Over the past few days, Fang Zhong, head of the Chinese Academy of Sciences' Institute of Physics, has become something of an online celebrity.

"I hope you choose physics, and fall in love with it," Fang told freshmen at a Beijing high school in August.

The remark was a response to a worrying decline in the love for physics among senior high school students. Among the 290,000 students from Zhejiang province who took this year's gaokao - the annual college entrance exam - only 80,000, or 27.5 percent, picked physics as a prime area of interest. In Shanghai, it was 30 percent. The test is geared toward the subjects a student selects.