Somebody on social media (I no longer recall who) pointed me to this Chemistry World piece categorizing stock images of chemists which was pretty funny. Tweeting about it led to this Twitter thread of humorous comments about stock images of math, which was also entertaining. This got me thinking about doing something similar around physics.
The first stop of any such excursion is to do a Google Image search for the word “physicist,” which yielded the screenshot above (it’s in incognito mode so my past search history doesn’t contaminate things). This is… better than I expected. Only six of the 24 people pictured are Albert Einstein, which is lower than I expected, and there are some great but not super well known physicists in there– Faraday, Maxwell, and Arnold Sommerfeld (the bottom left corner). A few of these folks are even alive and doing physics– Ed Witten and Jim Gates in the second row, Gerard t’Hooft in the bottom row, and Frank Wilhelm-Mauch, who I’ve never heard of before but who somehow grabbed a spot on the top row.
I could do with less of Michio Kaku and a few more women (there are several women in the next screen down), but this isn’t nearly as bad as I expected.
A google search for just “Physics” on the other hand, is pretty much what I thought it would be:
So… Many… Equations…
Of course, the real gold mine for this sort of thing is not Google, but stock-photo services. The Forbes blog platform has a direct link to Shutterstock, so I hit that to see what they come up with for “physicist” and “physics.”
Sadly, but not surprisingly, the largest category of stock images is what I think of as “Not That Kind of Doctor.” For example, this one:
is captioned “Portrait of professional physicist sitting at desk in office and writing work notes in patients form, copy space.” I’m pretty sure somebody was reaching for “Physician” and overshot a bit, here. Physicists don’t generally have patients…
In photos that include people, though, white lab coats abound, including this group of happy lab workers who are about the be obliterated by the supernova explosion that seems to be happening somewhere behind them:
And then there’s this extremely cautious person:
There are physicists who work on experiments that are assembled in clean-room conditions, who would wear a lot of clothes to reduce contamination, but I’m pretty sure that’s actually a medical doctor.
Images with people also include a fair number where I’m totally at a loss as to what makes any of these people a physicist. For example, these two in a cafe:
The man in this is specifically identified as “physicist with smart watch,” but I have absolutely no idea why.
And then there’s this image:
whose descriptive text is a glorious bit of word salad:
happy physicists fellow and girl having rest after defending thesis, young man and woman rejoicing at success. Smiling guy and fair-haired lady in strict suits have good mood. Concept of fashionable
“Fashionable” is not a word commonly associated with physicists, and I’m not quite sure why these two have chosen a featureless desert as the place to relax after a successful thesis defense, but there’s no accounting for tastes.
Of course, as with all stock photos, featureless voids are a surprisingly popular place to hang out, say if you’re fired up about your whiteboard full of equations:
or auditioning to play Doctor Strange:
or if you’d just like to contemplate your weird glowing atom in peace:
Speaking of weird glowing atoms, they’re everywhere:
Also, plasma balls:
Of course, the surest indicator of physics is the presence of equations, one in particular that shows up written by kids who do the darnedest things:
and also by disembodied hands:
and innumerable other forms. Less famous equations do appear, but generally with something else to dress them up:
I’m really not sure why that’s on fire.
Weird abstract cityscapes are also strongly associated with physics for some reason:
I will cop to occasionally using these to semi-ironically illustrate articles about quantum phenomena when I just need an image to separate two large blocks of text. Which I guess makes me Part of the Problem.
In the end, my two favorite images from this troll through search results for “physics” are this faintly ominous Looney Tunes stick of dynamite:
And this, which is probably the most realistic looking laboratory shot in the entire collection of stuff I found on Shutterstock:
This one’s explanatory test reads:
Small boy making a research during school science project in engineering lab.
So, okay, it’s apparently engineering and not physics, but “Making a research” is endearingly awkward, so we’ll end our visit to the land of stock photo physics there.
