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.
9 comments:
I actually think this talked moved a little slower than usual - I'm used to coming to colloquium, spending the first 20 minutes reviewing stuff I should already know, and then spending the rest of the hour (sometimes hour and a half) being bombarded with material way over my head. Yesterday, I didn't see much that I didn't already know until about 15 minutes from the end.
I think while it's nice to have pretty pictures, it's also important to explain very clearly what they mean and why we're showing them. Yesterday's speaker looped through several simulations of galaxy collisions - I spent most of that time trying to figure out exactly what, where, what scale and what orientation was being modeled, since I will have to model something very similar in the next few months. I wonder if the point of showing them was simply to show them...
I agree though, if most other colloquium talks were pitched like this one, I'd be able to understand them much better.
"...astronomers spend quite a bit of time thinking about how to make their data visually interesting"
I believe it is because they are observing something that is far away, untouchable or even virtual.^_^
In fact, people doing string theory should learn these skills from astronomers. They should make thier work more interesting, not just by using the fancy name "string".
I like the speaker this time, simply because I can understand more in his talk than most of the other astrophysicists. However, I always have a question (for the astronomy related topic): Even if they success in doing whatever they are doing(or want to do), what physics we can learn from it? Or does it have anything to do with the human's real life? So far I haven't seen any speaker explain it clearly. And I think that's very important, especially if one wants to attract people to support his research.
These are all really interesting comments. For now let me just comment on Chen's: Isn't it true that we ALL spend time talking about something "untouchable" (except maybe the biophysicists)? So yeah, I believe that thinking about how to help people have insight into something the will never really "see" (at least not in the usual sense) is part of the job.
Making a presentation attractive is one thing and making it understandable is another. I think about twenty years back and beyond when people didn't have the luxury of fancy softwares and digital imaging. Were then the talks were boring...I guess not. I think people, specially in science, get attracted towards things, to which they can relate. Pictures and animations are one way to make connections between the things, but if they are not prepared from this point of view then for audience they are just pictures and animations which might amuse you but will left you with little understanding. Friday talk was interesting but it lacked to some extent, in this perspective, in fully conveying the message and its importance. And yes, the 'Language is tricky', but if used carefully, it can not only help in making things understandable to others but also can open new doors towards understanding of the things. Language can be as abstract as E=mc^2 and yet can be understandable as v=d/t at the same time. Naturally as different fields in science grow, people working in those areas tend to think ‘locally’ which creates the ‘lingo barrier’ as you have mentioned. I think if we think both ‘locally’ as well as ‘extend ably’ we can over this barrier.
I liked Daniel's comment on being happy with accuracy within an order of magnitude. While it sounds poor, I understand the reasoning...in past years it was great to get 50% accuracy. So 10% is a huge improvement! :) Also, lots of topics are being researched for the first time and improvements come with time and with new scientists, sometimes spanning generations.
Larger telescopes and better CCDs are improving observational astronomy in a big way. 10% accuracy will be poor agreement some day.
And that's all I have to say about that.
I think some of this discussion has to do with the complicated question "What makes a good Colloquium?". Having done it a few times myself, I can testify to the fact that giving a Colloquium is hard. That's because you have several audiences, and you have to decide which one to try and reach. Are you trying to appeal to the graduate students? If so, which ones? First years? Fifth years in your field? Is the goal to convince faculty not in your area that what you do is interesting? Or to impress the big shot in nuclear theory who is sitting in the audience? The best Colloquium will do ALL of these things. But only the best can do that. I would say the rest of us have to pick one goal, and try and achieve that. After the last Colloquium I gave, at the University of Kentucky, I apologized to my host because I knew my talk had bored her. She agreed that it had, but then said that that meant I had given a good Colloquium. So maybe, Dave, the fact that you _wanted_ more detail, not less, testifies to the fact that you are beginning to dig into the details of what it means to work in the area of galactic dynamics.
Having said all that, I did think much of this last Colloquium was at a very basic level. But that can be a good thing. I appreciated him explaining how far back in time z=1 was, what distance a kilo-parsec corresponds to, etc. etc. Even if I didn't need an explanation of why foreground stars cause problems in finding stars in the outer reaches of Andromeda. Like you, Dave, I did get frustrated that he often did not say what was being plotted, and on what scale. Indeed, I once had one of our condensed-matter faculty complain bitterly to me that this wasa common failing of Astrophysics Colloquia: "they never tell you
what is being plotted or on what scale". Personally I don't think this failiing is restricted to Astrophysicists.....
One thing I liked about the talk was the way he tied his research to one of the "big questions" of Astronomy, namely "How did structure form?". It's all very well to study the ripples in the CMBR, but it's another---very important---question to understand how we went from those to the universe we see today. Without
Dr Guhathharkurta's animations and introduction this would just've been a talk about "How big is Andromeda really?". But he convincingly tied the issue of galaxy-on-galaxy violence to the bigger question of structure formation. And I think that that, Jerry, is part of the answer to your question. Without the formation of stars, galaxies, clusters of galaxies, etc. we would
not be here today. So while it's probably not the case that understanding how Andromeda feeds will allow us to cure cancer, it
may help us to learn how the features we see in the universe today emerged from what was there "In the Beginning". I hope that funding agencies are prepared to fund that sort of research, because a lot of Nuclear Physics is also about those questions of how bigger objects emerge from smaller ones.
There is one more thing I'd like to add to Dr. Phillips' last comment addressed to 'Jerry' that Astrophysics or basic science ,in general (knowing what happened in the beginning), not only serves as a tool to feed the human curiosity to know and understand things around him/her but also pushes the human intelligence to its limit to progress further and further and refine itself in the process.
Lot of us may not realize this as it is not too obvious, but just because of the sheer human quest to know the unknown (cosmos) we ended up pushing the technology to its limit in the form of rockets, spaceships, wireless communication etc...and the limit has been extendind ever since. A lot of technology that we use today is due in someways to our space explorations (remote monitoring, LASIK eye surgery, bar coding, noise reduction...), I have a small poster that talks about just that and a postcard whose title is "Over a thousand consumer products and services are built on NASA-inspired technologies.
So, in many ways, I think, addressing the basic questions do help the society directly in some cases and indirectly in some other cases. We just need to keep ourselves aware of the impacts.
Post a Comment