Excitement, baby steps and reams of rejections – how scientific knowledge builds on itself
Getting a paper published in a respected scientific journal can be an exhilarating opportunity for researchers to contribute to their fields, but it’s often a patience-testing exercise in rejection, rewriting and waiting. In this short by the French filmmaker Charlotte Arene, the physicists Frédéric Restagno and Julien Bobroff, both of the University of Paris-Saclay, offer surprisingly amusing accounts of their own experiences of the ‘letter’, the most common format for publishing research in physics. With Arene providing jaunty stop-motion visuals, The Researcher’s Article is an enlightening and lively paean to the process of adding a small drop to the well of scientific knowledge.
Director: Charlotte Arene
videoHistory of ideas
How to read ‘The School of Athens’ – a triumph of Renaissance art
25 minutes
videoCosmology
Are observers fundamental to physics, or simply byproducts of it?
10 minutes
videoAstronomy
Visualisations explore what the deep future holds for our night sky
6 minutes
videoKnowledge
A Kichwa activist on ayahuasca’s rise – and what it really means to her people
15 minutes
videoNature and landscape
Scenes from Aboriginal Australian pottery chart the turn of the seasons
7 minutes
videoMathematics
After centuries of trying, we’ve yet to arrive at a perfect way to map colour
20 minutes
videoEthics
What’s an idea worth? How prominent thinkers have understood intellectual property
6 minutes
videoHistory of science
Insect aesthetics – long viewed as pests, in the 16th century bugs became beautiful
8 minutes
videoMusic
A riveting audiovisual dive into what makes sounds harmonious, or not
28 minutes