Written evidence submitted by Professor Michael Merrifield,
Head of the School of Physics and Astronomy,
University of Nottingham (COM0002)

 

Executive Summary

 

  1. This short submission, although representing a personal perspective, is informed by my roles as current head of a large physics department at a UK university, former admissions tutor in that department, and participant in a variety of outreach activities, particularly those delivered via YouTube.
  2. I would like to bring to the Committee’s attention the effectiveness of science communication through YouTube relative to other media such as conventional broadcast television. BARB data indicate that regular serious science programmes such as The Sky at Night and Horizon have viewing figures of around the 400,000 mark on BBC4.  By comparison, new science videos released by top YouTube channels such as MinutePhysics (run by YouTube physics pioneer Henry Reich; www.youtube.com/minutephysics) typically pick up 400,000–800,000 views in just their first week, and can easily go on to have viewing figures of 4–6 million (admittedly for a global rather than a domestic audience).  Even our own more modest contribution, a channel called Sixty Symbols (www.youtube.com/sixtysymbols), which involves a cast of physics staff from the University of Nottingham talking about a wide range of physics topics from the transparency of glass to general relativity, has in excess of 500,000 regular subscribers, with the videos now viewed more than 50 million times.  The equivalent run by our colleagues in the chemistry department, a channel called Periodic Videos (www.youtube.com/periodicvideos) originated by Professor Sir Martyn Poliakoff and Brady Haran (the outstanding film maker behind all our video series), can boast 750,000 subscribers and more than 125 million views.
  3. It is worth noting that this popularity does not mean the videos are “dumbed down” or gimmicked in any way.  Although Brady ensures that we avoid too much mathematical complexity and jargon, the science is presented accurately, and largely by a cast of scientific researchers answering questions direct to camera in conversational unscripted interviews.  This simple non-didactic style of presentation does not seem to put off the audience; on the contrary, they enjoy the sense of community and ownership that comes from being taken seriously and hearing directly from the scientists involved in research. The simplicity of style also means that the costs involved are much more modest than conventional video programming, which is how we can afford to produce them at a cost consistent with the modest budget that a physics department has for such outreach activities. 
  4. We looked closely at the impact of Sixty Symbols for the Research Excellence Framework (REF) 2014.  It was returned as one of the School of Physics and Astronomy’s case studies for this exercise (http://results.ref.ac.uk/DownloadFile/ImpactCaseStudy/pdf?caseStudyId=32739). It was awarded the maximum four-star “World-leading” score in the REF assessment.  As part of the case, we commissioned an independent evaluation by a consultancy firm, which concluded that the channel has a wide impact ranging from use as a resource in the school curriculum (where videos are often employed as plenary introductions to topics) to higher education (a survey of first-year undergraduates revealed that three-quarters had had their interest in and understanding of physics significantly increased by these videos) to the wider general public (from whom comments on the videos and direct contacts are (almost!) universally positive).  Anecdotally, we also receive many communications describing the positive effect that these videos have had in awakening an interest in science – here, for example, is the story of an individual who was inspired by this work to give up an unsatisfying job in banking to pursue a career in physics:

http://periodicvideos.blogspot.co.uk/2014/09/i-quit-my-job-for-physics.html. 

  1. The success of Sixty Symbols has led to interest from other organisations and subsequent spin-out channels.  For example, Google, the owners of YouTube, commissioned an astronomy-related channel entitled Deep Sky Videos (www.youtube.com/deepskyvideos), and the Science and Technology Facilities Council funded a video series entitled Backstage Science to present its facilities and the science they enable (https://www.youtube.com/backstagescience).  This more corporate engagement has not been without its challenges: it is in the nature of the YouTube audience that it is turned off by anything seen as selling an official point of view, so the independence of the videos from the funding agency must be maintained.  This potential for tension ultimately led to us not producing a series of Sixty Symbols videos for the British National Space Centre (BNSC) around Tim Peake’s mission to the International Space Station: although BNSC had originally approved and agreed to fund our proposal to make these videos without editorial involvement (beyond a veto on the final product to ensure they were not embarrassed by the content), we were ultimately unable to negotiate a way of working that did not involve significant intervention by their staff. 
  2. There are, I believe, a number of lessons that can be learned from the work that we have done on these video channels:

March 2016