Turning on the computer and making coffee, li miao began to "cultivate" an acre of land on his blog. It has become his normal life to spend several hours updating articles every two days and taking some time to reply to netizens' messages every day.
Li Miao is a researcher at the Institute of Theoretical Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences. Last July 1, he started his blog life with the words "gossip begins". In just one year, a total of 6.5438+0.5 million people visited his blog "Talking about Physics".
Here, there are his latest research and thinking, tracking the latest progress of the discipline, and a lot of small talk related to or unrelated to physics. Daunting scientific terms such as string theory, dark matter, supersymmetry and anthropic principle can be found everywhere.
However, if you look carefully, you will find that li miao's blog, though profound, is talking about physics in a lively and interesting tone, and will not keep outsiders at a distance. In an article entitled "The weaker, the darker and the more beautiful", he talked about Lin Daiyu's morbid beauty and said that "gravity is the weakest force in the world", which is his research experience.
He once used a famous sentence in the movie "Big Man" to tease students about the hardships of studying string theory: "We must choose the longest article ... It will take a week just to read the introduction, and 50 students are scared to death, some are scared by propositions, some are scared by theorems, and if they are scared by lemma, they are embarrassed to say hello to people ... So our slogan for making strings is, not seeking the best, but seeking the biggest.
He wanted to write a history of alternative strings, but he only finished a poetic beginning: "In ancient times, there was a man with a moustache ... when he was 16 years old, he imagined that the light would stop." At the age of 26, he realized the relativity of time and space. It is said that he was pushing a stroller along a path in Boer at that time ... He worked tirelessly until his hair turned white, which did not impress his busy colleagues. Quantum theory is very rich.
As you can see, Li Miao basically answered the question about the news. Sometimes, there will be several rounds of arguments about the same question. Once, a middle school student who loves physics asked him, "What do you think of changing the speed of light to replace the skyrocketing universe?" He patiently gave a detailed answer.
Blog made Li Miao quickly become a "star" among many strange classmates, peers and science lovers. A colleague joked with him that when the Institute of Theoretical Physics was mentioned before, people thought of a show. Now everyone thinks of li miao, a blogger!
Li miao's "science blog" is rare among the huge blog groups.
A science reporter of a weekly magazine once wanted to know the trends, ideas and interests of scientists in China by browsing their personal blogs. As a result, he only found two blogs of China scientists, one is li miao, and the other is Wei Yu, an academician of China Academy of Engineering and former vice minister of education. He lamented that "China scientists who write blogs are even rarer than giant pandas".
Even abroad, the situation is not optimistic. According to a report in the British magazine Nature on July 3rd, Technorati blog search engine counted the number of linked websites in the first six months and found that only five of the top 3,500 blogs were "science blogs".
Here, the definition of "science blog" is a blog written by a working scientist, and it must be about scientific content, not about his cat or anything else.
The top ranking is the blog of Paul Myers, a biologist at the University of Minnesota, ranking 179. He is a master of translating expert opinions into blogs. He is keen to discuss liberalism and atheism on blogs and criticize the negative influence of religion on American culture.
"Sometimes I just outline some basic ideas like I did in class. If I write like a journal, I can't. " He said that blogging is like "chatting in a bar after an academic meeting".
Ranked second to fourth is a group blog named "Panda's Finger", with the theme of opposing intelligent design, opposing creationism and discussing evolution. A meteorologist Stefan Rahmstorf's blog and five physicists' blogs about the change of the universe.
On September 2nd last year, five scientists wrote an article on "RealClimate", which ranked third in the science blog, discussing whether frequent typhoon and hurricane disasters are related to global warming. They started with Hurricane Katrina, which just swept through New Orleans, USA, and used the author's research, analysis, charts, notes and reference materials to finally remind people that global warming will make the hurricane worse in the future. After the article was published, many people participated in the discussion and received 304 replies so far.
Nick Andteas, ranked fifth, has the most legendary blog. June 5438+this year 10, he just started to write a blog. In February this year, he took the lead in exposing an important official of NASA who lied about his graduation school, and then became a "well-known blogger" in one fell swoop.
It is reported that on the day Nature published the report, a total of 2,277 websites linked to Paul meyers's top science blog. On the same day, the number one blog in the world was "A China actress named Xu", with 29 18 1 links.
Of the 46.7 million blogs in the world counted by Technorati blog search engine, there are no exact figures showing how many are from scientists. But an intuitive feeling is that scientists who stand at the forefront of science are not "cold" about blogs, which is different from the conventional way of communication.
In February last year, 65438, Nature discussed the topic of the relationship between scientists and blogs in the news topic of "Science in the Internet Age". The article quoted a scientist as saying: "Science itself is about the adoption, discovery and utilization of new knowledge and technology, but the biggest revolution on the Internet is quietly passing us by."
Referring to the reasons for the lack of science blogs, Li Miao smiled clearly: "Scientists are more traditional." "Of course, this refers to the way of doing things, not the content of the work."
He explained that scientists usually speak carefully. Moreover, they often worry that their peers will know what they are doing and thinking, thus putting themselves at a disadvantage in the competition.
"In many organizations, it is dangerous to openly discuss the progress of work with others, let alone in blogs, because it may be preempted by competitors." A biologist complained.
Among scientists in China, there seems to be a more special reason why they don't want to start a blog. Professor Xing Zhizhong from Institute of High Energy, Chinese Academy of Sciences was appointed to participate in the activities sponsored by Fermilab to commemorate the World Year of Physics at the beginning of last year, and wrote a blog on the quantum website for a period of time, but it was a pity.
When bidding farewell to netizens, he talked about his last difficulty: "China's official propaganda and reports on high-energy physics don't need me to repeat them here; In fact, I can't write the concrete deeds of scientists, for fear of being inappropriate and involving taboos in the circle; It's easier to do your own thing, but it's too professional and no one is interested. Too personal and easy to go astray. "
In addition, an important factor affecting scientists' blog writing is that in the current evaluation criteria, a scientist's work performance depends on how many papers he has published in important academic journals, rather than how many posts he has published on his blog.
Meyers, the top "Cobo", admitted that as formal and archived documents, standard scientific papers are irreplaceable, and they are the main work of scientists. However, they are static and have great limitations.
"Describe your paper on the blog, wait a minute, something different will always happen. People who are far away from your usual social circle start to think about the theme of your paper, and they often put forward some interesting ideas. " He said.
Yan Feng, a young scientist now working in the European Southern Observatory, is a supporter of this view. In an article entitled "Advantages and Disadvantages of Researchers' Blogs", he said that if you write your own thoughts and learning experiences on your blog, it is very likely that some readers will help you find your mistakes, and other people's comments may inspire you and even find collaborators.
Li miao explained the benefits of blogging with his own personal experience. On June+10 this year, he learned about the latest research progress of "string theory" on a Harvard professor's blog, and immediately asked several students to devote their energy to see if they could make further progress on the basis of this achievement. Students have published three papers based on this.
From the reader's point of view, li miao compared blog to cultural fast food, which is "more fashionable than McDonald's Mai Spicy Chicken Leg Fort". He believes that reading science blogs can make it easy for you to get specialized information, just like eating fast food.
What makes li miao value more is that he can interact with students through blogs to guide students to think about some problems in the discussion and understand how they learn.
Yan Feng noticed the "public popularization" function of science blog. He believes that when an academic paper is published in an academic journal, perhaps only dozens or even several "colleagues" will read it. Ordinary people don't consult academic journals because they want to know something, but if you describe your research progress on your blog, your professional knowledge will serve the society and be known, and let the public know about you and your work. For example, majors such as politics, economics, public health and meteorology can make great achievements in this respect.
An American epidemiologist, who writes one or two short articles entitled "Effect Measurement" on his blog under the screen name of "awe" every day, has attracted various readers. "There are about 1500 tourists every day," he said. "If someone tells me, I can go to the lecture hall to express my views every day, and I will be satisfied if there are 1500 people to listen-1500, twice as much as professional magazines!"
Unfortunately, for most scientists, blogs are still not attractive enough to distract their attention from practical work, which may be the reason why scientists have too few blogs and they are cited as topics.