Naked Science Forum
General Discussion & Feedback => Just Chat! => Topic started by: hamdani yusuf on 03/07/2021 22:31:21
-
Welcome to the Veritasium Science Communication contest! I recently won a $10,000 bet with a UCLA physics professor over a wind-powered car (here’s the video). Now, the team and I have decided to pass the $10,000 on by holding a contest to highlight science communicators.
What you need to do to enter is create a science communication video that is one minute or less in length, and post it on YouTube or TikTok with the hashtag #VeritasiumContest. You will also need to include your email address in the video description or clearly on your profile, so we can contact you if you’ve won. You must be subscribed to Veritasium on YouTube or following Veritasium on TikTok. We are looking for videos that clearly and creatively explain complex or counterintuitive concepts in the fields of Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics.
There are cash prizes for this competition—with first place receiving $5,000, second place receiving $3,000, and third place receiving $2,000.
https://www.veritasium.com/contest
Is anyone interested to participate?
-
Here's the requirements.
Videos must be one minute in length or less. Videos must be posted on YouTube or TikTok, and they may be horizontal or vertical. Videos must include the hashtag #VeritasiumContest in the description to be considered. Your email address must be in the video description or clearly displayed on your profile so we can contact you if you’ve won.
And the selection.
The Veritasium team will look through the top 100 most liked videos on TikTok and top 100 most viewed videos on YouTube, then decide on our top 3 overall. What we’re looking for is high quality science communication—it doesn’t matter if it’s just talking to camera, an animation, an experiment, or anything else. If it’s high quality, crafted with care, love, and attention to detail, we will like it. We are specifically looking for people who can explain difficult concepts in a clear and creative way. Captivate us, teach us, surprise us.
-
It turns out that trying to creatively explain complex or counterintuitive concepts in the fields of Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics in a video less than a minute long is harder than I thought. My first try took more than 2 minutes. I'm trying to achieve the time limit by removing non-essential parts from the video.
-
This is my first video entry. The time limitation is real pain in the process. I did what I can to meet it without losing much of important information.
Let me know what you think.
PS. If someone plays the video in this page, will it count as a Youtube view?
-
Hi Hamdani, I hope you are well.
First of all, it's much harder to create something rather than provide a critique on it. So let's establish that you have done well and it's obvious you've put a lot of work into this. Well done.
Critical comments follow:
1. Does it meet the criteria asked for in the competition? Is diffraction and interference a difficult or counter-intuitive topic for most people? (I wouldn't have thought that it was).
2. Is it an interesting topic? This isn't a competition requirement but it's fairly clear that you want the viewers to be interested. People might be more interested to see something you can do with diffraction (like see around corners) rather than just spend all of their 1 minute learning about the concepts.
3. The video is difficult to concentrate on and makes the viewer feel uncomfortable. It is over-dense with written information and there is insufficient time to read it. It's extremely uncomfortable to try and read at speed while someone else is reading out fragments of it at a different speed. The Narrator is also a digitised voice, I can understand why you have chosen this but it demands more of the viewer's concentration to understand it than a natural voice would require. When a human being cannot keep up with the information being presented, they tend to feel panicked and uncomfortable.
-
Hi Hamdani, I hope you are well.
First of all, it's much harder to create something rather than provide a critique on it. So let's establish that you have done well and it's obvious you've put a lot of work into this. Well done.
Critical comments follow:
1. Does it meet the criteria asked for in the competition? Is diffraction and interference a difficult or counter-intuitive topic for most people? (I wouldn't have thought that it was).
2. Is it an interesting topic? This isn't a competition requirement but it's fairly clear that you want the viewers to be interested. People might be more interested to see something you can do with diffraction (like see around corners) rather than just spend all of their 1 minute learning about the concepts.
3. The video is difficult to concentrate on and makes the viewer feel uncomfortable. It is over-dense with written information and there is insufficient time to read it. It's extremely uncomfortable to try and read at speed while someone else is reading out fragments of it at a different speed. The Narrator is also a digitised voice, I can understand why you have chosen this but it demands more of the viewer's concentration to understand it than a natural voice would require. When a human being cannot keep up with the information being presented, they tend to feel panicked and uncomfortable.
I hope you are well too.
Thank you for your feedback. I agree with your analyses. But I'm afraid that there's nothing much I can do about it, especially with time restriction. You'll have to frequently pause it to really get the information from the video.
The video is my first entry to the contest. Although winning is good, it's not my main purpose.
If you search for the difference between diffraction and interference in Youtube or Google, you'll find many videos and articles which are confusing at best, misleading, or even simply wrong. Some of them even come from professional science educators.
So I think that the best way to stop the misconceptions from spreading further, we need widely known science communicators to spread the correct explanation. I hope it can help to make the lives of many science students a little bit easier.
To prevent the video from being a spreader of disinformation itself, I'd like to know if you find any conceptual flaws in it.
-
This contest was created as a follow up of the wager that Veritasium won against a physics professor over the explanation for a physics experiment. Someone in Twitter joined the conversation and show an old short video explaining the simplified model. I guess this video can be a reference. Although it exceeds the 1 minute duration limit.
-
The selection criteria of the competition are:
We are specifically looking for people who can explain difficult concepts in a clear and creative way. Captivate us, teach us, surprise us.
A concept can be difficult if it meets at least one of these conditions:
- it's related to many things at once
- it involves long chain of reasoning
- it contains unknown values/parameters which can not be derived from known values/parameters
- it contains intuition or strongly held beliefs which turn out to be false
The 1 minute time limit is prohibitive to difficult concept of type 1 and 2.
The difficult concept of type 3 needs some methods or instrumentation devices to obtain the unknown values/parameters, so there would be more time needed to explain the method rather than the core concept itself.
The difficult concept of type 4 is the more likely candidate to meet the selection criteria without exceeding 1 minute time limit requirement. I think the video examples in reply #6 fall into this category.
-
1. Does it meet the criteria asked for in the competition? Is diffraction and interference a difficult or counter-intuitive topic for most people? (I wouldn't have thought that it was).
It's good to know that you don't think that difference between diffraction and interference is a difficult topic. But online references show that it's not always be the case.
Here is another answer I found arguing that Interference and diffraction are really the same phenomenon.
https://www.quora.com/Why-does-interference-happen-during-diffraction
Tipper Rumpf, PhD Optics, University of Central Florida (2006)
Answered April 7, 2018
Interference and diffraction are really the same phenomenon so the question is a little strange. They have slightly different connotations. Diffraction usually describes the spreading or splitting of a wave. Interference describes when there are two or move waves passing through the same location and the waves add or subtract (i.e. constructive or destructive interference).
Perhaps an answer to your question is that diffraction produces waves at different angles and when these overlap you get interference.
Here is another one,
Bill Otto, studied Physics & Chemistry at The University of Alabama in Huntsville (1976)
Answered April 13, 2018
Diffraction and interference are the same phenomena, and there is no clear distinction.
Interference is usually used to characterize the effects of a very small number of slits or beams, while diffraction is used to characterize a large number of slits (such as a grating) or a large area such as the diffraction from from a telescope mirror.
That said, there is no clear distinction between the two, and a discussion of why one is present with the other is moot, unless perhaps in your textbook the terms have been defined differently from the usual definitions.
From The Feyman Lectures[1]
the name has been changed from Interference to Diffraction. No one has ever been able to define the difference between interference and diffraction satisfactorily. It is just a question of usage, and there is no specific, important physical difference between them. The best we can do, roughly speaking, is to say that when there are only a few sources, say two, interfering, then the result is usually called interference, but if there is a large number of them, it seems that the word diffraction is more often used. So, we shall not worry about whether it is interference or diffraction, but continue directly from where we left off in the middle of the subject in the last chapter.
https://www.feynmanlectures.caltech.edu/I_30.html
Ernest Rutherford Quote: “All of physics is either impossible or trivial. It is impossible until you understand it, and then it becomes trivial.”
-
The difficult concept of type 4 is the more likely candidate to meet the selection criteria without exceeding 1 minute time limit requirement.
it contains intuition or strongly held beliefs which turn out to be false
Many videos I uploaded contain surprising results. They forced me to reconsider some widely accepted assumptions, such as Huygen's principle and how light interacts with matter. Maybe I'll remake some of them in shorter version.
-
Hi again Hamdani,
You've slightly misrepresented something I said earlier but I don't suppose it matters much.
You have started to seriously re-examine what the competition was asking people to do and that's definitely good progress. You may still be focusing too much on what you've done...
Many videos I uploaded contain surprising results. They forced me to reconsider some widely accepted assumptions....
Now you're obviously a very smart person but if that is your main strength then work in research, produce research papers or do something like that. When you're teaching or communicating with others, the focus should primarily be on the person you are teaching or communicating with. If you are teaching then you have to get them to understand something and preferably to be motivated to learn more. Veritasium admit to being an edu-tainment channel rather than an education provider. In your 1 minute video it may be acceptable to provide entertainment to the audience in a background of discussing or displaying some science. Take some pressure off the need to find the best science topic and put a bit more emphasis on making your audience enjoy themselves and/or make them feel that they are capable of being the smart ones. You only have 1 minute so I might give up on teaching them what you (or the exam syllabus) wants them to learn and just think about what they might be keen to see or learn about.
Good Luck and best wishes.
-
You've slightly misrepresented something I said earlier but I don't suppose it matters much.
In general, we say that a question is difficult if we can't give the correct answer quickly. There are many people who think that their wrong answers are the correct one. For them, that question becomes difficult.
-
I started making experiments when I found out that there's something in widely publicized explanations about behavior of light which doesn't add up.
I started the investigation using laser in visible spectrum, mainly focused on diffraction. I think it's strange that many textbooks introduce diffraction of light using single slit experiment, which has two edges, instead of the simpler single edge diffraction. My suspicions grew stronger with the result of tilted diffraction, in both vertical and horizontal orientation. And the most fatal blow to Huygen's principle in explaining diffraction of light came from non-diffractive edge, which is constructed using total internal reflection.
-
Debunking an old explanation naturally creates demand for new explanation. I needed to collect more pieces of the puzzle to close the knowledge gaps.
Then I learned that microwave can offer some insights which is hard to obtain using visible light. It's very convenient to explore some phenomena such as polarization. It's also easier to construct metamaterials in microwave range due to its macroscopic wavelength.
Experiment using microwave tells me that widely publicized fence analogy to explain polarization of light is misleading. Although microwave polarization filters look like a fence, their working mechanisms are different.
(https://www.scienceworld.ca/wp-content/uploads/Polarizing1.jpg)