Students sometimes get the impression that all physics was done many
lifetimes ago by ultra-smart people like Newton and Einstein. They
cannot imagine getting a job doing physics in today's world.
By way of counterexample: Earthquake science and engineering is a
hot topic. It has been in the news lately. Here are some useful
references:
*) The forecast for the northwestern US is terrifying.
Here's an excellent article on the subject. You can offer it to
students as an example of what good science writing looks like,
both style-wise and content-wise. If it had not won the Pulitzer
prize, you would wonder why not:
It contains zingers like this:
the Pacific Northwest has experienced forty-one subduction-zone earthquakes in
the past ten thousand years. If you divide ten thousand by forty-one, you get
two hundred and forty-three [....] Counting from the earthquake of 1700, we are
now three hundred and fifteen years into a two-hundred-and-forty-three-year cycle.
Update: 319 / 243 and counting. Yikes!
*) Here's a recent discussion of basic earthquake science:
*) Here is something that I don't expect high-school students or teachers
to read in any detail, but it might have some value as a show-and-tell
conversation piece, so people can see what an industrial-strength
research publication looks like:
Goldfinger, C., Nelson, C.H., Morey, A.E., Johnson, J.E., Patton,
J.R., Karabanov, E., Gutiérrez-Pastor, J., Eriksson, A.T., Gràcia,
E., Dunhill, G., Enkin, R.J., Dallimore, A., and Vallier, T.,
"Turbidite Event History—Methods and Implications for Holocene Paleoseismicity of the Cascadia Subduction Zone" https://pubs.usgs.gov/pp/pp1661f/ https://pubs.usgs.gov/pp/pp1661f/pp1661f_text.pdf
This contains the data and analysis that allows you to estimate the actual
probabilities. The earthquakes do not come every 243 years like clockwork.
On the other hand, they are not random, not a Poisson process. The longer
you go between earthquakes, the higher the probability per unit time of
getting one ... and (!) the higher the probability that it will be huge.
Also it contains zingers like this: A big Cascadia earthquake might will
trigger a San Andreas earthquake few years later.
OTOH the largest possible San Andreas earthquake is small compared to
the expected Cascadia earthquake, and California is much better prepared.
So, as is so often the case, the thing that is fashionable to worry about
is not what people ought to be worried about. Oops.
*) As always, once you have done the basic physics you need to work on
the policy and politics. Getting a large group of people to deal with
something they'd rather not deal with is a challenge. You have to
persuade them to pay a nontrivial price for tsunami protection, which
they have not hitherto paid for.
There are defensive measures that can be taken. They're not cheap, but
they're not completely unaffordable either. For example, you can google
for tsunami vertical evacuation. Here's a specific proposal, with lots
of details: