Students Dressed Up As Icons

Students at a middle school dressed up as famous figures that have made an impact. As expected, someone dressed up at Einstein. But what caught my attention was this description:

There weren't any awards for best costume, but Craig Dudd's version of Albert Einstein was hard to miss. Craig, 14, spray-painted his hair white, sported a white mustache and borrowed a white laboratory coat from a local orthodontist.

There are, of course, 2 things wrong with this:

1. Einstein was not an experimentalist, and there's hardly any chance of him ever having any need to wear a lab coat;

2. Most physicists do not wear a lab coat, even experimentalists. I don't even have one, and I know for a fact that in all my years working as an experimentalist, I have never see a physicist wearing one.

I think kids like these do not have access or interactions with scientists, and physicists in particular. So of course, the popular misconception on what a scientist should look like based on what they've read, or seen in the popular media would be the one they have. I suppose in the scheme of things, this is the least problematic of all the misconceptions students have about science and scientists. Still, I wonder if this is a symptom of the distance between "fiction" and "reality" that the students have about science.

Zz.