Physics professor Sidney Perkowitz reflects on how women scientists are portrayed in film

Of Science My big annual conference-the American Physical Society meeting-held in March, will have come and gone in St. Louis by the time you read this. That simple fact won't mean much to you, but it catapults me 33 years into the past. I gave my first scientific paper in St. Louis, in March 1963, at the same annual meeting of the same scientific society. I'm not one for the treacherous emotion of nostalgia, but this time I am giving in just a little. I remember how scared I was as a graduate

No one wants to become just another statistic, scientists least of all. We cherish our individuality, our march to a drummer whose beat most people never hear. And isn't our profession built on the unquantifiable flash of creative insight? Because statistical analysis concentrates only on average behavior, it is destined to miss outstanding individual achievement. Yet it is valuable to find the common threads that define our own special herd. What kind of analysis would help scientists understa

If we scientists have a God, he is Quantus, the champion of quantitative reasoning (who I imagine looks like Mercury, but with winged sneakers and a portable PC). Our numerical description of nature marks our intellectual style. But outside our temple, Quantus and his computer can't help much. In the wider world, as we teach, sell a research program, or explain medical risks to an anxious public, we must rely on the same insubstantial vehicles used by advertising copywriters and humanities prof

In America’s competitive scientific arena, different areas contend for limited funds, as their benefits to society—cures for disease, national defense, cultural value—are weighed. The pure and the applied, the theoretical and the experimental, also vie for dollars and recognition. Two other categories, big science and little science, fracture the lines in yet another direction. What are they? Do their differences matter? Should we as scientists, or the United States as a n

As a rare Westerner strolling recently among Shanghai’s 12 million Chinese, I nearly caused spectacular bicycle pile-ups. Riders risked life and limb to snap their heads in my direction, underlining my novel role as a minority person. Yet when I returned to my research laboratory at Emory University in Atlanta, it seemed that little had changed. True, there were no potential bike catastrophes. But my research group of eight contains just three United States citizens. The rest are from C