Physics style

I joined Facebook in January 2010, four years after the popular social medium became accessible to the public. Despite my late start, by the time I took over Physics Today‘s Facebook page in April 2010, I had acquired a good sense of how people interact on Facebook and of what kinds of posts they like.

That training period was essential to making Physics Today‘s page a success. The most important lesson I learned was that posts should be interesting and relevant to your friends (or fans in the case of Physics Today‘s page). If they’re not, your existing fans won’t share your posts with their friends, who won’t, in turn, become new fans.

The training period also taught me to try out other social media myself before using them to fulfill the mission of Physics Today‘s publisher, the American Institute of Physics: “To advance, promote, and serve the physical sciences for the benefit of humanity.”

My latest social media venture is in Pinterest . Launched in 2010, Pinterest calls itself a visual discovery tool. Users can follow and create virtual pin boards of images and other content that they find on the internet. One popular way of using the social medium is to collect ideas for decorating projects.

Why would Physics Today be interested in Pinterest? For one thing, the social medium is much more popular among women than men. Of its 70 million users, 80% are female. Promoting physics on Pinterest might help, however modestly, to encourage girls to take an interest in the subject.

Having signed up, I soon discovered that Pinterest is indeed highly visual—to the extent that most images have short captions. My sister-in-law posts pictures of food on a board devoted to healthy eating. If she wants the corresponding recipe, she can click on the picture, which will take her to the site where she originally found the recipe.

Given Pinterest’s picture-heavy, text-light nature, what boards could I create that both promote physics and align with how people behave on the social medium? For my first (and so far only) board, I opted to show well-dressed physicists.

Despite what you might think, it hasn’t proven difficult to find images of physicists—male and female, past and present—who look good in their clothes. So far, the board, which is called Physics style , has 95 images (or “pins” in Pinterest parlance). The screenshot above shows a typical selection. Of the 14 physicists, seven are women. The countries represented are Bangladesh, Bulgaria, Malaysia, Portugal, Romania, Serbia, Turkey, the UK, and the US.

I don’t know how Pinterest users will react to my board. At first, I worried that choosing physicists based on what they wear or wore would appear frivolous and shallow. But the more pins I posted, the more their collective impact became stronger: Physicists are very definitely not all scruffy, white men.