The Intimacy of Research
Hello friends!
I have a new open-access post up today, The Intimacy of Research, all about trying to close the gap between my own experiences doing research, and the one-dimensional way scientific discovery (specifically in astronomy) is offered to people outside the profession. You can read the full article here, and here's a little excerpt:
Room for the personal is, in my opinion, missing from a lot of the ways astronomy is offered to “the public”. A lot of the astronomy content that’s intended for people who are not astronomy experts (broadly called “outreach” amongst astronomers) is very single-note, in that it attempts to confine or control people’s emotional responses. Astronomy outreach is often based on telling people wild-sounding facts that are usually sort of a stretch of the truth (a planet where it rains diamonds! the largest/nearest/oldest thingamabob ever discovered!), and it vies for people to have a reaction that I think is something close to awe, but is usually more like a mystified impressedness. After all, most of these whiz-bang descriptors come at people with no context. What the hell does it mean for it to rain "diamonds"? The superlatives feel like marketing copy for Milwaukee's Allen-Bradley clock tower, which is advertised as "the world's second tallest four-faced clock tower", or the Fukuoka Tower in Japan, which is "Japan's largest seaside tower". What is the competition like for four-faced or seaside clock towers?
While I understand the urge to scrabble for people's attentions amid a million other things in a hyperstimulating world, it's often troubled me that this way of experiencing the universe-- as a hail of nearly uninterpretable factlets that only offer "wow" as their possible response-- is so very different than the way people within science experience their own work. In my own research, I find the "eureka" moments don't much feel like them. A good idea, or an insight, feels instead like when a breeze moves the curtain on your window, and a sliver of sunbeam touches you, even if just for a moment. It feels, to use a word I learned during the creation of our winter performance last month, like apricity: the warmth of the sun in winter.
This is also the last week to sign up for my next workshop, Moving Through the Universe! Since this particular workshop is something of a newer venture for me, I could really use some help getting the word out-- if you know someone who'd like to take a journey through space (while being in their own body), please consider sharing it with them (you can also share your discount code, which if you recall from the last newsletter is CUPCAKES).