Wearing my rowing and physicist hats

Sometimes, when I’m working out at my gym, I wear my Capital Rowing Club baseball cap. The club’s logo identifies me as a rower, which, as I found out last week, isn’t a bad thing.

Lifting weights alongside me was a newcomer to Washington. He saw my hat and we chatted about rowing. I told him about the club and encouraged him to join.

I don’t habitually wear anything that identifies me as an astronomer (my former research area), a physicist (my current field of operations), or an editor (my current job). Still, when I encounter members of the general public, I’m aware that in a modest, indirect way, I represent the physics community.

For the most part, the questions I get from the general public at parties, on airplanes, or at other social encounters spring from pure curiosity. To answer “What’s new in physics?” I might reply about advances in medical physics, particle physics, or other areas that I suspect my interlocutor might not have heard of.

Occasionally, however, I’m asked about climate change by people who are skeptical of its manmade component. Not being a climatologist, I don’t attempt to refute their views. Rather, I point out that the evidence that Earth’s troposphere has warmed is undeniable. Spacecraft have reliably measured the mean global sea-level rise (about 2 mm/y). Spring, as measured by the greening of remotely sensed vegetation, is arriving a week earlier in the Northern Hemisphere than it used to. The controversy, I say, is about what will happen in the future and what we should do about it.

My conciliatory approach is aimed not just at avoiding a dispute that I doubt I could win. I lack the specialist knowledge to make a compelling case for anthropogenic climate change. Rather, I’d like to leave my climate-skeptic interlocutors with the idea that experiment is the final arbiter in climatology and other sciences.

That said, I can’t bring myself to say anything conciliatory about astrology.