Science, science everywhere

I'm doing a bit of professional work this week and so have science outreach on the brain. Specifically, I'm helping to manage an online discussion about science festivals that has an A-list of science festival organizers from around the country and a smattering from around the world. Since there are only a dozen odd full size city-scale science festivals in the US, almost all started in the last five years and most in the last two years, the difference between the A-list and everyone else is not so much.

It's nice to use my professional brain and it has gotten me thinking not just about science festivals, those city-wide parties celebrating science with carnivals, lectures, discussions, fairs, and whathaveyou, but about the best science outreach I've been a part of or known of. I love museums. I love going to museums and working in museums and watching people marvel at a micrograph of a fly's eye or walk around a scale model of the solar system embedded in the pavement. I shudder sometimes at the limited reach of such things, the few hundred thousand people (at most) who are going to engage with a given exhibit and then only for a few minutes, once, in their lives. I have great faith in the power of the momentary transcendent experience, the wow factor, the fleeting sense of understanding the universe more than you did a second ago and seeing great vistas of understanding along the road ahead. I believe these moments come most frequently in the company of others, as science is best done in community, of your classmates or teachers or parents or friends. Meeting a hero, be they astronaut or grad student (some of my biggest heroes are grad students. Or they were at some point.), inspires.

I think that momentary transcendent experience is a time when people change what they believe, how they think of themselves and their world, and can inspire entire careers in science. That is, when it is backed up by daily access to information and encouragement at school and at home (for kids) and in conversation at home and at work (for adults).

I am conflicted on it, as I am about most big questions I come across professionally. The informal science education world I've worked in for the past five years in many cases is mostly focused on reaching a lot of people for a short amount of time, a few dozen hours at most, and in many cases just a few minutes. You can't learn much in that amount of time. I haven't engaged the other side yet, the formal science education world in classrooms, the people who reach only a few people at a time but have enough contact to create in them something whole and huge. Yet.

Yesterday's run destination: CVS

Yesterday's menu:
breakfast: cereal
lunch: veggie fried rice
dinner: church potluck