The "national team" of popular science is like Prometheus, a fire thief in the field of popular science, leveling the information gap, allowing ordinary people to have the ability to hear the top knowledge and views of a country on a regular basis, and achieving universal knowledge in the era of short videos.
Author | Li Wei (Beijing)
"What is the meaning behind holographic wormholes?"
"How can a man be a fish?"
"If the javelin pierces the boundaries of the universe, what will be outside the universe?"
Behind each of the above fantastical scientific questions, there is a series of interesting popular science stories. What Duan Mingdi has to do every day is to connect these stories and tell them to everyone through the Douyin account of Lao Ming TV, so that the audience can understand the ins and outs of these scientific problems, theoretical cause and effect, and understand what is the spirit and concept of science in the process of listening to the stories.
Before becoming a Douyin popular science blogger with 1.9 million followers, Duan Mingdi was already a veteran science and education film director, creating works such as "Lunar Exploration", "The Rise and Fall of Empires", "Unity and Prosperity", and "Demystifying Cancer". Among them, "Lunar Exploration" won the 13th Huabiao Award and the 27th Golden Rooster Award for Best Science and Education Film respectively, and was evaluated by the State Administration of Radio, Film and Television as "representing the highest level of China's science and education films in the 60 years since the founding of the People's Republic of China".
From a senior science and education film director to a popular science blogger on Douyin, the change in Duan Mingdi's professional identity reflects the new changes in the current ecology of popular science content. As short video content has become the mainstream communication media, the form and distribution channels of popular science content have gradually undergone some changes: short videos and live broadcasts have become new carriers of popular science content; At the same time, platforms such as Douyin have built a faster and flatter communication system for popular science content to reach the public.
Under the interaction between easier to present content forms and more efficient communication channels, the communication efficiency of popular science content has been greatly improved, the ecology of popular science creation has been continuously activated, and the creative groups and audience groups have been continuously activated. In addition to professional popular science content creators like Duan Mingdi, you can also see university professors, researchers from scientific research institutes, and even academicians of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the Chinese Academy of Sciences have also begun to create popular science content on platforms such as Douyin, forming a popular science "national team".
"Douyin allows people like me who are new to Chinese to see knowledge beyond my scope, and Douyin is really taking the world to see the world." Under the video of Academician Jin Yong of the Chinese Academy of Engineering, someone commented. The "national team" of popular science is like Prometheus, a fire thief in the field of popular science, leveling the information gap, allowing ordinary people to have the ability to hear the top knowledge and views of a country on a regular basis, and achieving universal knowledge in the era of short videos.
1. Use "big vernacular" to talk about popular science content that can be retained
"What is man, according to Wheeler? Man is a particle nodule in space-time, a mass of particle yarn in space-time." In Lao Ming's top work, Duan Mingdi focuses on the physical major event that scientists created the first holographic wormhole in human history, introducing John Wheeler, the proposer of the concept of wormholes, as well as his single-electron universe hypothesis and participation universe theory; There is also quantum entanglement proposed by Einstein and Rosen, and the relationship between holographic wormholes and quantum entanglement.
"Wheeler believed that the essence of the universe could be information"; "Quantum is naturally a carrier of information"; "Information has no quality, and when information passes through a wormhole, the wormhole will not collapse"; "It is reasonable to think that parallel universes can be connected through wormholes...... In Duan Mingdi's narration, the essence of the world explored by physics is opened up in an alluring corner, allowing the audience to fully feel the charm of thinking in 15 minutes.
Since the first video was released on Lao Ming's TV account in June 2020, Duan Mingdi has released 189 works in four years. These works cover three categories: scientific exploration, historical stories, and character stories. People can learn why the ancestors of human beings are fish in Lao Ming TV, and you can see how the human cannon spawned by scientific and technological progress outside the city of Constantinople in 1453 changed the course of human history, and you can also find that Wu Zetian played an important role in the decline of the gate lord clan.
Although each work involves different fields, Duan Mingdi's works are like top works that explore the nature of the universe, taking Duan Mingdi's own views or perspectives as the main line, and through a logical and meticulous argumentation process, connecting a wealth of serious information such as theories, data, and historical facts, and integrating them into popular knowledge stories and telling them in as popular language as possible.
The reason why I want to say that fish are the ancestors of human beings is because some viewers left a message under Duan Mingdi's work: "Fish are your ancestors, not mine." From Charles Darwin's observation of the evolution of giant tortoises on the Galapagos Islands to the discovery of the world's oldest vertebrates by paleontologists in China, Duan Mingdi's work clarifies the factual basis for the existence of fish as human ancestors.
Translating difficult professional knowledge into works suitable for ordinary people to read or watch requires popular science content creators to use "big vernacular" to tell content that can be understood by all audiences. Many viewers will be "shocked" by Duan's ability to tell popular science stories, "It is an ability to output content in a rhythmic, flexible and even manner, and it requires extremely sensitive insight in addition to professionalism."
On the one hand, this stems from his years of experience in creating popular science content, and he knows how to properly integrate the explanation of scientific principles into the story, such as using the story of American middle school students to build high-efficiency solar installations to connect the explanation of Fibonacci sequences. On the other hand, because he is good at using technical means to vividly present scientific facts, in order to restore scientific facts such as wormholes, quantum entanglement, and double-slit interference experiments, Duan Mingdi taught himself animation production, using two-dimensional and three-dimensional animations, combined with film materials to produce.
2. New content and new channels help the ecology of popular science content prosper
As a veteran who has devoted himself to the creation of popular science content since graduating from university, Duan Mingdi is a witness and participant in the ecological changes of popular science content in the past 20 years. In 2000, people were still accustomed to watching programs such as "Into Science" and "Journey of Discovery" on TV, from which they learned about aliens, mysterious creatures, geological surveys, and astronomical observations. Duan Mingdi was the main creator of "Discovery Journey" at that time.
More than a decade later, more and more people have become accustomed to continuing to enter science through short videos and live broadcasts. According to the "2024 Douyin Natural Science Data Report", in the past year, more than 7.73 billion people liked natural science content on Douyin, and the number of views of experimental short videos exceeded 34.6 billion. The stories and research results of scientists such as Qian Xuesen, Yuan Longping, Newton, Einstein, and Stephen Hawking are known to more people through Douyin.
From a long-term perspective, the form and communication channels of popular science content have been changing with the upgrading of communication media. From buying popular science books like "100,000 Whys", to watching TV popular science programs like "Discovery Journey", to watching Lao Ming TV's popular science videos on Douyin, the scientific knowledge explanations that people see have become more vivid and vivid, the scientific fields they can access have become more extensive, and the popular science content creators they can access have become more professional.
As Academician Jin Yong said, the development of science has given people the opportunity to use newer technologies to convey scientific knowledge vividly. With the blessing of short videos, live broadcasts, and animation technologies, a lot of boring knowledge that was originally difficult to understand through text descriptions has broken out of the confines of ivory towers and tomes of books with a light posture and gone to the public, so that more people who are interested in them can see, understand and like it.
In the works released by Duan Mingdi, the ones that get a higher number of likes are often relatively more hardcore popular science content. Nobel laureate in physics Roger Penrose proposed the theory of the "quantum soul"; the immeasurable gravitational pull that pulls billions of galaxies forward; Whether there are blind spots in the human brain, etc., have received tens of thousands of likes. These seemingly serious and difficult knowledge points have become easy to understand in Duan Mingdi's narration, combined with film materials and animation effects.
More and more popular science content is being seen by more and more people through more and more popular channels. Among the fans of Lao Ming TV, many parents and children are chasing more popular science content together. On Douyin, there are also many users who have not gone to college and have become fans of works such as "The Theory of Relativity" and "A Brief History of Time" by watching popular science videos. At the same time, employees of large factories in Beijing and civil servants in small towns may be watching the same video work explaining "The Origin of Species".
3. The "national team" of science popularization sows the seeds of knowledge to the society
At the end of the issue of Why Fish Are Human Ancestors, Duan Mingdi said, "Darwin's greatness lies in his genius in pointing out that the process of evolution never stops, and that it is not the innate sacredness that makes the legend of mankind, but our determination to become a wiser, more rational and loving species."
This is also the ultimate goal pursued by popular science content creators, that is, to help the society develop a scientific spirit and scientific thinking by creating popular science works that can stand the test of time. Starting from this determination, mankind's continuous exploration, inheritance and application of scientific principles will become the source of driving force for the continuous progress of human society. And popular science is to sow the seeds of knowledge to society.
The progress of science and technology has brought new forms of content and means of communication, which has lowered the threshold for professionals in various fields to join the popular science team, and more professionals are using short videos and live broadcasts to disseminate their years of professional knowledge to the public. When more and more professionals join it, it will give birth to a richer, more hardcore, and flatter popular science creation system.
In the current ecology of popular science creation, a "national team" of popular science has been formed. In this team, there are professional popular science content creators like Duan Mingdi, who once worked in authoritative media, researchers from various scientific research institutes and professors from major universities, and even academicians of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the Chinese Academy of Sciences such as chemical engineering expert Jin Yong, paleontologist Zhu Min, solar physicist Wang Jingxiu, volcanic geology and Quaternary geologist Liu Jiaqi.
The emergence of the "national team" of popular science has made the scientific knowledge stored in the top minds of this country visible, heard, and learned by everyone. On Douyin, people can attend an online class with Academician Jin Yong and listen to him talk about how chemistry is changing agricultural production; You can listen to Academician Wang Jingxiu talk about why we want to study the sun; You can also follow Academician Liu Jiaqi to the moon and learn about the magical properties of basalt; Or learn how to build a dinosaur skeleton out of chicken bones at Lu Jing, a researcher at the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology at the Chinese Academy of Sciences.
In the view of Zhou Zhonghe, an academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the main significance of popular science is social education, and the huge "national team" of popular science can provide more authoritative information for everyone in an era of rapid information dissemination and in the increasingly large and scattered information flow, becoming the most stable ballast stone for the healthy development of popular science ecology, and playing an irreplaceable role in the precipitation of scientific spirit and scientific thinking.
More and more researchers, professors, and academicians are entering Douyin and using short videos to disseminate knowledge, which is to improve the scientific literacy of the whole people, complete enlightenment education, and stand on the last shift.