After yesterday's colloquium I found myself thinking not so much about the science, but about the issue of disciplinary culture. Here I refer to the distinction between Astronomy and Physics. At many institutions (including ours) these are in the same Department. But at many others (e.g. Ohio State for one) they exist separately.
Having heard quite a few Astronomy talks over the years I have reached the following (tentative) conclusions. I realize that generalization from a small sample is dangerous (maybe I even learnt that from astronomers?) but I'm gonna do it anyway. I'll be interested to hear others' comments on these issues:
(1) Astronomers know how to make their talks look good. Yesterday's talk looked fabulous. And indeed it was astrophysics talks (actually cosmology talks) 10 years ago that made me realize I needed to raise my own game in Colloquia and make talks that were funnier, more generally appealing, and looked better. That meant I had to throw out my equation-covered transparencies of the time....
But this also has to do with how data is represented. Astronomy data sets can be pretty complex (and seem to be becoming more so). My impression is that astronomers spend quite a bit of time thinking about how to make their data visually interesting. (Think about all those false colour images from telescopes.) Maybe those of us in other fields could learn from that, and do better on presenting our complex data sets in ways that aid understanding through visualization.
(2) Astronomers can be pretty anthropormorphic. (That's the $10 word for talking about in animate objects, or even animals, like they were human.) Yesterday we had Andromeda (who was referred to multiple times as "she") "eating her last meal a billion years ago". Still, anthropormophism is not limited to astronomers. How many times in my 253 lectures did I say "The charge wants to move to the left because it can feel the electric field". Encouraging students to sympathize with the physical entities in your problem can be an effective (if rather deceptive!) teaching strategy I think. "If you were a quantum particle in this box, what would you do?"
(3) Language is tricky. Earlier this week we had the discussion about "Neutral iron" in our joint astro-nuclear seminar. It turned out, that to astronomers---or at least to that particular speaker---"neutral iron" means anything with an ionization state less than Fe5+. Then there are "metals" which are not really metals at all and baryons, which are anything that isn't dark matter. And so on and so on. (Someone may need to correct my limited knowledge of astronomy lingo, but you get the idea.) Indeed, this gap in language, can be VERY confusing, and having someone who can translate across the divide (which, I must say, our astronomers do a pretty god job of) is crucial to communication.
(4) Astronomy talks tend to be more qualitative. Don't you often get the sense they are saying: "Well, we did this simulation, and it kind-of looks like this data, so we think we're onto something". Sometimes I feel like I am listening to a biology talk. This seems to go with the astronomy culture of "If I get agreement between theory and data to within an order of magnitude I'm happy". Which is not a wrong way to approach the problem, because astrophysical systems (like biological ones) are very complicated, with lots of stuff going on and quantities varying over several decades. So if you can get it to within an order of magnitude you are probably indeed pretty happy. But it's quite different to what I'm used to in my sub-field, where if you only get the order of magnitude right that's sucky agreement.
