UK news article muses on US physics sitcom’s relation to resurgence of physics study
DOI: 10.1063/PT.4.0235
In the UK, to what extent has the funny but fluffy-shallow American situation comedy The Big Bang Theory helped cause a resurgence of student interest in physics?
A 5 November article in the Observer carried the headline “ Big Bang Theory fuels physics boom: Interest in A-level and university courses rises as US comedy makes the subject ‘cool .’” But the text of the news report is more cautious about defining causality.
The sitcom, with its caricaturing of geeky science nerds, was last discussed in this column in September . The Observer article cites an Institute of Physics (IOP) spokesman’s statement crediting “a range of factors,” including the sitcom, for a recent “rise in popularity of physics.”
The article offers a bit of quantification of that rise:
According to the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE), there was a 10% increase in the number of students accepted to read physics by the university admissions services between 2008-09, when The Big Bang Theory was first broadcast in the UK, and 2010-11. Numbers currently stand at 3,672. Applications for physics courses at university are also up more than 17% on last year. Philip Walker, an HEFCE spokesman, said the recent spate of popular televisions services had been influential but was hard to quantify.
The number studying A-level physics has been on the rise for five years, up 20% in that time to around 32,860. Physics is among the top 10 most popular A-level topics for the first time since 2002—and the government’s target of 35,000 students entering physics A-level by 2014 seems likely to be hit ahead of schedule. It is a far cry from 2005 when physics was officially classified as a “vulnerable” subject.
The number of those entered for AS level has also increased, by 27.8% compared with 2009, up from 41,955 to 58,190. The number of girls studying physics AS-level has risen a quarter to 13,540 and of boys by 28.6% to 44,650.
The piece ends by quoting the IOP spokesman: “TV shows and news coverage of exciting research both have the power to inspire their audiences but we firmly believe, and all the evidence suggests, that only good physics teaching has the power to convert student’s latent interest into action.”
Steven T. Corneliussen, a media analyst for the American Institute of Physics, monitors three national newspapers, the weeklies Nature and Science, and occasionally other publications. His reports to AIP are collected each Friday for ‘Science and the media.’ He has published op-eds in the Washington Post and other newspapers, has written for NASA’s history program, and is a science writer at a particle-accelerator laboratory.