In the Dark

Regular readers of this blog – both of them – will know that I engage, from time to time, in acitivities we are usually obliged to call “outreach”. For once, the OED gives a meaning which is pretty much spot on what is involved:

The activity of an organization in making contact and fostering relations with people unconnected with it, esp. for the purpose of support or education and for increasing awareness of the organization’s aims or message.

For us scientists this word means going out into the wider community (often, but not exclusively, in schools) and talking about our work to generate interest in science and also to explain what we do to the people who actually pay for it, i.e. taxpayers. This general activity is increasingly important for science generally, and astronomy has a particularly important part to play as it is not only very photogenic – there are lots of wonderful images to excite and engage the audience – but it also gives people the chance to think, at least for a while, about matters far removed from the mundanities of everyday life.

Most astronomy departments in Britain have very active outreach programmes and their importance is even recognized in, e.g., research grant applications, which nowadays require a statement about “public engagement” to be submitted alongside the technical science case.

I think colleagues in more mainstream subjects (e.g. condensed matter physics) often get a bit jealous of the astronomers in their department gallivanting off to all kinds of venues in the evenings to give talks. We usually say that what we’re doing is raising the profile of the discipline so that more students apply to do physics, justify our existence to the taxpayer, and so on. All very laudible things to do, but I have to admit I don’t really think of those things when I go off to do a popular talk. It’s not for the money either; I’m not famous enough to command a fee for public speaking, but even if I were I would probably waive it. The real reason I do these things because I like talking, especially about astrophysics, and especially to people who are interested enough to make a positive decision to come and listen.

Anyway, the reason for that rambling preamble about outreach was that yesterday I went to London to give a talk – in the upstairs room of a nice pub in the Marylebone area of Central London – for a group called Just Friends. When I was invited to give the talk I was a bit nervous because previous speakers had included David Starkey and Sir Roy Strong, as well as fellow astronomer and rising media star Marek Kukula, who actually turned up last night to lend me moral (?) support. My nervousness was, of course, entirely unjustified and the audience turned out to be very friendly.

I’ll leave it to the reader to work out what sort of people make up Just Friends, but there’s a bit of a clue in the list of previous speakers…

Because of the unusual location I had to take my own data projector along, which meant lugging it around all evening. Actually it wasn’t really “my own”. I borrowed it from a colleague in the department, so I was a bit nervous about breaking it as well as unsure how well it would work. As it happens, it all worked fine and I handed it back safely this morning.

Anyway, the room turned out to be very full and my talk – a variation on the theme of the Cosmic Web – seemed to go down quite well with an audience which was considerably less rowdy than I’d expected given that the talk was in a pub. After a fairly lengthy Q+A at the end and a quick drink, I headed back to Paddington for the 22.45 train back to Cardiff, getting home about 1.30am, exhausted but having enjoyed the evening enormously.

I suppose the price for having a captive audience and the chance to meet interesting new people at events like this is that you end up spreading yourself a bit thin. The morning after it feels less like outreach and more like overreach. The younger folk in the department seem to cope much better with all this scooting about. I’m definitely getting old.

This entry was posted on October 28, 2010 at 12:19 pm and is filed under Biographical, Books, Talks and Reviews, The Universe and Stuff with tags astronomy, Just Friends, Outreach, public engagement, Science. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.