Anyone who goes into physics for money or power is not likely to be bright enough for physics.

Dear CIP,

That’s exactly my point. Physics is not currently linked to money and power. If it were somehow linked by, say, a crazy new law setting the minimum wage for physicists to be $400,000/year, being a physicist would suddenly become a cool thing to be.

Again, very human, but not the kind of thing you’ll learn in standard bios.

*Not likely, for almost all meanings of ‘not’.

..and is currently finishing the PhD dissertation on Interplanetary Dust he interrupted 35 years ago, after he joined Queen.

See Bri’s Soapbox
http://www.brianmay.com/brian/brianssb/brianssb.html

Anyone who goes into physics for money or power is not likely to be bright enough for physics. And last time I checked, “I am a physicist” was roughly as effective a pick-up line as “I live with my mother,” though marginally more effective than “I’m on parole on child pornography charges” and clearly less effective than “I’m an escaped axe murderer.”

The situation for women may be slightly different. As a female undergrad at Caltech wrote: “for a woman here, the odds are good but the goods are odd.”

If you want to create more interest in physics as a career choice among people are aren’t particularly interested in physics, you must connect it to the things that most people are interested in: money, power, and sex. Because of a perceived connection between these things and the legal profession, law schools have a surplus of applicants despite lawyers being generally regarded as lying scum.

Conflicting anecdotes:

“Flirt harder, I’m a physicist” (APS - Best Slogan contest)

then again:

“Physics is like sex, sure it might produce practical results sometimes, but that’s not why we do it.” (Feynman)
“Love is a matter of chemistry, sex is a matter of physics.”

But:
Legend has it that Brown came up with his motion idea at a crowded Party and Pauli thought of his exclusion principle while watching the dancers in a Paris Nightclub.

Apparently physicists truly only ever think of one thing:
http://xkcd.com/c69.html

There is no escape:
http://xkcd.com/c230.html

On the other hand there is probably a reason these cases are rare.
Robert Lucky liked to repeat an anecdote that had him bumping into a hooker at Las Vegas who bemoaned whenever there was an engineering convention in town because they generated so much less business than other conventions. I suspect the hooker take from the annual APS convention is even more meager.

Scientists who become rich or famous often indulge the luxuries and vices available to the rich and famous. Does that make them more attactive role models? Maybe.

Nic,

One doesn’t need to understand French to see that it *is* possible to be an acclaimed Physicist who looks like a “normal” working person. De Gennes is quite the antithesis of the stereotypical poorly groomed Physicist!
In a jacket sans those tell-tale academic elbow patches, one could easily mistake him for a lawyer or businessman.

Still, science is not a job like every other. Every working scientist has made choices that put acquiring knowledge over acquiring money. There are few other fields where you find people so passionate about what they do.

I would like to think that these are the strongest and most honest selling points. To emphasize that this awesome occupation is being filled by human beings certainly can’t hurt though.

The post is not about an aspiration to appear normal, it is more about the fact that the lives of most scientists are, in most aspects, similar to those of most of the population. They fall in love; they worry about what others think; they have children; they worry about their education; they make some smart choices about their lives; they make other choices that end up as disasters, sometimes in their personal lives; some like sport, some don’t; they are baudy; some have stable marriages, others divorce multiply, or have affairs, or both.

I often think that precisely the opposite of “aspiring to be normal” is true of many academic scientists - they work hard to create the illusion of a life without the concerns of non-academics.

The point I’m making in the post is that the idea of scientists as very different from most people in ways other than merely their scientific abilities and inclinations acts as a barrier to people entering the field. If this was what scientists were really like, then I’d say “so be it” and have no interest in us “appearing to be normal”. But I think the truth is that most scientists are quite normal in most respects, and that we are shooting ourselves in the foot by perpetuating this illusion of the ethereal geek.

Concerning your other point; In my own experience I’ve found that the stereotypes in the UK and the US are pretty much the same.