- I feel excited to be
representing physicists
because I am a minority and
I want to show young girls
out there that there are women in STEM
and I wanna show them
that they can do it too.
(cool music)
I'm Dianna Cowern.
I'm the creator of Physics
Girl, a science YouTube channel
and I do science
communication and outreach.
I try to get the kids
interested in science.
No one was telling me that
it was cool to love science.
In fact, it was quite the opposite.
But eventually I met these role models.
I met my science teacher.
I met physicists.
People who encouraged me to be curious.
On Physics Girl, I get to do experiments.
I get to look into fun physics topics
and I get to really dig in and have fun
while trying to teach
other people about science.
It's like the future.
Today I wanna explore the
physics of this simple act.
We're hoping for more
observations that support
inflationary theory, or whatever theory
that might improve upon it.
That's what we're working toward.
Thanks for watching.
That moment when you're
sparking your curiosity
and you're starting to figure
out how the world works,
that doesn't have to be complicated.
It can be applicable to your everyday life
and it can be super exciting.
I think that there are different ways
of looking at the world.
One way of looking at the world
is through the eyes of physics.
One is just kind of admiring
what the world has to offer.
- What's really nice
about working with Dianna,
and having her to look up to,
is she took this passion for science
that a lot of girls have
and makes something
completely unique out of it.
She has a knack for
being able to take these
complex scientific ideas and relate them
to an everyday way of thinking
that helps a lot of
people understand better.
- There's physics in everything.
There's physics in skateboarding.
Looking at a skateboard and thinking,
okay when that comes up
in the air it's gonna fly
in a parabola and you
could calculate exactly
what the trajectory is gonna be.
You can look at when someone
kicks up a skateboard
or when someone goes up on a rail
and knowing what part of
the skateboard is touching
is gonna affect how fast
it'll move across the rail.
What's fun about physics demos
is that you can show a model
of the real world, of
something much, much bigger,
on a small scale.
So with a plasma ball,
you're showing how air can be ionized.
You're making lightning,
basically, in a little demo,
a little small experiment.
And then when you go to the big scale,
that's what lightning is.
You're ionizing air.
The STEM wage gap between men and women
is nearly $17,000 per year.
An interesting little
fact about my channel
is that if you look at the
demographics for younger ages,
it's in the 30%, 40% female.
And then as it gets older,
the numbers go down by a lot.
So it's like 10% female.
And that's what we see in physics too.
So you see this pipeline.
You see this loss of women in science.
So what I'm hoping is
that 10 years from now,
I'm not gonna see that drop off.
I'm gonna see girls
are staying in science.
Girls that are interested
in it when they're young,
they're gonna stay with it.
They're gonna keep asking questions,
maintain their curiosity, and
hopefully stay in science.
What I do day to day is I
get to play with science.
I get to ask questions.
I really enjoy what I do.
It's really fun.
It's exciting.
It's fun to be on the cutting edge
and I wanna show young people
that you too can do it.
This is where the future is at.
STEM is where the future jobs are.
That's where our future
of our world is going.
(fun music)
