Ask Ethan: What should a scientist look like?

If you do not like people who refute your expectations, or like to judge a book by its cover, you may be tempted to speculate whether a person is competent enough to do his job based only on his appearance. Even if a person has already proven his ability to perform work in his field, you will remind them, personally or publicly, that they do not meet your expectations. And this week one of the readers asked me:

Why do you, Mr. Ethan Siegel, look strange and frivolous, despite the fact that you have a great scientific mind? You fly in your mouth can fly.

As you can see from my photo above, or from a photo from my Facebook profile (below), I don’t particularly fit the stereotype about the appearance of a scientist.



For a long time it was believed that scientists should look serious and professional. Other stereotypes are associated with this: a scientist must be well cut, even if scattered, but not stand out from the crowd, must be Asian or white, and always a man. If you do not believe, take a look at one of the most famous “photographs of scientists”: the Solvay Congress of 1927, which was attended by all the greatest personalities of science: from Einstein to Lorentz , from Schrödinger to Pauli , and also Ehrenfest , de Broglie , Planck , Heisenberg , Bohr Dirac
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The most attentive will notice Marie Curie , the only exception to the male stereotype. This situation persisted for a long time, and if you look at the most typical images that we associate with scientists - NASA astronauts and MCC workers - they will look about the same in the 1960s and 1970s, at the peak of the space program.


NASA Control Center celebrates successful Apollo 13 landing in 1970

Times have changed, styles have changed, the demographic composition of scientists has changed - in terms of religion, race, age, gender - but some stereotypes die off with difficulty. Worse than that - despite the large number of major scientists who do not fall under the usual measures, there are a much larger number of scientists corresponding to these measures. Especially in such areas as physics, mathematics, engineering and computer science, the stereotype of the scientist as a serious, professional man of the white race persists to this day.


NASA Science Lab team celebrates successful landing of the Curiosity 2012 rover

I do not want to say that there is something bad about being professional, serious, white or male. Many scientists are just such, and, probably, the majority of today's acting scientists combine these features. But none of these signs, external or personal properties, have any effect on your mind’s abilities or on what you can achieve with it.

George Gamow (also known as George Gamov) was one of the most ridiculous living people, and at the same time one of the greatest scientists of all time, and he came up with the Big Bang theory. Pal Erdös was one of the least professional people - he slept on institute couches, LSD and amphetamines threw themselves most of his life, and at the same time became the most fruitful mathematician of the 20th century. His colleague, Alfred Renyi, once said about him: “a mathematician is a machine for turning coffee into theorems”. For many reasons, it is hard to be nonconformist, since not only ordinary people, but your colleagues are not serious about you if you do not match the picture of a “good scientist” in their head. This I did not even embark on sexism and racism towards women, blacks and Hispanics, who are trying to succeed in areas in which it is not customary to wait for their participation. Even such a relatively down-to-earth characteristic, like an unusual hairstyle, is still able to attract attention.


Senator Dianne Feinstein and Bobach Ferdowsi, a member of the Cassini – Huygens and Curiosity missions, known as the “mohawk dude”

This is one of the most important lessons - both in life and in science - that will not be given to you at school: your intellectual abilities do not depend in any way on whether other people consider you strange, not serious, bizarre (from the physical, personal or other points of view), or whether you have any unusual habits or qualities, except for quick wits and a penchant for science. You don’t have to like the fact that he is, from your point of view, strange, not serious, unprofessional, etc. But you must judge them in terms of their activities and the quality of the results of their work, and not in terms of whether you approve of their appearance.

For you, for your life and happiness, it is very important to be yourself, to feel free in expressing yourself and who you really consider yourself to be. There will always be a stereotype to which you, from the point of view of other people, should correspond (in my case, an intellectual scientist), and there will always be people who have a negative attitude towards you for non-conformism. But to feel the contempt of some - and not particularly significant, in the end - better than not expressing yourself. Therefore, dear reader, I seem strange and frivolous to you because it is part of my person, and that’s how it is convenient for me to present myself to the world. I agree to bear responsibility for this and I am ready for all the judgments that people will make about me due to the fact that I show myself as I am. But on behalf of all the living people who have ever been told that they are crazy for any reason, who dreamed of going beyond the limits that others chose for them, I hope that if you don’t like me, it will be solely because of claims to the quality of what i do, and for no other.

And about the fact that a fly can fly into my mouth? Well, what is life without a little risk ?!