Arthur C. Clarke died earlier this year. You may know him as man who first came up with idea for geostationary satellites or as a towering figure in science fiction who co-created 2001:A Space Odyssey and HAL, the most frightening computer ever
But did you know that Arthur C. Clarke was also a pioneer in astronomy outreach? In 1953, Clarke published a short story entitled “The Nine Billion Names of God.” The plot is simple, yet striking. Two computer programmers have been sent to a remote monastery in Tibet to help the monks there use a computer to compile a list of all the names of God. The monks believe that once that list is complete, human and cosmic destiny would be fulfilled and the world would end. The programmers do their work and are fleeing the mountain at night because they fear the wrath of the monks when the program finishes and the world still exists. One of them looks up. This is Clarke’s closing line to the story:
“Overhead, without any fuss, the stars were going out.”
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In the headline for a column about Clarke by science writer Dennis Overbyte, The New York Times called Clarke “the voice of cosmic wonder.”
In my view, to succeed in really engaging the public during the International Year of Astronomy, CASCA and its members all need to become voices of cosmic wonder.
I said “engaging”, not communicating with, or outreach to. Public outreach is something that funding agencies ask grantees to enumerate. Public engagement is what scientists of all stripes really have to do.
Let me explain the difference. Outreach means programs aimed at telling the public what someone thinks they want to know, or worse, what someone thinks they ought to know;
engagement means asking the public what they want to know. Outreach too often can resemble mothers telling children to “eat your peas because they’re good for you.”
Many areas of science have a real problem switching from the traditional passive “outreach” to a more activist “engagement.” That’s partly because what many scientists do and how they do it is increasingly inaccessible to other scientists, much less the educated layperson or the general public. In many fields, the theories appear arcane to outsiders, the concepts strange and the stuff of interest is discernible only through the use of very specialized equipment or abstruse statistical manipulations.
But astronomy wields an advantage over many other branches of science. You have a great brand. There are hardly any negatives (in fact I couldn’t think of any but a reporter with four decades experience has learned to avoid words like unique, only, never, and all unqualified superlatives). Astronomers and astrophysicists deal daily in cosmic wonders, although that connection isn’t always obvious.
But your marketing needs a lot more pizzazz and polish. What do I mean?
The two story lines that editors seem powerless to resist are almost any discovery about dinosaurs and anything in astronomy and astrophysics that can be connected to the Big Questions, such as these:
You’ve already done a lot of good preparation for IYA outreach, including appointing Kim Breland as outreach co-ordinator. But you need to move even faster. Right now a big chunk of the realm of cosmic wonder is in danger of being snatched away from under the noses of professional astronomers. I’m alluding to Google Sky and the even newer WorldWide Telescope from Microsoft. In effect these two FREE software programs put a kind of Go-To Telescope on every computer screen. And it’s a telescope that combines the best images from Hubble, Spitzer, Chandra, the Sloan digital sky survey, and so on.
Like software programs costing hundreds of dollars, WorldWide Telescope offers packaged tours of the universe, such as one called “Dust and Us” narrated by Harvard’s Alyssa Goodman. But this free software also lets people create their own sky shows, along the lines of creating a playlist on an iPod. I predict that this will be the “killer ap” because it gives users the power to follow their own imagination. It is a classic example of good public engagement with science.
The older idea, public communication of science, would be a planetarium where some “expert” has decided what viewers need to see. I have a soft spot for planetaria, having lived for four years a few minutes walk from the London Planetarium. Yet despite the installation of a state-of-art projector, the London show closed in 2006. I don’t think the future is that bright for new planetaria in Calgary and Toronto.
So, back to my advice to accelerate. First up is a key decision. What should be the goals of outreach/engagement activities during International Year of Astronomy? I did note your guiding principles, including such things as involving amateur astronomers and having fun. But these are not goals, which are still for you to decide. Let me simply list four things that shouldn’t be among those goals
Once you have three or four goals (no more) you’d be wise to also think of some themes with high market potential. Take the example of focusing on Einstein during the 2005 Year of Physics. This provides a unifying engine to which you can hitch all sorts of events, such as EinsteinFest at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Astrophysics in Waterloo or the cross-Canada lectures delivered by Washington University’s Cliff Will under the “Was Einstein Right” rubric. This approach is also attractive to media because provides a peg (in effect an excuse) for feature stories that lack a hard news peg (see www.thestar.com/Einstein)
Of course, for the International Year of Astronomy one theme is the 400th anniversary of key Galileo discoveries. Just think of all the possibilities – staging the play Galileo across the country, planetarium shows on the sky that Galileo saw, debates about the clash between religion and science then and now, classroom projects to build a Galileo telescope with the winner getting a trip to Rome.
After setting the goals and some themes there’s yet another strategic decision. What to pursue through direct engagement with the public, what through an intermediary like the mass media and what through both avenues. I’m going to throw out some suggestions but first I want to emphasize what should be an overarching characteristic of any outreach/public engagement activities.
You have to spell out why any a development in astronomy should matter to a potential lay audience, That doesn’t mean everything has to be prosaically linked to everyday life. Remember the concept of cosmic wonder. But you can’t take for granted that people will automatically recognize how some discrete advance connects to that sense of wonder
For an example of how this is done, consider the paper in the May 21 issue of Nature announcing the serendipitous first observation in real time of a supernova explosion. The well-crafted news release from the Carnegie Observatories spells out the wider importance in comments by Neil Gehrels, principal investigator for the Swift satellite which spotted the event. Here’s the wind-up:
“The first instance of catching the X-ray signature of stellar death is going to help us fill in a lot of gaps about the properties of massive stars, the birth of neutron stars and black holes, and the impact of supernovae on their environment.”
Now comes the money quote:
“We also now know what X-ray pattern to look for. Hopefully we will be able to find many more supernovae at this critical moment.”
The Carnegie release goes on to say that finding a large number of supernova at the instant of explosion will allow searches for the neutrino and gravitational wave bursts predicted to accompany the collapse of the stellar core and the birth of the neutron star.
So now we have some aspects to which any lay person can relate. First, the discovery provides an identifying pattern. It’s like being able to distinguish poisonous mushrooms in a field, or pick out an ivory-billed woodpecker among pileated woodpeckers.
Then there’s the carom shot, as pool players would call it. From spotting supernova as they explode we can bounce to positively detecting gravitational waves, first proposed 70 years ago by Einstein. In turn the waves would open our ears to new sounds in the universe’s cosmic symphony.
Enough of the didactic haranguing. Here are a couple of key tips for dealing with the media, not just during IYA, but all the time:
Here are summary Seven Steps to Success from that presentation:
As well here are a few wild thoughts to put into the hopper for promoting the International Year of Astronomy to Canadians.
Astronomers: use your star power
Astronomy – tackling the biggest questions
Finally, don’t forget that you should appeal to the emotional side of people in addition to the rational.
On March 19 NASA’s Swift observatory and telescopes on the ground recorded a gamma ray burst in the constellation Bootes that ranked as the most luminous event ever seen in the universe. Or as we cautious grizzled reporters would say “reportedly the most luminous event ever seen in the universe.” If it had happened in our Milky Way, the burst would have shown as bright in the Earth’s sky as the sun. Instead it happened 7.5 billion light years away.
This gamma-ray explosion is formally designated GRB 080319B. However it was recorded only hours after Arthur C. Clarke died, aged 90. Some astronomers are lobbying to call it the “Clarke Burst.” Making that name official would be a great way to kick off the International Year of Astronomy. After all what better than naming a fabulous cosmic wonder after the man who was the voice of cosmic wonder.