Socially Distanced SciComm

One important (and honestly fun) duty of the science community is to keep the general public in the loop about what they are up to. It fosters scientific literacy among adults, in a time when anti-intellectual spirit abounds. And it gets kids interested in the reality of what we do, which is often nothing like the science or maths they are taught in school! After all, this field, like any other, has to sustain itself and bring in new people.

Some large organisations like NASA have excellent PR/outreach teams, putting out enough content to satisfy thousands of space nerds worldwide. (Did anyone else watch Perseverance landing on Mars?) Universities and teams of researchers carry out their own outreach programs - TIFR, for its part, has two open days a year apart from the fortnightly Chai and Why? talks.

One of these, National Science Day, was last Sunday! Last year's NSD seems like a geological age ago, but I do remember some of it - a college student asked for a selfie with me, and later when I visited a different department's exhibit, I was asked which class I was in.

This year it was fully online, and as a result could reach viewers who could not normally visit TIFR. That of course brought a fresh set of logistical challenges. There was a last-minute change of venue owing to a power shutdown. The anchor, demonstrators and speakers were all in different places. Someone had to repeatedly appeal to viewers not to spam the chat with larger and larger numbers, discussions of the time taken to cook rice, teachers taking attendance, or worst of all, people cursing at the first half being in Marathi and not Hindi.

Most viewers were probably watching on their phone screens, so we had to be super-clear and also mildly theatrical in order to hold their attention. Those demonstrating experiments with colourful acids, liquid nitrogen and superconductors had no problem keeping it visually engaging; we theorists had to work a little harder! Luckily people responded to our questions for the audience and seemed to overall enjoy our presentation.

Ultimately the event passed successfully in a whirl of Zoom spotlights and co-host handovers. It was an exciting new medium. But I look forward to hearing teenagers' wild lateral thinking suggestions in person once again.

You can watch the full thing here on YouTube. Some rough timestamps:

1:40:00 - Experiments (Duration ~20 mins)

2:03:00 - Mj Mahan's talk on "Hyperbolic Geometry in Nature" (Duration ~35 mins)

2:41:00 - My department's presentation, featuring me as main speaker and an untrustworthy postmaster (Duration ~20 mins)