I was chastised by my sister in a family email thread for “unsolicited maths” in my characterizations of covid-19. I told her to go fuck herself, and cc’d everyone. That was like two weeks ago, and I still don’t regret it.
Forever Labs is relatable, with an obvious motivation. Did you ever have the pleasure of doing more obscure research and attempting to explain it to the layperson? I’m pretty much done trying to broach my work with the general public, unless asked to. So, never.
It's very easy to forget how much jargon, let alone knowledge, you accumulate when you work in the business of science. I have given many lectures to lay audiences. It's an experience I actually always enjoy. It's a different kind of challenge, because you need to figure out a way to say what you want to say without using nitty-gritty details, and also without using words that are field specific--things that are second nature to you but have never been heard by some members of the public. To give one example, I gave a talk to a group of American Heart Association employees three weeks ago (ah, three weeks ago seems so distant now!). I talked about some drug discovery work I do in stroke, and how the AHA is supportive in certain unique ways, etc, etc. At the end, when I asked if anyone had any questions, someone raised their hand and asked, "What does NIH mean?" If you want a good analogy for the level on which people need to be talked to, just watch any (literally any) commercial advertising a drug. That pain medicine works by making flashing streaks in your arms turn not flashy anymore! And that antibiotic makes microbes implode and disappear! The trick is to talk to people in a way that's simplified but not essentially wrong. There are many layers of understanding to any problem, so you have to find the one that your audience is going to most connect with, no matter whether your audience is scientists in your field, out of your field, lay educated adults, high school students, little kids, or the president. If you really understand what it is you're saying and you really respect your audience, you will find a way to connect. That's been my experience.
I won't claim to be a fantastic science communicator in public-facing mode, but I do put some thought and effort into it. It's just intrinsically difficult to talk about magnetic field lines with that crowd, and it only gets weirder from there. The eyes tend to glaze over sometime between reminding people how Earth's magnetic field steers a compass, and telling them about the supersonic solar wind, which I think sounds pretty neato right outta the gate, but whatever. It's just not something I can casually talk about with anyone but other scientists, or places like Hubski. It takes effort. People here don't seem to mind putting in effort, but where the hell are you guys when I'm (well, when I was* #covid19) out doing social shit? I've pretty much given up even lightly probing to see if there's curiosity. I'm really good friends with people who have no idea about anything I do. They know I do science, but have never said "hey, so what do you study, anyway?". I don't think less of them because of it, we're different people, and connect over different interests. If they wanna give me an inside perspective on their careers, I'll take it, and I'll ask about it to initiate conversation in that direction. Everyone loves talking about themselves. But I've got colleagues who love to foist our field on innocent bystanders in transparent attempts to claim higher status. I found it repulsive. Anyway, if the public fires off a "Why should we pay you to do this?", I explain that I'm also working with the magnetic confinement fusion community to make progress towards clean energy, and then like 40% of the country hates me because "clean energy" is literally a trigger phrase, and hey, why am I trying to help the world, maybe I should destroy it instead. Probably my favorite audience was the freshman undergrads I TA'd for a couple years. They were brilliant, and they were also curious. Duh, 'cuz the two are heavily coupled. Found ya on RG dotcom, suckaaaaaa
Ok wait now I neeeeeed to know how fast the solar wind is traveling because on the one hand my brain realizes that it is not “Earth wind speed” but now that I know that I don’t know this number I suddenly need to. And sure I can probably look this up for myself but if you wanna nerd out on some solar wind facts l’m ready.
Yes!! Ok so, the solar wind can become a “light breeze”, maybe only 200 kilometers PER SECOND, but it’s usually about twice that. Depending on other things, that’s a speed (relative to Earth) that’s usually faster than information can travel through the solar wind, so it’s like a shockwave when it smashes up against the Earth’s magnetic domain of influence (the magnetosphere). Imagine the Earth as a nonpolluting magnetic spaceship getting blasted with supersonic music. Damn, I just wrote a verse(?)
So for comparison: "Light breeze" solar wind: 200 kilometers per SECOND Category 3 Hurricane: 200 kilometers per HOUR (Cat5 is 252kph+) Help me wrap my mind around this. I know that solar wind is not the same thing as earth wind, (mostly radiation vs. gases, correct?) but there has to be something of substance to it in order for us to be able to measure and put a number on it. How is the solar wind not scouring the dust off of the Moon - or is it, but not at a rate that's all that appreciable, due to the much lower density of solar wind, and how does something like solar wind affect astronaut EVAs?
Yep. Well, it's kinda like a half-joke here, I guess, and you've already correctly guessed a lot stuff. Space is mostly empty, everybody knows. It mostly is. The solar wind stream is like 99%+ unbound protons and electrons (I could go look this up, but my new anxiety therapy is actually quarantining myself to only certain realms of the internet, too, as is self-deprecation on a species-wide scale) blasted away from the sun, sure, but it's way under a trillion trillion times less dense than the air we're breathing right now. You nailed it: we wouldn't feel it at all, but of course it's quite undesirable for astronaut wear-and-tear. But it's not the usual solar wind particle and photon energy spectrum that will kill you quickly from radiation poisoning; There can be solar events that generate deadly radiation, usually at least once in every five years-ish, but highly variable. Mother Earth shields us here on her surface from it all :). And no one really predicted the solar wind, I think. I remember how it falls out of the maths as one of four possible solutions for a family of magnetohydrodynamic equations. We're magnetically shielded basically up to 10 earth radii outward, so we had to send something out far enough to see it. Well, or you could have an orbit over the poles. You're kinda out in the solar wind over the poles. Sputnik's orbital inclination may not have been high enough to see it. But, naturally, Sputnik wasn't outfitted with instruments to measure the solar wind anyway, though you may still see secondary effects, if you know what you're looking at (we didn't). Plasma does all sorts of terrible things to spacecrafts, and it's literally everywhere in space. Even so, the separate garden variety space plasmas of different regions are quite distinct in their characteristics and behavior, we know now. Lunar dust is much heavier than solar wind, larger particles, and there are plenty of studies on what the solar wind does to exposed regolith. Mars used to have an atmosphere. When it lost its magnetic field (which, let's just call that process "magic", for now), solar wind came in and stripped the air away. And it still would today, if we tried to artificially enhance Mars's atmosphere. Probably all "main-sequence" stars, like ours is, have their own solar winds. That's why my friend is looking for exoplanets with a very particular type of radiation produced by the interactions between a planet's magnetic field and the solar wind. We should probably only colonize an exoplanet with a sufficiently strong, dipole-shaped magnetic field oriented in a certain direction. That's on top of all our other needs. I mean, really, what a pathetic species we are. Shelter in place, kids. Please ask questions or leave comments, I’m trying to get better at this :).Light breeze
Found your problem right there. You're working on "cheap" energy solutions, not "clean" energy! I literally say a pickup truck in northern Michigan that had a bumper sticker on it that was a picture of a windmill with one of those circle-crossed-out-no-smoking signs over it. So yeah, everyone hates clean energy (SOLYNDRA WHERE ARE THE INVESTIGATIONS), but everyone loves saving money. Frank Luntz (inventor of such phrases as "job creator" and "death tax") may be a a gigantic piece of shit, but he tapped into to somethings really really real.I explain that I'm also working with the magnetic confinement fusion community to make progress towards clean energy, and then like 40% of the country hates me because "clean energy" is literally a trigger phrase...