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communicating science

Nicholas Z. Rui

18 September 2023

Astrophysics

Relativity

Cosmology

Seminar

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scope

I am a graduate student

in astrophysics

theory

we will be talking about communicating science effectively

don’t take my word for it

https://bshs.smsd.us/staff_directory/mr__lockhart_s_site/earth_science/earth_science_textbook_chapter_p_d_fs

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always keep the purpose in mind

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writing with purpose

what is their background?

would you give all these people the same presentation?

what do they care about?

what do you want to happen?

ask people what they might do differently for these different kinds of presentations?

is it a conference, group meeting, public talk?

background:

- informs jargon that can be used

- informs concepts that can be invoked

--- to physicists: can explain stuff via harmonic oscillator

--- you may have to overturn existing intuition (e.g., relativity vs. newtonian, different stellar mass ranges)

care about:

- researchers mostly care about their own research

- what you find interesting may not be what others do

--- e.g., you may care about a cool algorithm or cool math (or cool experimental setup), but most people just want your result and use it blindly

--- e.g., BBH simulations vs. LIGO predictions/FRBs, cool asteroseismology math vs. inference of stellar parameters

- can convince people to care about something else:

--- hard

--- should be done deliberately

--- can leverage what they already care about

want to happen:

- want to start a collab?

- want to be accepted into grad school? get a job?

- getting (the public?) excited about science?

- being informative? e.g., this ARC seminar is not very directly good for my career, but snacks are nice

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writing with security

make concrete, “falsifiable” claims

honesty ≠ self-deprecation

don’t overassume background

don’t try to “blend in”

be concise

ask: what do people think I mean by this?�

these are just general principles

self-deprecation:

- caveats are good science: science IS messy

--- however, non-specific statements about your own competence are NOT good caveats

--- “I’m just a grad student,” “there are a lot of things I don’t understand about this” are not “honesty”

--- it may feel like this is “valid context,” but if you think critically about this it makes zero sense to say these things

- “fake it till you make it”

concrete claims: -- comes from talk by Simon Peyton-Jones (Microsoft)

- don’t be vague: ”We demonstrate that sufficiently strong magnetic fields will suppress gravity wave propagation.”… not “We study stellar oscillations in magnetized stars.” – it is IMPOSSIBLE to fail at the latter

- “We develop a robust eccentricity reduction algorithm which can do X, Y, Z”… not “we study the problem of eccentricity reduction”

- makes sense, but seems counterintuitive since you’re holding yourself accountable

- failure to do this comes from insecurity: if you’re writing/publishing/etc., you should at least act like you believe in your conclusions

don’t overassume background

- if you spent even a normal amount of time thinking about your problem, you now know about it more than even most other experts

- affects also whether they even understand why it’s important in the first place

- dirty secret: on apps and job talks and stuff, except for the basics, people aren’t objective arbiters of what is “good work” and “exciting,” even if they have strong opinions

- if a friend tells you they don’t understand your app, don’t assume that a faculty who reads it will

- in a talk: in a short talk, you can’t do much more than convey basic results, intuition. theory talks are hard, can’t expect any real understanding of any more than 1-2 eqns tbh

blending in:

- it’s ok to mimic behavior you find compelling/clear if you can identify explicitly what’s good about it

- don’t necessarily do things everyone else does just because they’re doing it

- most people don’t say in academia, so it makes no sense to just copy them

- blending in doesn’t work because stand-outs are easiest to choose

- when you do this, you are banking on the fact that stem specialists are just all really good at communicating, which is a terrible bet

concision:

- be concise

- …

- easy when starting out to try to “pad” out the length of a paper or a presentation because you don’t believe you’ll have enough material

- you can do this if you want, but you will end up having to cut a lot, and you will do this enough times that you’ll learn it’s just a waste of time and counterproductive

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writing papers

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title & abstract

Topic: A modified version of the magnetic Tayler instability can redistribute angular momentum fast enough to explain the slowly rotating cores of many stars. This may have implications for compact object mergers.