And just like that, there was a mad rush of mass-spectrometer-for-home-use startups.

Back in graduate school, I TA'd an electrostatics course. We were going through the details of the basic parallel-plate capacitor, and so Prof. Peter Hagelstein (of the project you listed above) used the example of how much energy was stored in a football-field sized set of parallel-plate capacitors with oil as a high-breakdown dielectric.

The students were dutifully copying the lecture while I was sitting there with my mouth agape realizing that he was working through a simplified example of what energy storage was required for the X-ray laser. IIRC Those guys had their own substation, and would charge the capacitors. The switch would get thrown and the sublasers would shoot at the molybdenum target, which would laze in the X-ray spectrum (and the molybdenum would vaporize, I think.)

Afterwards, I asked him how on earth the energy was transferred from the caps to the sublasers: He just smiled and said "very carefully".

> part of the depicted did come from anecdotes

He spoke at MIT (early 90s?) and I remember him talking about making fun of PacBell colleagues in his comic: They would recognize themselves, ask him to autograph the comic for them, and then go away happy (thus making fun of them a second time.)

I wrote in the other reply:

> As for others, the set of people who understand that Hawking radiation exists has nearly 100% overlap with those who know that black bodies and spinning magnets radiate, so for those folks who are in the set who are also unfamiliar with the author, perhaps it's more clickbaity.

So according to my theory, you must in the set that understands Hawking radiation + black bodies + E&M, but not in the set familiar with Baez.

I worked hard on my theory, please don't let me down and be a counterexample. :)

Well, you got me thinking about "What exactly is clickbait?"

So full disclosure: I've directly interacted with John Carlos Baez only in social media, with the topics as disparate as music and observational astronomy. My own QFT & GR background is grad course level but with little actual usage in my career. (I've done more solid-state + high-speed electronics work, with a bunch of programming as well.) With that background, and turning the pedantry dial up to 11:

To me, one distinguishing element of clickbait is that the post is ultimately disappointing. The usual M.O. for clickbait is that the website needs eyeballs for advertising, so they beef up a headline of an uninteresting article with the expectation of getting extra monetization compared to an honest headline.

I would venture a guess that he doesn't actually care about monetization, or really even extra clicks, with this post. The screenshot with the big red X through the popsci article sets the expectation pretty quickly, and the tone of the rest of the post is really a rant that mediocre science made it into PRL and then into the popular science literature. He explicitly calls out the popsci journalists for laziness, but in a clever (I'm pretty sure Mark Twain would approve of his name being taken in vain) and erudite (correct use of the subjunctive) way.

Would I have clicked on the title without seeing the authorship johncarlosbaez.wordpress.com? Maybe but I doubt it. There is so much bad popsci physics out there that I'm pretty trained to ignore obviously inadequate headlines. So on a scale of 1-10, I'd rate the click-baityness of the headline no more than a 3. He got me to click, but only because I knew it was his post.

As for others, the set of people who understand that Hawking radiation exists has nearly 100% overlap with those who know that black bodies and spinning magnets radiate, so for those folks who are in the set who are also unfamiliar with the author, perhaps it's more clickbaity.

[edit: And I can't believe you got me to write that many words on the clickbait philosophy. Have I been baited? :) ]

Perhaps, but "Mathematical Physicists HATE when authors make THIS ONE ASSUMPTION!!1!" would be more click baity. I took it more as Baez writing for his physics audience.

> The title is... odd.

Not if you know the reputation of John Baez: Anyone familiar with him or his writings would know without hesitation that he understands black-body and E&M radiation, so his choice of title is clearly meant to be provocative.

It says to the reader "I wonder what he means?" To this reader, I'll also say that he delivered a terrific blog post.

Can you blame them? Just look at how they've been treated in the last few hundred years.

> Yeah, it's weird to me that an atomic transition can create something with a wavelength so much longer than the atomic radius.

Then it will be even weirder during an MRI: The protons in your body produce a wavelength that can be of order 1-10 meters.