This is, first and foremost, an outreach blog. I try to make my writing as accessible as possible, so that anyone from high school students to my grandparents can learn something. My goal is to get the general public to know a bit more about physics, and about the people who do it, both to better understand the world and to view us in a better light.

However, as I am occasionally reminded, my readers aren’t exactly the general public. I’ve done polls, and over 60% of you either have a PhD in physics, or are on your way to one. The rest include people with what one might call an unusually strong interest in physics: engineers with a fondness for the (2,0) theory, or retired lawyers who like to debate dark matter.

With that in mind, am I really doing outreach? Or am I doing some sort of “inreach” instead?

First, it’s important to remember that just because someone is a physicist doesn’t mean they’re an expert in everything. This is especially relevant when I talk about my own sub-field, but it matters for other topics too: experts in one part of physics can still find something to learn, and it’s still worth getting on their good side. Still, if that was my main audience, I’d probably want to strike a different tone, more like the colloquium talks we give for our fellow physicists.

Second, I like to think that outreach “trickles down”. I write for a general audience, and get read by “physics fans”, but they will go on to talk about physics to anyone who will listen: to parents who want to understand what they do, to people they’re trying to impress at parties, to friends they share articles with. If I write good metaphors and clear analogies, they will get passed on to those friends and parents, and the “inreach” will become outreach. I know that’s why I read other physicists’ outreach blogs: I’m looking for new tricks to make ideas clearer.

Third, active readers are not all readers. The people who answer a poll are more likely to be regulars, people who come back to the blog again and again, and those people are pretty obviously interested in physics. (Interested doesn’t mean expert, of course…but in practice, far more non-experts read blogs on, say, military history, than on physics.) But I suspect most of my readers aren’t regulars. My most popular post, “The Way You Think Everything Is Connected Isn’t the Way Everything Is Connected”, gets a trickle of new views every day. WordPress lets me see some of the search terms people use to find it, and there are people who literally google “is everything connected?” These aren’t physics PhDs looking for content, these are members of the general public who hear something strange and confusing and want to check it out. Being that check, the source someone googles to clear things up, that’s an honor. Knowing I’m serving that role, I know I’m not doing “just inreach”: I’m reaching out too.