According to the American Association for the Advancement of Science’s (AAAS), Science Dance Contest (Taking science to the dance, and back again) a/k/a Dance Your PhD, “…the human body is an excellent medium for communicating science–perhaps not as data-rich as a peer-reviewed article, but far more exciting.”
Markita Landry’s PhD thesis is titled “Single Molecule Measurements of Protelomerase TelK-DNA Complexes.”
My Ph.D. work involves the use of a relatively new technology called optical trapping. Using focused laser beams, (1064 nm = infrared beam = red dress) can trap dielectric particles (we use grey/black microspheres = black shirt). The laser holds the beads in place, but it is ultimately the motion of the beads that allow us to take our measurements, and that must be followed extremely precisely (in our case, our resolution is 3.4 angstroms, which is a very small length scale). This precision with regards to following the motion of the beads was my motivation for expressing the theory of optical trapping through tango, which is a dance that is heavily dependent on the ability of the follower to follow the steps that are led. These steps are non-deterministic and are made up by the leader on a real-time basis, so the follower never knows what to expect, and must always be acutely aware of their partners motions to follow correctly…
For more on Dance Your PhD read the article in the AAAS Science magazine, Can Scientists Dance? by John Bohannon.
[T]he diversity of the dancers was nothing compared with the diversity of their output. The graduate student category is a case in point. The first dance, Gruetzbauch’s 30-second galactic tango, focused on one phenomenon: the capture of a galaxy by a larger one.
Maybe foresters should try this to explain forestry? I’m a lumberjack…
It’d never work, would it?
Nullius in Verba 