate feedback mechanisms that involve clouds and how aerosols affect clouds and the climate.

• Rector is editor of the book Climate Change for Astronomers: Causes, consequences, and communication. It was published earlier this year by IOP Publishing – which also brings you Physics World

The post Astronomers can play an important role in explaining the causes and consequences of climate change, says astrophysicist appeared first on Physics World.

In an e-mail to staff in September 2024, Christopher Day, the vice-chancellor of Newcastle University in the UK, announced a £35m shortfall in its finances for 2024. Unfortunately, Newcastle is not alone in facing financial difficulties. The problem is largely due to UK universities obtaining much of their funding by charging international students exorbitant tuition fees of tens of thousands of pounds per year. In 2022 international students made up 26% of the total student population. But with the number of international students coming to the UK recently falling and tuition fees for domestic students having increased by less than 6% over the last decade, the income from students is no longer enough to keep our universities afloat.

Both Day and Universities UK (UUK) – the advocacy organization for universities in the UK – pushed for the UK government to allow universities to increase fees for both international and domestic students. They suggested raising the cap on tuition fees for UK students to £13,000 per year, much more than the new cap that was set earlier this month at £9535. Increasing tuition fees further, however, would be a disaster for our education system.

The introduction of student fees was sold to universities in the late 1990s as a way to get more money, and sold to the wider public as a way to allow “market fairness” to improve the quality of education given by universities. In truth, it was never about either of these things.

Tuition fees were about making sure that the UK government would not have to worry about universities pressuring them to increase funding. Universities instead would have to rationalize higher fees with the students themselves. But it is far easier to argue that “we need more money from you, the government, to continue the social good we do” than it is to say “we need more money from you, the students, to keep giving you the same piece of paper”.

Degree-level education in the UK is now treated as a private commodity, to be sold by universities and bought by students, with domestic students taking out a loan from the government that they pay back once they earn above a certain threshold. But this implies that it is only students who profit from the education and that the only benefit for them of a degree is a high-paid job.

Education ends up reduced to an initial financial outlay for a potential future financial gain, with employers looking for job applicants with a degree regardless of what it is in. We might as well just sell students pieces of paper boasting about how much money they have “invested” in themselves.

Yet going to university brings so much more to students than just a boost to their future earnings. Just look, for example, at the high student satisfaction for arts and humanities degrees compared to business or engineering degrees. University education also brings huge social, cultural and economic benefits to the wider community at a local, regional and national level.

UUK estimates that for every £1 of public money invested in the higher-education sector across the UK, £14 is put back into the economy – totalling £265bn per year. Few other areas of government spending give such large economic returns for the UK. No wonder, then, that other countries continue to fund their universities centrally through taxes rather than fees. (Countries such as Germany that do levy fees charge only a nominal amount, as the UK once did.)

Some might say that the public should not pay for students to go to university. But that argument doesn’t stack up. We all pay for roads, schools and hospitals from general taxation whether we use those services or not, so the same should apply for university education. Students from Scotland who study in the country have their fees paid by the state, for example.

Up in arms

Thankfully, some subsidy still remains in the system, mainly for technical degrees such as the sciences and medicine. These courses on average cost more to run than humanities and social sciences courses due to the cost of practical work and equipment. However, as budgets tighten, even this is being threatened.

In 2004 Newcastle closed its physics degree programme due to its costs. While the university soon reversed the mistake, it lives long in the memories of those who today still talk about the incalculable damage this and similar cuts did to UK physics. Indeed, I worry whether this renewed focus on profitability, which over the last few years has led to many humanities programmes and departments closing at UK universities, could again lead to closures in the sciences. Without additional funding, it seems inevitable.

University leaders should have been up in arms when student fees were introduced in the early 2000s. Instead, most went along with them, and are now reaping what they sowed. University vice-chancellors shouldn’t be asking the government to allow universities to charge ever higher fees – they should be telling the government that we need more money to keep doing the good we do for this country. They should not view universities as private businesses and instead lobby the government to reinstate a no-fee system and to support universities again as being social institutions.

If this doesn’t happen, then the UK academic system will fall. Even if we do manage to somehow cut costs in the short term by around £35m per university, it will only prolong the inevitable. I hope vice chancellors and the UK government wake up to this fact before it is too late.

The post Why academia should be funded by governments, not students appeared first on Physics World.

In this episode of the Physics World Weekly podcast I am in conversation with Joanne O’Meara, who has bagged a King Charles III Coronation Medal for her outstanding achievements in science education and outreach. Based at Canada’s University of Guelph, the medical physicist talks about her passion for science communication and her plans for a new science centre.

This episode also features a wide-ranging interview with Burcu Saner Okan, who is principal investigator at Sabanci University’s Sustainable Advanced Materials Research Group in Istanbul, Turkey. She explains how graphene is manufactured today and how the process can be made more sustainable – by using recycled materials as feedstocks, for example. Saner Okan also talks about her commercial endeavours including Euronova.

The post Top tips for physics outreach from a prize winner, making graphene more sustainable appeared first on Physics World.

In August 2024 the influential Australian popular-science magazine Cosmos found itself not just reporting the news – it had become the news. Owned by CSIRO Publishing – part of Australia’s national science agency – Cosmos had posted a series of “explainer” articles on its website that had been written by generative artificial intelligence (AI) as part of an experiment funded by Australia’s Walkley Foundation. Covering topics such as black holes and carbon sinks, the text had been fact-checked against the magazine’s archive of more than 15,000 past articles to negate the worry of misinformation, but at least one of the new articles contained inaccuracies.

Critics, such as the science writer Jackson Ryan, were quick to condemn the magazine’s experiment as undermining and devaluing high-quality science journalism. As Ryan wrote on his Substack blog, AI not only makes things up and trains itself on copyrighted material, but “for the most part, provides corpse-cold, boring-ass prose”. Contributors and former staff also complained to Australia’s ABC News that they’d been unaware of the experiment, which took place just a few months after the magazine had made five of its eight staff redundant.

It’s all too easy for AI to get things wrong and contribute to the deluge of online misinformation

The Cosmos incident is a reminder that we’re in the early days of using generative AI in science journalism. It’s all too easy for AI to get things wrong and contribute to the deluge of online misinformation, potentially damaging modern society in which science and technology shape so many aspects of our lives. Accurate, high-quality science communication is vital, especially if we are to pique the public’s interest in physics and encourage more people into the subject.

Kanta Dihal, a lecturer at Imperial College London who researchers the public’s understanding of AI, warns that the impacts of recent advances in generative AI on science communication are “in many ways more concerning than exciting”. Sure, AI can level the playing field by, for example, enabling students to learn video editing skills without expensive tools and helping people with disabilities to access course material in accessible formats. “[But there is also] the immediate large-scale misuse and misinformation,” Dihal says.

We do need to take these concerns seriously, but AI could benefit science communication in ways you might not realize. Simply put, AI is here to stay – in fact, the science behind it led to the physicist John Hopfield and computer scientist Geoffrey Hinton winning the 2024 Nobel Prize for Physics. So how can we marshal AI to best effect not just to do science but to tell the world about science?

Dangerous game

Generative AI is a step up from “machine learning”, where a computer predicts how a system will behave based on data it’s analysed. Machine learning is used in high-energy physics, for example, to model particle interactions and detector performance. It does this by learning to recognize patterns in existing data, before making predictions and then validating that those predictions match the original data. Machine learning saves researchers from having to manually sift through terabytes of data from experiments such as those at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider.

Generative AI, on the other hand, doesn’t just recognize and predict patterns – it can create new ones too. When it comes to the written word, a generative AI could, for example, invent a story from a few lines of input. It is exactly this language-generating capability that caused such a furore at Cosmos and led some journalists to worry that AI might one day make their jobs obsolete. But how does a generative AI produce replies that feel like a real conversation?

Perhaps the best known generative AI is ChatGPT (where GPT stands for generative pre-trained transformer), which is an example of a Large Language Model (LLM). Language modelling dates back to the 1950s, when the US mathematician Claude Shannon applied information theory – the branch of maths that deals with quantifying, storing and transmitting information – to human language. Shannon measured how well language models could predict the next word in a sentence by assigning probabilities to each word based on patterns in the data the model is trained on.

Such methods of statistical language modelling are now fundamental to a range of natural language processing tasks, from building spell-checking software to translating between languages and even recognizing speech. Recent advances in these models have significantly extended the capabilities of generative AI tools, with the “chatbot” functionality of ChatGPT making it especially easy to use.

ChatGPT racked up a million users within five days of its launch in November 2022 and since then other companies have unveiled similar tools, notably Google’s Gemini and Perplexity. With more than 600 million users per month as of September 2024, ChatGPT is trained on a range of sources, including books, Wikipedia articles and chat logs (although the precise list is not explicitly described anywhere). The AI spots patterns in the training texts and builds sentences by predicting the most likely word that comes next.

ChatGPT operates a bit like a slot machine, with probabilities assigned to each possible next word in the sentence. In fact, the term AI is a little misleading, being more “statistically informed guessing” than real intelligence, which explains why ChatGPT has a tendency to make basic errors or “hallucinate”. Cade Metz, a technology reporter from the New York Times, reckons that chatbots invent information as much as 27% of the time.

One notable hallucination occurred in February 2023 when Bard – Google’s forerunner to Gemini – declared in its first public demonstration that the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) had taken “the very first picture of a planet outside our solar system”. As Grant Tremblay from the US Center for Astrophysics pointed out, this feat had been accomplished in 2004, some 16 years before the JWST was launched, by the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope in Chile.

Another embarrassing incident was the comically anatomically incorrect picture of a rat created by the AI image generator Midjourney, which appeared in a journal paper that was subsequently retracted. Some hallucinations are more serious. Amateur mushroom pickers, for example, have been warned to steer clear of online foraging guides, likely written by AI, that contain information running counter to safe foraging practices. Many edible wild mushrooms look deceptively similar to their toxic counterparts, making careful identification critical.

By using AI to write online content, we’re in danger of triggering a vicious circle of increasingly misleading statements, polluting the Internet with unverified output. What’s more, AI can perpetuate existing biases in society. Google, for example, was forced to publish an embarrassing apology, saying it would “pause” the ability to generate images with Gemini after the service was used to create images of racially diverse Nazi soldiers,

More seriously, women and some minority groups are under-represented in healthcare data, biasing the training set and potentially skewing the recommendations of predictive AI algorithms. One study led by Laleh Seyyed-Kalantari from the University of Toronto (Nature Medicine 27 2176) found that computer-aided diagnosis of chest X-rays are less accurate for Black patients than white patients.

Generative AI could even increase inequalities if it becomes too commercial. “Right now there’s a lot of free generative AI available, but I can also see that getting more unequal in the very near future,” Dihal warns. People who can afford to pay for ChatGPT subscriptions, for example, have access to versions of the AI based on more up-to-date training data. They therefore get better responses than users restricted to the “free” version.

Clear communication

But generative AI tools can do much more than churn out uninspired articles and create problems. One beauty of ChatGPT is that users interact with it conversationally, just like you’d talk to a human communicator at a science museum or science festival. You could start by typing something simple (such as “What is quantum entanglement?”) before delving into the details (e.g. “What kind of physical systems are used to create it?”). You’ll get answers that meet your needs better than any standard textbook.

Generative AI could also boost access to physics by providing an interactive way to engage with groups – such as girls, people of colour or students from low-income backgrounds – who might face barriers to accessing educational resources in more traditional formats. That’s the idea behind online tuition platforms such as Khan Academy, which has integrated a customized version of ChatGPT into its tuition services.

Instead of presenting fully formed answers to questions, its generative AI is programmed to prompt users to work out the solution themselves. If a student types, say, “I want to understand gravity” into Khan’s generative AI-powered tutoring program, the AI will first ask what the student already knows about the subject. The “conversation” between the student and the chatbot will then evolve in the light of the student’s response.

As someone with cerebral palsy, AI has transformed how I work by enabling me to turn my speech into text in an instant

AI can also remove barriers that some people face in communicating science, allowing a wider range of voices to be heard and thereby boosting the public’s trust in science. As someone with cerebral palsy, AI has transformed how I work by enabling me to turn my speech into text in an instant (see box below).

It’s also helped Duncan Yellowlees, a dyslexic research developer who trains researchers to communicate. “I find writing long text really annoying, so I speak it into OtterAI, which converts the speech into text,” he says. The text is sent to ChatGPT, which converts it into a blog. “So it’s my thoughts, but I haven’t had to write them down.”

Then there’s Matthew Tosh, a physicist-turned-science presenter specializing in pyrotechnics. He has a progressive disease, which meant he faced an increasing struggle to write in a concise way. ChatGPT, however, lets him create draft social-media posts, which he then rewrites in his own sites. As a result, he can maintain that all-important social-media presence while managing his disability at the same time.

Despite the occasional mistake made by generative AI bots, misinformation is nothing new. “That’s part of human behaviour, unfortunately,” Tosh admits. In fact, he thinks errors can – perversely – be a positive. Students who wrongly think a kilo of cannonballs will fall faster than a kilo of feathers create the perfect chance for teachers to discuss Newtonian mechanics. “In some respects,” says Tosh, “a little bit of misinformation can start the conversation.”

AI as a voice-to-text tool

As a science journalist – and previously as a researcher hunting for new particles in data from the ATLAS experiment at CERN – I’ve longed to use speech-to-text programs to complete assignments. That’s because I have a disability – cerebral palsy – that makes typing impractical. For a long time this meant I had to dictate my work to a team of academic assistants for many hours a week. But in 2023 I started using Voiceitt, an AI-powered app optimized for speech recognition for people with non-standard speech like mine.

You train the app by first reading out a couple of hundred short training phrases. It then deploys AI to apply thousands of hours of other non-standard speaker models in its database to optimize its training. As Voiceitt is used, it continues refining the AI model, improving speech recognition over time. The app also has a generative AI model to correct any grammatical errors created during transcription. Each week, I find myself correcting the app’s transcriptions less and less, which is a bonus when facing journalistic deadlines, such as the one for this article.

The perfect AI assistant?

One of the first news organizations to experiment with AI tools was Associated Press (AP), which in 2014 began automating routine financial stories about corporate earnings. AP now also uses AI to create transcripts of videos, write summaries of sports events, and spot trends in large stock-market data sets. Other news outlets use AI tools to speed up “back-office” tasks such as transcribing interviews, analysing information or converting data files. Tools such as MidJourney can even help journalists to brief professional illustrators to create images.

However, there is a fine line between using AI to speed up your workflow and letting it make content without human input. Many news outlets and writers’ associations have issued statements guaranteeing not to use generative AI as a replacement for human writers and editors. Physics World, for example, has pledged not to publish fresh content generated purely by AI, though the magazine does use AI to assist with transcribing and summarizing interviews.

So how can generative AI be incorporated into the effective and trustworthy communication of science? First, it’s vital to ask the right question – in fact, composing a prompt can take several attempts to get the desired output. When summarizing a document, for example, a good prompt should include the maximum word length, an indication of whether the summary should be in paragraphs or bullet points, and information about the target audience and required style or tone.

Generative AI is here to stay – and science communicators and journalists are still working out how best to use it to communicate science

Second, information obtained from AI needs to be fact checked. It can easily hallucinate, making a chatbot like an unreliable (but occasionally brilliant) colleague who can get the wrong end of the stick. “Don’t assume that whatever the tool is, that it is correct,” says Phil Robinson, editor of Chemistry World. “Use it like you’d use a peer or colleague who says ‘Have you tried this?’ or ‘Have you thought of that?’”

Finally, science communicators must be transparent in explaining how they used AI. Generative AI is here to stay – and science communicators and journalists are still working out how best to use it to communicate science. But if we are to maintain the quality of science journalism – so vital for the public’s trust in science – we must continuously evaluate and manage how AI is incorporated into the scientific information ecosystem.

Generative AI can help you say what you want to say. But as Dihal concludes: “It’s no substitute for having something to say.”

The post Why AI is a force for good in science communication appeared first on Physics World.

Physicists and others with STEM backgrounds are sought after in industry for their analytical skills. However, traditional training in STEM subjects is often lacking when it comes to nurturing the soft skills that are needed to succeed in managerial and leadership positions.

Our guest in this podcast is Peter Hirst, who is Senior Associate Dean, Executive Education at the MIT Sloan School of Management. He explains how MIT Sloan works with executives to ensure that they efficiently and effectively acquire the skills and knowledge needed to be effective leaders.

This podcast is sponsored by the MIT Sloan School of Management

The post Peter Hirst: MIT Sloan Executive Education develops leadership skills in STEM employees appeared first on Physics World.