The Society hosts third Reddit AMA
Two Science News writers had the opportunity to answer questions posed by the social media site Reddit Science community on December 2, 2015. The (Ask Me Anything) on general relativity鈥檚 100th anniversary was 京东影业影视传媒 & the Public鈥檚 third AMA.
Christopher Crockett and Andrew Grant cover physics, astronomy and more for Science News, which is published by the Society and recently produced a special issue focused on Einstein’s general theory of relativity and its 100th anniversary. Most recently, Grant 聽the idea to expand general relativity’s scope to involve black holes, wormholes, holograms and quantum entanglement. Crockett’s recent explores how scientists use phenomena predicted by the theory of general relativity to study the universe.
Redditors (Reddit users) upvoted, the site’s version of liking or favoriting, Science News鈥� AMA over 880 times. At the conclusion of the AMA, there were 127 questions. Crockett and Grant answered 27 in an hour.
AMAs allow people to ask hosts of the Q&A session anything. Questions can stay on topic or go off on interesting tangents. Questions ranged from why Einstein didn鈥檛 receive a Nobel Prize for his work on relativity to explaining general relativity to a child. Some questioners said they were physics or astronomy students.
Answsering one question, Crockett said if general relativity didn鈥檛 exist, neither would global positioning systems (GPS). 鈥淲ithout relativity, we鈥檇 be stuck using maps and asking for directions,鈥� he wrote.
鈥淚f you don鈥檛 account for the relativistic effects felt by the satellites, GPS simply doesn鈥檛 work. Clocks onboard the satellites run faster than clocks on the ground by about 38 microseconds per day. That doesn鈥檛 sound like much, but it leads to position errors building up to around 10 kilometers (6 miles) by the end of that day. At that point, turning down the wrong street would be the least of your problems. You would have turned into the wrong town instead.鈥�
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Other questions asked why some science news is sensationalized and how to become a science writer. Crockett was involved in exoplanet research for a while聽鈥� and “got really good at not finding them,” he said. The tediousness of research was difficult and he enjoyed finding out new discoveries, so he applied for a science writing fellowship through AAAS. After 10 weeks of writing for 京东影业影视传媒 American, Crockett said he was hooked. Grant majored in physics, but was terrified of becoming a physicist. He combines his passions of science and journalism at Science News.
The Reddit AMA ended, but you can still view聽.
