Jeremiah O'Mahony, 2019 Physics Today Science Writing Intern

Biography

SPS Chapter: Sarah Lawrence College

I’m a recent graduate from Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, New York, with what they tell me is an incredibly useful degree in Liberal Arts. What it doesn’t say on that wildly expensive piece of paper is that I’ve had the good fortune to study physics through many different lenses, from history to philosophy. Beyond academics, I directed my school’s Shakespeare group and edited the news section of its student paper.

I’ve come a long way (more literally than metaphorically) from my hometown of Santa Fe, New Mexico, but science writing has always stuck with me. I love communicating the complex ideas at the heart of prickly physics issues. I’ve tried to carry my curiosity for the things that make the world tick through a long list of odd jobs in physics—TA, tutor, research assistant, the list goes on. I’m thrilled and honored to be able to carry that curiosity with me to Physics Today this summer.

Internship

Host: American Institute of Physics

Project

Abstract

The adage goes, “Journalism is what somebody doesn’t want you to print. The rest is advertising.” The idea is that reporting should exclusively be a tool of sticking it to the man, and articles that do anything less are a waste of time. That puts science journalism in an awkward position: there isn’t some shadowy figure with a vested interest in Physics Today not publishing the latest developments in quantum tunneling. Should it be considered free advertising for scientists? This presentation will draw on my (admittedly limited) experience with science reporting to discuss where reporting on science fits, and how it squares with the often machismo-laced mindset of news reporting. Since my position is a new one, this presentation aims to be both a retrospective of my time at Physics Today and a how-to/guidebook/survival guide for my successor.

Final Presentation

Internship Blog

Sandwiches and Other Misconceptions

My first attempts at science writing weren’t Pulitzer stuff. My second grade teacher tasked me with explaining how robots work in an essay. I thought I got pretty close, but Mrs. Long wasn’t buying that they ran on peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. It was a decent kind of start.

I now have the privilege to be the Physics Today science writing intern. Coming into the job, I didn’t have much of an idea of what to expect. I met my mentor once in an interview over an obscure video chat app (Zilch? Zoom? Who comes up with this stuff?) and didn’t have any contact with him after that. I jokingly told people that I would be fetching coffee, but as the day to arrive in D.C. neared, I started to take the joke more seriously.

Finally, it was time. I finished undergrad and without a moment for the most cursory of existential crises about employment was whisked away across the Mason-Dixon line. The land down here is beautiful. I thought my home state New Mexico was the undisputed queen of the dramatic sunset, but the pink-and-golden castle of clouds outside the window of the budget bus carrying me to D.C. was alright, I guess. If anyone from New Mexico is reading this, I’d like to apologize for my treachery but still recommend you take a trip to our nation’s capital. The Mexican food isn’t even that bad here.

I was too late for the pizza social when I arrived, and the post-sunset Target trip wasn’t a great opportunity to socialize, but I got to meet most of the other interns at the Memorial Day parade the next day. I’d like to pause for a second to recognize the incredible young people with whom I’m sharing the summer. The blog posts from SPS interns of previous years, especially the entries near the end of their summers, all mourn the loss of daily contact with their fellow interns. Reading those over, I was excited to meet such charming people, but ultimately I was smug. “No,” I told myself in a stupidly masculine moment, “that won’t be me tearfully composing a blog in ten weeks’ time.” About halfway through the first day with these funny, lovely, sharp-as-a-tack young scientists, I thought, “Oh, OK. I see it now.”

But that’s the future. For now, I still have nine weeks with the 2019 SPS group and at Physics Today where, as it turns out, I’m not fetching coffee. I spent the first week analyzing the online magazine, figuring out which made each sections’ articles tick, and writing potential social media posts for popular articles. I was aware that all of this was training but part of me was still surprised I was doing this much this quickly. I thought “errand boy” would be a pretty apt description for my first couple of days, but Andrew—one of the online editors for the magazine and my wonderful mentor—already had me digging through texts and getting a feel for the style.

On Friday, Andrew came to my cubicle (I have a cubicle!) to give me weekend work. He told me to look over the Research and Technologies section and get a feel for it in the way I’ve been doing for other parts of the magazine. He told me that we could go over my notes on Monday. I assumed the next thing he’d say would be that I would keep working on my rolling assignments once I were done with those articles, but what he said next—with a grin—was: “We can maybe get you started writing one.”

My heart leapt: I’m doing science writing. This is it.

I’m very much looking forward to the next nine weeks with my fellow interns, and I’m trying to think about goodbyes as little as possible. Working with Physics Today has been more fulfilling than I could have hoped for. I was even invited to a pitch meeting coming up on Tuesday. They seem like a pretty open-minded crowd, but even still, I think I might keep my peanut butter and jelly theory to myself.

The Tick

I am interviewing a very accomplished woman tomorrow. She is the lead author on a paper which has good odds to solve a problem plaguing the energy industry for decades. This groundbreaking research required a suite of bespoke methods and instruments, computer modeling, and experimentation, all of which was done a team of her and nine other scientists peppered across the globe.

I looked those nine up—all men.

That surprised me, though I do have a skewed view. I had the privilege to have a college education in the gender-diverse environment of Sarah Lawrence, which also boasts a majority of female-identifying teachers.

Women even outnumber men in teaching the sciences at Sarah Lawrence—a rarity. According to data on APS’ website , the only field in which female-identifying PhD candidates outnumber their male-identifying peers is in biology, which they do by about five percent. In the remaining fields for which APS has data, the disparity ranges from 40% in Earth Sciences to 18%. The latter percentage is in physics, which sees the fewest women graduate with a PhD—352—than any other hard science field in 2017.

I was also shocked to see so few people of color in the building with us. Though, as a fellow intern reminded me, I shouldn’t have been. Physics is a historically white field. 2017 saw 19 African Americans receive doctorate degrees in physics. Statistics on specifically African-American female involvement are damingly poor: there are fewer than 100 Black female-identifying people who hold PhDs in physics.

Take a broad view for a moment: according to APS’s data, 1,967 people graduated with physics PhDs in 2017. Two years ago, the physics graduates outnumbered all the Black, female-identifying physics PhDs throughout all history twenty to one.

There are, currently, 99 Black female-identifying physics PhDs. The physics community plans to award that last milestone degree later this year . There was a steep hike—percentage-wise—in PhDs awarded to that group since 2017, when only 90 Black female-identifying people had been afforded that honor since 1972. In that same 45-year time span (1972 to 2017), 59,894 people were awarded PhDs in physics. Of the people who earned a physics PhD over the last 45 years, 0.002% of them were Black womxn. A Black, female-identifying, PhD-holding American physicist is one in five hundred.

The woman I am interviewing tomorrow is not Black. She is not a Native American, nor Hispanic, nor Pacific Islander, nor any other ethnicity for which the physics PhD data are also dismal . She did, however, overcome the (admittedly easier) odds and join the slim ranks of female physics PhDs worldwide. As much as a human being can or should be held up as a symbol, she is a testament to the indisputable power of inclusivity. So are Ellen Fetter and Margaret Hamilton, mathematicians who helped program the computer that spat out the first proof of chaos theory. So is Sau Lan Wu, a particle physicists who currently heads a team using Large Hadron Collider data to make something out of the shambles of Standard Theory after the discovery of the Higgs Boson. The list goes on. There are no statistics on LGBT+ physics PhDs readily available. Since those statistics are currently collected by a government which has targeted swathes and members of that community, it’s for the best that there isn’t a federal database. We don’t need stats to know the story of Alan Turing , or Sir Francis Bacon , or Sally Ride .

Physics is act of listening to the clockwork of creation tick. We all hear that tick equally well.

A Lesson in Precision

Writing for a small college’s newspaper is a unique journalistic experience, because everyone already knows what you’re writing about. Sarah Lawrence College’s culture of relentless gossip ensures administration’s betrayals of the already-thin trust became public information quickly. The best I could do as a reporter at the student outlet Phoenix was set the record straight and fact-check the rumor mill. Science writing, I learned this week, is the exact opposite.

My assignment was to write an article on a new paper for online publication. After I got over the initial thrill of thinking I might be published in the first few weeks of my internship, I got to work. Some initial research on the topic—solar cell degradation, wrap your brain around that—revealed that “over my head” doesn’t really do justice to how baffling this paper is for a newcomer to the field. A couple more days of banging my head against a wall (I’ll leave it up to your imagination whether this is literal or not) and interviewing some of the paper’s authors, I started writing.

Science writing is the act of explaining the work of a microscopic sliver of the population to a tiny one. That entails translating opaque jargon into slightly less opaque jargon. Writing this piece, I had to get a feel for the average physicist’s understanding of semiconductors and then write to that level. To be clear, I’m not the average physicist. I’m a guy with a liberal arts degree and huge amounts of patience for obscure science. That meant another round of learning: if I had to write to the average physicist, I had to think like them (why does this sound like a metaphor for hunting big game?).

Then came the edits. One of the thrilling parts of this internship is being proximal to the lead editors of Physics Today—and have my writing marked up by them. Reading what they write is like seeing where I want my writing 10 years from now to be, so “thrilling” could easily be replaced by “terrifying.” My mentor was nice enough to remind them it was my first rodeo, and accordingly to be nice. “Though,” he stressed in the same email, “not too nice.” They followed his advice (for the most part). Their edits were like this week at micro scale: a lesson in precision. What did I mean when I wrote a vague phrase about the importance of this research? Was I using broad language about research methods to cover an ignorance of them?

Was I absolutely sure the paper’s evidence was conclusive? That one stopped me in my tracks, and it came from my mentor as he was doing a final once-over with me. There’s such a higher standard of proof, and of truth, in physics. I couldn’t be flippant in saying the paper solves a longstanding mystery—word choice has such stricter limits in science writing. That epiphany was the only thing this week that didn’t intimidate me. It reaffirmed my love for this work: I get the chance to tell other people about advances in human understanding. When those are the stakes, it’s worth being right. It’s worth being sure.

After a week of triple-checking 101 textbooks on semiconductors and questioning my career choices, I was done. My mentor made the last edit just as we were both running to a meeting. It almost seemed like an unfitting end—like the last edit should be some sacred, solemn thing. At the same time, it felt freeing. Why should the last, most inconsequential sentence redaction mean more than paradigm shifts in my writing technique? I highlighted the sentence, hit delete, and sent it off. I didn’t even have time to gloat after the meeting: my lovely partner came this weekend and I had to run and pick her up from the station. Looking back, it’s probably good that I didn’t marinate in this process for too long. I learned everything I could from last week, and my writing and how I thought about it was bent, broken, and built up again. I wrote something. I got better. I’m ready to write more.

Will Shortz 2020

The crossword is mankind’s greatest invention, and Will Shortz should be elected King of the World. We can even forgive his mustache.

Shortz, for the uninitiated, is the guy who edits the crosswords in the New York Times. He has written over 100 puzzle books and owns around 20,000, the world’s largest collection, according to his Wikipedia article. (I cannot, in good faith, write this post without mentioning that his Wikipedia article also says that one of his professions is “table tennis center owner,” with zero context.) I’m giving you Shortz’s biography because since my work day begins at a different time to every other intern’s, and thus my commute is a solemn, solitary affair, I started doing the crossword. My puzzle of choice (I’m kidding, I can only afford the free paper) is in Express, the quick-hit, local-and-world number that is known to DC as the Metro’s signature piece of litter.

That’s my morning: get up, head out, get my paper from Andre, who you may know as the guy who stands in front of the Foggy Bottom stop with papers in hand, and who I know as my personal savior. Andre doesn’t know this, but I love crosswords. On a day-to-day level, they’re a bit of morning mental gymnastics, and they do something for the crushing loneliness. On a deeper level, though, Will Shortz’s cryptic little grids got me into reporting.

When I was first easing into journalism, I came to understand that I was only game for half of the process: I loved the process of talking to people and getting stories, but I hated reading newspapers and staying up to date on events. This is, of course, a cardinal sin, and if anyone from any paper that may someday employ me is reading this, please know that I saw the error of my ways and I have changed. Forgive me, WaPo, for I have sinned.

My ever-supportive dad recognized my split loyalties and decided that, instead of gently coaxing me to see the light like the philosophers of Plato’s Republic, he would chuck me into the deep end like the mobsters of de Niro’s Godfather. This took the (admittedly less murder-y) form of putting a paper in front of me each weekday morning before school and quizzing me on front-page articles in the car. Usually I failed those quizzes. My parents, ever the globalists, got the Wall Street Journal most mornings, which at the time represented to me all the driest aspects of journalism. (Ford’s stocks fell again! The drama! The outrage!) I had the hardest time retaining--or caring about, take your pick--facts and figures about the world’s markets. Shame me if you will, dear reader, but I was sixteen at the time. The comings and goings of capitalism thrilled me on about the same scale as the finer points of etiquettemattered to Ghengis Khan. That is to say, it’s not really my thing.

Weekends were different. My parents got the New York Times, which was a revelation for two reasons. One, I realized that there were papers that covered world events outside the walls of the New York Stock Exchange. Those stories encouraged me to flip through more than the first page, which led me to revelation two: the crossword. What, I wondered when I first saw it, is this mysterious grid in which some squares are arbitrarily blacked out? What is this list of cryptic two- to three-word hints?

Based on how this blog has gone thus far, you might imagine that upon seeing the crossword, trumpets played, the angels sang, and celestial light beamed down on 31-Across. In actuality, dear reader, the first time I saw a crossword I felt not elation but frustration. Why would this Shortz character just write weird clues? He gets paid to do this? My consternation didn’t last long, as the second bugbear of my high school days kicked in: apathy. With a mental shrug I moved on. Looks like even the inside of papers are boring.

Now, before you feel validated for reading all those think-pieces about Those Damn Millennials, know that I came back to the puzzle. I flipped to it every day, getting less and less angered by the fact that Somebody out there has a job to befuddle people, where does he get off and more curious. I started to learn the basic thrills: the hints often made you think backwards, or sideways. The work you’ve done before helps the work that comes after, in that the words overlap with each other. I started to see that solving a crossword is like solving a math equation (if you’re just now realizing “Oh god, he’s a nerd,” you should have been paying more attention) and suddenly I liked being befuddled.

I started rifling through the paper each weekend morning in search of the puzzle. Just as a function of having to open the paper past the first page to find it, I started reading articles. I never knew exactly where the hell the crossword was (I swear to you, it’s like it changed every day), so there would be a lot of frustrated flipping back and forth, during which time I accidentally absorbed some news. The whole wide world unfolded in front of me with a welcoming crinkling sound. As I read, I learned some craft. And somewhere along there I felt less discouraged about my tentative career choice and I thought, I can do this. Then, of course, I got stumped by every crossword clue and felt like an idiot, but the spark was there.

And so, Will Shortz made me a journalist. Consider this post my vote for his dictatorship.

Yo Quiero Perspective

“Now it reminds me of when my life was beginning and everything was new and full of ideas, for days when I have more memories than ideas.” Francisco Santos, the Colombian ambassador to the US, said that in an interview with Express. He was talking about Taco Bell.

I’m a young man, but sometimes I feel like I’m fuller of memories than ideas. Sometimes I feel that lingering injuries are getting in the way of my having more ideas: I’m stuck on the memory of them, like a leaf blocked by a river rock from flowing downstream. A journalist’s main work is to be full of ideas. Stories I’ve heard recently about seasoned reporters’ career paths hinged on pitching concept after concept to editors, and finally getting an assignment. Or else, giving one of their more glimmering stories to an employed reporter, who would pass along the concept, which the applicant hoped would impress by its merit.

Those stories don’t square with the head-down, do-your-duty image I had of climbing the journalistic ladder. Maybe it’s the having to reorient my plan and my thinking, but I head these stories, and I see journalists downstream, and I wish I could join them. I wish I could be free of my rock. I often have difficulty coming up with story ideas, and I like learning about things once I hear about them—but I have to hear about them.

I’ve had—and have—many privileges in my life. One of the most central to who I am, and one I almost never think about, is that I have always been surrounded by interesting ideas. Growing up, my mom showed me how to escape into a book, and had the saintly patience to speak to a young, excited boy about what he found there. I spent most of my childhood in Santa Fe, where there are so many complicated, painful histories woven together that one can take the tapestry for granted. I went to Sarah Lawrence and Oxford, where I was exposed to the depth and color of the world. Ideas, in short, found me.

I read Ambassador Santos’ quote on a solitary commute to work, on that lsat leg of the train journey between the Fort Tottam and College Park stations in which I either have the train car to myself or share it with one other passenger in a silent kind of intimacy. I felt foggy this week, and I have been feeling stuck on the rock more than ever. My work had started to highlight some insecurities—social anxiety, doubt in both my intelligence and myself—that tend to crop up when I get face-to-face with the simple requirements of my chosen career.

Worst of all, I couldn’t do the crossword. I had forgotten a pen and was therefore forced to spend my trip sifting through Express‘s deepest sections. I found Mr. Santos’ quote in a feature about ambassadors like to eat in DC when they’re feeling homesick. The Georgian and Mongolian ambassadors sang praises to authentic hidden restaurants, and the delegate from Bahrain told a story about how a certain dish at his chosen spot helps him reconnect to his childhood.

Mr. Santos confessed that his guilty pleasure was Taco Bell. He got a taste for Combo No. 1—for the uncultured, that’s a burrito supreme, hard-shell taco, and a large drink—during his undergrad days at UT Austin. “Now,” he said, “it reminds me of when my life was beginning and everything was full of ideas, for when I have some more memories than ideas.”

What a melancholy thought, Mr. Ambassador. That was my first feeling. Then the trees caught my eye—the train was passing through that other-worldly section of forest that greets Yellow- and Green-Line passengers between Prince George’s Plaza and College Park. Something about that section made me sit up straighter, and I got a sort of insight into the ambassador’s thinking: when he spoke about his days being full of memories, he wasn’t talking about negative ones. Not entirely, at least. He was talking about the memories he made at UT Austin, of working towards promoting democracy in Colombia, and of serving the country he loves as Vice President for eight years.

I admit that I may not make VP of Colombia. I do have some of those wonderful memories of my own, though, and I think I’ll have more soon. This internship will be one. So will the people with whom I’m honored to share a few months. With the sudden infusion of perspective, I couldn’t help but think I might be on a rock now, but the ideas will come.

Ambassador Santos’ quote is hanging to the right of my computer, emblazoned on a Post-It note, as a reminder that my time, for now at least, is one of ideas.

Old Sayings and New Impressions

One of those old, attributed-to-everyone adages about reporting goes: “Journalism is what somebody else doesn’t want you to print. The rest is advertising.” And then, there’s science writing.

After seven weeks with Physics Today (Only three left! Cue the waterworks), I’ve had the opportunity to learn the magazine’s audience, style, and intention. In that time, I’ve been weighing which half of the adage applies more to the science writing I’ve been asked to do here. What follows in this (incredibly late) blog post are a couple impressions I’ve gotten which make me think that (horror of horrors) the old adage might need an update.

One of the Physics Today editors sent me a book that drew a line between science writing, the sort of technical “here’s what’s hot in science”, and science reporting, which is uncovering problems in the institutions and practices of science that somebody (as the old adage goes) doesn’t want you to print. The former is Physics Today’s main fare, though the magazine does have a smaller section for the latter. I may only have a solid month of experience in professional science writing, but that’s a month more than in science reporting, so I’m going to stick with what I (kinda) know for this post.

I recently wrote a piece for Physics Today on how the sun itself makes a popular kind of solar cell less effective over time. I set up a few Skype interviews with various people on the team. I was ready—I had my list of questions and a conversational attitude. It took a few minutes into the interview for me to realize that I needed neither.

I didn’t have to pry information out of the scientists. In fact, they could barely say enough. In one 45-minute interview they told me the history behind their research, the potential commercial applications, what type of spectrography they used—and all I asked were two questions.

The experience of interviewing scientists about their work doesn’t map very well onto news journalism. The closest parallel would be a government official saying shaking your hand and then admitting to launching a coup. It doesn’t, in a word, happen.

Trust between a reporter and a source, the silent protagonist of Spotlight and every other journalism yarn, is a different beast in science reporting. The most important capital a journalist can have is a source’s trust in her ability to get the facts right and treat the story fairly and without biases. Though the image is different under the current regime, we as Americans have inherited an idea of the journalist as an upright truth-teller with a near-mint moral compass. That’s partially, I think, because the stories about journalists that get passed down are of incredible feats of holding truth to power, which typically only happens when you have people close to power who trust you enough to spill the beans.

In science writing, trust is different. Yes, the scientist whose brain you’re picking must trust you, but her trust is less in your moral uprightness than your ability to know what the hell she’s talking about. It doesn’t pay to talk to somebody who nods through an interview, looks at his notes later, and finds a doodle of a solar cell and “conspiracy????” underlined three times. I’m only kind of speaking from experience.

The last way in which science reporting differs from news reporting is really two (forgive me, five-paragraph essay format, for I have sinned): the audience and the impact. News reporting is, in theory, the act of exposing flaws in social systems to the people in those social systems. Ideally, it’s for everyone, about everyone. (I’m adding qualifications because of course news reporting falls prey to elitist, racist, any kind of -ist, really, biases) When a publication limits its audience, or adds barriers to understanding its content, its impact plummets.

Publications like Physics Today do both. To be fair, it’s a very specific level of science that only a certain group with years of training can understand. On the flip side, some of it is science that affects people without years of training. Not to mention, as a science communicator told me the other day, “It’s an obligation as a scientist to share [my work] with the people who are paying for it.” I see the obligation of science writers to help scientists share their work as a matter of public service. It chafes when publications set additional, artificial boundaries on a subject that is at once so gate-kept and so vital to being an informed citizen.

Maybe I’ve watched too much Newsroom. Still, I think journalists should help the broader public to understand things that would otherwise be kept from them, be that through state power or social barriers. That’s a pretty banal thought, and something like it is in most 101 books on reporting. That said, it’s been on my mind while working in a place that often makes pieces with a very high knowledge bar. I understand that it’s a different kind of reporting, and I understand that it’s for a different audience, and I understand it is, to such a gargantuan and humbling degree, not up to me to adjudicate on these things. Still: it doesn’t feel like advertising, but sometimes, it doesn’t often feel like the other thing.

Suckers, Nobels, and the Sweep of History

The editor wanted an excel sheet with every Nobel Prize winner’s name, their seminal paper, and the year that paper was published. “This looks like a job for an intern,” he chuckled.

I laughed along with the editor’s joke, wondering what poor sucker would get that job. Then I noticed everyone’s eyes on me. Hey, I thought. I’m an intern. A beat, and then: I’m the sucker.

Two weeks and 163 obscure physics papers later, that editor is now the proud owner of a spreadsheet cataloging every Nobelist’s one to four greatest hits up to 1948, the year of Physics Today‘s first issue. Meanwhile, I’m the proud owner of a grudging respect for Microsoft Excel and a frighteningly specific google search history (Let’s see you target ads at me now, Facebook). Does the Nobel committee give a prize to the guy who visited their website the most times in a week?

While you mull that over, let me regale you with a couple of things that struck me during my slog down the physics establishment’s collective memory lane. Mostly glaringly, Dead White Guys applies nowhere more than in the halls of Nobelists. Of the 141 people who won a Nobel in the time span that I surveyed, 2018 to 1948, one hundred and twenty of those are white men. The others: seven are Japanese, two are Chinese, one is from Pakistan, and Chandrasekhar worked in Western countries but was born in India. Two women were honored with a Nobel in my 70-year time frame: Donna Strickland, who won last year, and Maria Goeppert-Mayer, who won in 1963, fifty-five years before Strickland. To find the one other woman who won besides Strickland and Goeppert-Mayer, we have to trek an additional 60 years to 1903, when Marie Curie won alongside her husband. All three women, it goes without saying, are white.

Physics, for a hundred different reasons, has a problem with everyone who isn’t a white man . The Nobel, with its 51 female Laureates (as opposed to 851 male) and 15 Black Laureates, shares the blame for the ratio. However, time and again , physics has shown that its heroes and foot soldiers are white and male. As people in the physics community, we should wrestle with this daily.

Alongside the screaming racism and sexism, I saw something quieter. It started with David Wineland, one of the two (still-living) white guys who shared the Prize in 2012. His work in optical cooling, the act of placing particles in a trap so delicate that they maintain their quantum-mechanical state, that won Wineland a Nobel wasn’t the thing that stuck out to me. Rather, it was how much he cropped up in other Nobelists’ speeches. In his Nobel lecture from 1997, Claude Cohen-Tannoudji cites Wineland’s methods for optical cooling. It’s mutual, too: in Wineland’s lecture, citation 30 is for one of Cohen-Tannoudji’s papers from 1986. Strange, I thought. Maybe it’s a coincidence. They’re working on the same thing, so of course they’d talk about each other.

As it turns out, Nobelists cite each other constantly. Boyle is indebted to Kroemer. Kroemer credits Esaki. Esaki genuflects before Shockley, who started it all. Putting together this spreadsheet, arduous as it was, I got to see something of history’s sweep. I saw an interlocking and self-reinforcing web of scientific endeavor: as scientists cited each other and used each other’s methods in their experiments, their fields progressed. I saw entire disciplines evolve—if you ever have a spare day or two, go through the Nobels for Physics from the latter half of the 20^th century and watch high-energy particle physics grow from infancy. If you’re someone with a love for science, it’s deeply, resonantly satisfying to watch each generation of physicists climb onto the shoulders of giants.

That might seem romantic for someone who just wrote half a blog post about inequality, and yeah, it is. Consider this, though: what more compelling evidence do you need to include the entire human race in the study of the universe than the progress we’ve made with both hands tied behind our back?