Visualizing the Physics of Nanotechnology Using 3D Animations

Your science is cool, but making it seem that way to non-scientists can be daunting. One of the biggest hurdles in gaining the public's interest in physics is overcoming the specialists' means of communication – static diagrams and plots may clearly communicate a physicist's ideas to another physicist, but they aren’t going to grab attention from a wider audience. By looking to how mass media portrays physical phenomena in an abstract way, we can learn how to better reach a larger audience, and explore how to connect to a non-specialist viewer. In this talk, I’ll show that you can use powerful (and free!) 3D modeling software to animate your physics in a way that is stimulating and exciting to the viewer, yet also easy enough to generate by a graduate student in their spare time.