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Yuan Lanfeng's attempt has influenced Zhou Siyi, and she hopes to introduce the charm of science to more people, clear up the rumors and confusion in the field of social opinion, and spread true knowledge.
◎ Science and Technology Daily reporter Liu Yan
Black-rimmed glasses, qi bangs, an orange top, surrounded by colorful foreign language words, at first glance confusing.
Image source: ByteDance
"These words are all my research directions, and the Douyin head is my own drawing," Zhou Siyi said with a smile.
Siyi Zhou, 29, is a postdoctoral fellow in theoretical physics whose research interests include cosmology, string theory and field theory, touching on the forefront of modern physics.
In the past 4 months, Zhou Siyi has become a popular science creator of Douyin, and she has broken and crushed the mysteries of cosmology in a language that everyone can understand. Her account, String Theory World, has 245,000 followers across all walks of life and has received 134,000 likes.
"Recently, many children have asked me if there is a UFO", speaking slowly and logically, milky, looking like Zhou Siyi, a primary school student, calling himself a "kindergarten teacher" and calling fans "children".
Brain-burning and want to listen, is the "children's" evaluation of her popular science.
Zhou Siyi in popular science what is the "primordial black hole"
Among the several fan groups she has built, the top physics researchers, doctoral students, high school students, and junior high school students in China are enthusiastically discussing quantum mechanics, black holes, and dark matter in the group.
Zhou Siyi said: "If this continues, you say that there is not a Nobel Prize in my fan base?" ”
The fun of the physical world
Zhou Siyi was born in Wuhan, Hubei Province, her grandfather was a special teacher of physics in high school, her father studied electrical automation, and the company opened specialized in the automation control of large machinery, she showed her interest and talent in physics at a very young age.
Zhou Siyi said: "Since I was a child, they have let me see the circuit board."
When Zhou Siyi was in kindergarten, her grandfather taught her to learn small hole imaging. In elementary school, the two grandchildren often worked together on radios and small airplanes.
Once, I wanted Zhou Siyi to make a small car that traveled against the wind and participate in a manual race in Wuhan. Zhou Siyi said: "I wanted to use gears to drive, and grandpa said that it was cheaper to use a belt to convey." Zhou Siyi felt that the toothpaste that was running out was difficult to squeeze out, so he and his grandfather came up with a tool, and later applied for a patent.
Physics not only gave Zhou Siyi the joy of using her hands and brains to solve problems, but also gave her another way of understanding the world - many phenomena and things in daily life, she knows the "why", Zhou Siyi likes this feeling.
After junior high school, Zhou Siyi's physical talent appeared and became the standard answer to the physics class in the eyes of the teacher. In high school, Zhou Siyi was admitted to the First Affiliated Middle School of Central China Normal University, and in this famous school in Wuhan, where there are many masters, Zhou Siyi is still a top student in physics.
In his junior year of high school, Zhou Siyi watched a documentary called "Dimension: A Mathematical Walk", a two-hour science film that told a lot of esoteric knowledge, such as the theory of regular polycycles, fractals, and fibrosis in four-dimensional space, which was the first time Zhou Siyi experienced the pure beauty of science.
Zhou Siyi said: "Because it visualized these things, it was originally just a vague concept in the mind. It's like when you go to the Public Security Bureau to report a crime and someone asks you what a criminal looks like, you describe small eyes, wear glasses, and someone else draws him. Those haunting physical concepts become three-dimensional images, some people say, beauty to tears, like the infinite truth of the universe is in it, you see all the pictures feel the beauty. ”
From postdoctoral fellows to science popularization workers
"Girls are not suitable for learning physics", Zhou Siyi did not know how many times he had heard his parents say it since he was a child.
In Zhou Siyi's view, the entire Asian society is biased against women learning physics, and it is precisely for this reason that she wrote in the introduction of Douyin: "I like to tell children interesting physics knowledge. Especially for the cute little girl to talk about physics. ”
After going to college, Zhou Siyi was able to contact the world's top scientists. In 2014, she went to the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology to pursue a Ph.D. in cosmology under the tutelage of Wang Yi, whose field of research is "cosmological colliders". In her second year, she was given the opportunity to communicate with maldacena, an Argentine theoretical physicist who, in her words, those two hours of communication were worth a year of hard thinking. In October 2019, she went to Stockholm University as a postdoctoral fellow, and Nobel laureate in physics James Peebles came to share, and she was able to get up close and personal with "characters in textbooks".
In 2020, Siyi Zhou's two-year collaboration with Toshifumi Nokai, Takeuchi and Suro Kim won the 15th Particle Physics Medal: Young Scientist Award in Theoretical Particle Physics for their achievements in theoretical physics. Successive laureates of this prize have since become great physicists.
Zhou Siyi in his childhood believed that he might be the next Einstein, but science's requirements for genius have always been cruel, and in the process of advancing human cognition of the universe, the hierarchy between real geniuses and others is even more intuitive and cruel.
Zhou Siyi had to accept his relative ordinariness.
A year ago, Zhou Siyi saw a video by Yuan Lanfeng, an associate researcher at the University of Science and Technology of China, who was once known as a "genius prodigy."
Zhou Siyi said: "At that time, some people spread 'pseudo-science popularization' under his eyes, as an active science popularization expert, the main speaker of the "Science and Technology Yuan Ren" program, Teacher Yuan Lanfeng said that if we don't come out (to do popular science), let those people rob the traffic."
On July 25, 2021, Zhou Siyi released his first short video on Douyin.
Dressed in black and white stripes, she "reported" to everyone in a tone that scientists had discovered the merger of black holes and neutron stars in June this year, and explained why the news made the academic community so excited.
Let science spread farther and wider
In Zhou Siyi's "String Theory Kindergarten", some of the questions she taught were very interesting and curious: "The crisis of cosmology is about to be lifted?" "How do you steal energy from a black hole?" "Are there any Trisolarans?" "How do kindergarten children learn to make hair?"
There are also names that make people daunted, "How do elementary school students understand P-V phase transitions?" "How Kindergarten Kids Understand Schwarzschild Black Holes.". There are also esoteric professional terms such as "degree gauge", "curvature", "inflation", "AdS/CFT" and so on.
At the beginning, many netizens in the comment area were confused, why push this for me? "How can I get a video like this?" Some people also sighed, "This is really not what I should see as a college student."
Slowly, many people began to "chase more".
"I don't understand what she's saying, but I just want to hear it." One housewife said that when her children were in junior high school, they all loved to watch Zhou Siyi's videos, "although sometimes they didn't understand it, but they were very interested."
Zhou Siyi's "kindergarten" has become a classroom for seeking knowledge.
In a video about the speed of gravitational waves, there are hundreds of comments about the discussion of scientific questions, "Can gravitational waves pass through black holes?" "Do gravitational waves also have diffraction?" "Talk about five-dimensional space".
To Zhou Siyi's surprise, someone made a short video to spread the knowledge she spoke in a more understandable language.
Zhou Siyi said: "Originally, I made a short video and thought I was a teacher of children. It turned out that the children were my teachers."
Because of the strong curiosity of netizens, Zhou Siyi, as the "kindergarten director", with a three-inch tongue, invited more industry leaders to the fan base, and many children benefited. Those high school students and junior high school students who have a sincere love for physics but do not have enough good educational resources have the opportunity to communicate with scholars such as Wang Yi.
Zhou Siyi believes that the audience base of the short video platform is much larger than the traditional knowledge Q&A group, which will make the scientists' ideas spread more widely and attract more next generations to join the scientific research team.