built for speed: part deux

Today we bring you Part Deux of our awesome Q&A with Diandra Leslie-Pelecky, a physics professor at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln (in the process of relocating to Dallas, Texas) and author of The Physics of NASCAR: How To Make Steel + Gas + Rubber = Speed. If you missed it, you can read Part I here. Also check out her Website and schedule of speaking engagements. And oh yeah -- buy the book!

Q: As a woman in physics, you're sensitive to gender dynamics, and NASCAR is another male-dominated sport. Did you notice some differences?

DLP: I'm so used to being one of the few women in a room that the composition of the NASCAR garage and shops didn't strike me as unusual. NASCAR is a little more male dominated than physics, but I think the bigger difference is between non-profit academia and a for-profit, high profile professional sport. I have yet to see young women waiting anxiously outside the door for the speaker after a particularly good talk at the APS March meeting. [The Spousal Unit would like readers to know that he heartily approves of the concept of physics groupies, and thinks this should become de rigeur at conferences. In fairness, he believes that female speakers should have groupies, too.] The fact that all the drivers are male and there are very enthusiastic female fans changes the male/female dynamics significantly compared to a situation in which it is assumed that everyone is there -- male or female -- for their job.

The people who work in the shops and the garage (and the NASCAR officials) are a much more diverse group than the drivers.  There are a number of women working for NASCAR in the technical inspection line, and during races in the pits. There are a few women on the garage and pit teams, but not many. I went to my first testing session in Vegas a couple of weeks ago and was pleasantly surprised to find a number of women engineers. Some come to the track only for testing, when the teams are allowed to use data acquisition tools on the cars. I had only been to races, and many of the women I saw at Vegas work primarily at the shop.

The garage environment is a little like a frat house. There are a lot of practical jokes and put-downs and a lot of "guy humor." The environment in the engineering departments of most shops may be a little more professional. (I realize that sounds like I'm comparing research-intensive universities with frat houses. I'm not, but I do think many research universities tend to be more competitive and less collegial.) NASCAR is also very high pressure, because if you are, for example, on the pit crew and you screw up, you do it in front of millions of people and it could literally cost tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Physics is a little ahead of NASCAR in terms of numbers, but there are a lot of similarities. The most important thing, I think is early parental involvement. If you talk to most women in science, they will tell you they had extremely supportive parents. The same is a requirement for racing, especially because racing is expensive. Kids get involved at age 7 or 8 in go karting, and advancing up the ranks isn't cheap. The prospect of getting physically hurt is a bit of a difference between science and racing. I'll stick with a theoretical understanding of impulse, thank you.

Q: One of the strengths of your book is that it brings a strong narrative structure to a story in which, as you once told me, "the main character is momentum." Why did you decide to do that, and what can other scientists learn from this about effective ways to communicate with broader audiences?

DLP: The narrative structure just seemed to work as a way to take the reader along with me on the trip. I'd love to say I planned it that way, but the end book I delivered to Dutton was very different than the one I expected to write. I sort of fought the narrative structure at first. For example, it was really hard for me to write physical descriptions of people. First, I often realized after I left an interview that I couldn't actually remember what the people looked like and I was so focused on the science that I hadn't written anything down. Second, I felt uncomfortable writing that someone was graying, or heavy, or balding. And the longer I was around the garage, the more I couldn't help but feel for the people I was watching. I couldn't write dispassionately about the struggles the No. 19 team was having last year, or the disappointment Andy Randolph felt looking at the blown engine from Fontana.

I went to a screenwriting workshop called Catalyst and the most important thing I took away from that is that there has to be something your audience cares passionately about. That almost always involves people. Science isn't done in a vacuum. (Okay, technically, it is, but I meant there is no science without the people doing it.) The thing that scientists and the NASCAR people have in common is passion. Passion allows you to work 60 hours a week without realizing that you're doing it. The Physics of NASCAR shows people that science doesn't just happen in laboratories.

Q: Who is your target audience?

DLP: My book is meant for the NASCAR fan who doesn't know a lot of science, or the science fan who doesn't know a lot about NASCAR. The writer Margaret Wertheim pointed out that people who are already interested in science are very well served. It's the people who don't know that they're interested in science that we fail. NASCAR has 75 million fans. If this book gets even a very small percentage of them to think about taking a science course, or ask their teacher about springs, I will be thrilled. My goal is to stimulate people's interest. They'll learn some science from reading the book, but I hope the book will inspire them to look further and ask their own questions.

I think we often miss that what is interesting to us as physicists is not at all interesting to most people. Students usually have three questions: "Why do I have to learn this?", "When am I ever going to use this?", and "Is this going to be on the test?" We usually only have a good answer to the third one. How can you have a position about alternative fuels if you don't understand how an internal combustion engine works? Every year, I talk to my students about engines in the thermodynamics unit, and I talk about real engines. Inevitably, I get a few students who will email me and ask, "If the internal combustion engine can never be really efficient, why aren't we looking for alternatives?"

You don't have a right to have an opinion on things you don't understand. If you can't explain what a stem cell is, you shouldn't be lobbying for or against using them. We need to be teaching students the science they need to function in today's world.

Q: Have any of your physics colleagues expressed dismay about taking such a "popular" approach? It's a common criticism of such books. How would respond to that criticism?

DLP: I blame it all on NSF and NIH. If they funded more of my research proposals, I would be so busy in the lab that I wouldn't have time to write about NASCAR. I've been bombarded over the last few weeks with pleas from the scientific societies to write my elected representatives because the US budget for science this year is a disaster. Those of us in schools from kindergarten to universities are responsible for the people who made these decisions.

Look at people like Leon Lederman and Carl Wieman, who stopped doing physics research per se and are focusing on education issues because they believe that solving these problems is more important than publishing another paper in Physical Review (sorry Phys. Rev.). When you get to heaven, St. Peter is not going to ask for your academic C.V. It's an important enough problem that what other people think or say isn't really a factor.

I've been working with teachers from elementary to high school for more than 10 years and frankly, I'm frightened by much of what I see there. Even the best teachers are paralyzed by the implementation of the idea that we can prove that students are competent at science by giving them multiple choice vocabulary tests. We are teaching kids that learning is nothing more than rote memorization of unrelated facts they will never use again. They get to college or the workforce and are shocked to find that your results and not your intentions are what matters. They can't write persuasively. They can't read a chapter from a book and pull out the main ideas. The best of our students will be the best in the world, but I fear that the distribution is getting broader and broader. We are not doing well by the majority of the students we educate and, in the end, it is going to come back and hurt us as a country.

I've gotten a lot of encouragement from my colleagues at Nebraska. That may be because we have a long tradition of writing books about the physics of sports, starting with The Physics of Golf by Ted Jorgenson, The Physics of Football by Tim Gay, and now my book. We're taking bets on which of the current crop of assistant professors is going to be writing The Physics of Professional Wrestling in a few years.

Q: You've written The Physics of NASCAR which -- if there is any justice -- should be a huge success. What's next?

DLP: My father's favorite saying was, "Life is not fair." So I'm trying not to get any expectations up. My next writing projects are going to be research grant proposals. I'm hoping that my experience writing this book has made me a more convincing proposal writer as well.

I just wrapped up working on a television program on the science of the new car for VOOM HD networks. That project is headed up by Brad Minerd, who did the spots with my colleague Tim Gay for NFL Films. Brad is now at NASCAR and gave me the opportunity to consult on the show. It was a really interesting experience to see how television programs are put together. It is even more of a challenge to put science into a very short TV program than it is to write a [popular science] book.

As for a second book, I've heard from F1 racing people talk about finding ways to harness the innovative minds of the people in motor sports to generate ideas that could be used in consumer automobiles. For example, limiting how much gasoline the team gets for a race would force them to think about ways to capture some of the energy from the engine that is normally wasted, such as the motion of the flywheel, or heat.

As a country, we have to make some really tough decisions about energy, and I don't think most people have the information they need to make an informed decision, so I'm thinking about how there might be a way to do something along those lines. I also have an idea for a NASCAR-themed romantic comedy about an aerodynamics engineer who falls in love with a NASCAR driver. It seems like a healthy challenge to get the Navier-Stokes equations and a kiss in the same line of dialogue!