EUREKA!
EUREKA!
notebook
CAMPUS
NEW FINDINGS AND RESEARCH
Skewed Views
Surveys exaggerate support for political violence.
In this moment of media hand-wringing about the specter of violent partisan conflict or even civil war, a recent study led by government prof Sean Westwood finds the propensity for such violence to be significantly overstated. The research, published in PNAS (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences), determined in four survey experiments that support for politically motivated violence is “exceedingly rare”—2.4 percent, vs. estimates of 18.5 percent. The researchers found that ambiguous questions, biased wording, disengaged or inattentive survey respondents, and the lack of a “don’t know” option in various polls all tend to skew support for political violence upward. “Although recent acts of political violence dominate the news, they do not portend a new era of violent conflict,” the researchers conclude.
Splitsville
Photons seen in a new light.
“We’ll never look at light the same way,” says physics prof Lorenza Viola, whose research group predicts that split particles of light can exist. The particles, known as photons, previously were thought to be indivisible. Vincent Flynn, Adv’22, lead author of research published in Physical Review Letters, explains that light can exist in different phases, in the same way water can exist as ice or vapor. The researchers showed that a photon has two distinct halves, and they identified conditions suitable for isolating the two. They named the split parts of the photon Majorana bosons, after Italian physicist Ettore Majorana, who theorized in 1937 that electrons could be split in half.
