Issue 1, 2014
From May 27-29, George Musser from Scientific American and Sabine Hossenfelder from Nordita ran a workshop with lectures for science writers. The workshop website is here and slides of the lectures can be found here. This workshop was funded by Nordita with an additional grant from the Swedish Research Council, Vetenskapsrådet.
Here Sabine summarizes her motivation for this workshop:
George and I came up with the idea for this workshop exactly one year ago at a reception of an earlier Nordita workshop, says Sabine Hossenfelder. Yes, alcohol was involved. We talked about how science writers often feel like they're running on a treadmill, having to keep up with the frenetic pace of publishing, only seldom getting a chance to take a few days off to gain some broader perspective. And we talked about how researchers too are running on a treadmill, having to keep up with the pace of their colleagues' publications, and often feel that science writers miss the broader perspective.
And so we set ourselves the goal to get everybody off the treadmill for a few days.
Our "workshop for science writes" was devised for both, the writers and the physicists: For the writers to hear what topics in astrophysics and cosmology will soon be on the agenda and what science journalists really need to know about them. And for the physicists to share both their knowledge and their motivation, and to caution against common misunderstandings.
We modeled the workshop on "boot camps" organized by the Space Telescope Science Institute, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute, Knight Foundation, U.C. Santa Cruz, and other institutions. It was a very intense and tightly packed meeting, with lectures by experts on selected topics in astrophysics and cosmology, followed by question and answer sessions.
On Tuesday afternoon, we visited the phonetics lab at Stockholm University, which was a fun excursion into a totally different area of science. At the lab, participants could analyze their voice spectra and airflow during speech, and learn the physics behind speech production. On Tuesday evening, one of the participants of the workshop, Robert Nemiroff, gave a public lecture at CosmoNova. The fully booked lecture took the audience on a tour through the solar system and beyond, explaining the science behind the amazing photos and videos.
While it was quite an organizational challenge to find the right level of technical details for an audience that physicists rarely deal with, the question and answer sessions as well as a large number of breaks were useful for participants to talk to lectures individually. We also had many interesting discussions about the tension between scientific accuracy and popular science writing.
Only a week after the workshop, I knew of at least four participants who are planning on using what they learned at the workshop for an article or radio program. We also got very useful feedback on the organization of the event that will be valuable if we plan on repeating a meeting of this type.
Recently, I hear a lot of talk about the relevance of science communication. It seems to me though the most relevant thing is to actually do it.
Top row from left: Patrick Sutton dispelled myths about gravitational waves, while Illa Losada detected brain waves at the phonetics lab. After what seemed like an eternity, George Musser, Alberto Aparici and Patrick were happy to escape from the silence room. Bottom row: Ray Jayawardhana generously shared his hottest tricks for finding your own new expolanet. Alberto, Daniel Fischer, Ernesto Lozano, and Claudia Di Giorgio got invaluable tips from Francisco Lacerda, head of the phonetics lab, on how to interpret the spectra of their recently recorded voices.
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