Outreach, art, and three minutes of radio

Most of what I work on doesn’t lend itself to a quick explanation. Supercomputers, sensor networks, big data: people have heard of them, but not in a way that survives contact with a casual conversation. So when WNIJ and NIU STEAM asked if I’d come do a few segments for their show The Sound of Science, three minutes apiece, I said yes. Then I kept thinking about why I said yes.

Part of it is that I think people who do this kind of work owe an attempt at communicating it. Public funding pays for most of what happens at Argonne, and the public deserves more than the occasional press release written for the press. The trouble is that scientists are mostly trained to talk to each other, and the room of “each other” is small. Three minutes for a Friday afternoon radio audience is a different room.

Part of it is that I find the constraint useful. When you have an hour to explain something, you can hide. When you have three minutes you can’t. Either you have a clear analogy or you don’t, and the cost of not having one shows up immediately. I take the segments as a forcing function for myself as much as for the listener.

The rest of it is the creativity thread. We tend to talk about creativity as something you bring to science once the rigorous work is done, an extra coat of paint. I don’t think that’s right. Choosing the problem, finding the analogy that holds, framing the question so it’s answerable, these are creative acts before they’re anything else. Programs like NIU STEAM, where Kristin Brynteson and her team pull art and science into the same room, make that idea visible. But the bigger point is that creativity isn’t a side ingredient in science. It’s how the science actually moves.

If three minutes can do any of that, the format is doing more than its share.

Episodes are at WNIJ’s Sound of Science page.