Fun With Physics
Young scientists popularize physics
As arcane physics theories buzz around the world after the 2019 Nobel Prize in Physics winners were announced, physicists and physics majors continue to try to popularize the mysteries of the world.
An inspiring example is a group of graduate and doctoral students from the Institute of Physics (IOP) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), who have been making efforts to change the face of physics by dressing it up, reassembling its fun parts and putting it all online.
Playtime
In 2014, Cheng Meng, a doctoral graduate from the institute, had the idea to make physics more fun through IOP’S official public account on Wechat, a popular social media app in China. Li Zhilin, an IOP doctoral student and winner of a campus contest to write an interesting article promoting physics, joined Cheng to form the initial team.
In the first year and a half, Cheng was in charge of updating articles to the account. “I spent every day looking for and editing articles to feed the account,” Cheng said. “It was a lot of work.”
Li remarked, “Our initial goal was to make the institute’s public account more creative, doing away with the boring routine release of regular IOP news.”
Their work proved fruitful as the number of IOP account followers has grown steadily over the past five years and now stands at almost 1 million.
Li Xuanyi, 24, a doctoral student at the institute, followed the account when he was an undergraduate student. “The account had already gained some fame in its first two years,” he said. “When I joined the team in 2016, we already had over 200,000 followers.”
Liu Guangxiu, a 25-year-old IOP doctoral student, was also an early follower of the account. “I knew the institute through its public account,” Liu said. “I was an undergraduate student at the time, making plans for further physics studies. I really