Science in the public view
Wednesday, March 11th, 2009Monday evening I and a friend attended Dr. Stephen Hawking’s public lecture in Pasadena, Why We Should Go Into Space. It wasn’t the first time I’d seen one of Dr. Hawking’s lectures, nor the only time I’ve seen him in person; his frequent visits to Caltech and my past inability to escape that campus’ gravity well and/or event horizon meant that like many other former Caltech undergrads I’ve seen him around campus, and also, when his assistant came to the computer department to get email set up for him, I was the person to activate the account for at least one of his visits.
It’s humbling to see the lengths he must go to in order to communicate, regardless of the import or impact of his ideas.
Of course he’s a scientific genius, and he has a lovely, gently dry sense of humor that tends to sneak up on the unwary.
It’s also very neat to know that the new Pasadena Convention Center was packed to capacity for a scientific lecture. That says something fundamental about the community.
It also says something fundamental about science and public science communication that, both in his presentation and in the other presenters remarks bracketing his talk, there were many, many references to Star Trek. “To boldly go where no one has gone before” has become so embedded in the psyche of everyone who works and dreams of humanity’s future in space. Gene Roddenberry’s hopeful vision of our future, the idealism that embodies, the wonder of exploration, and the depiction that just about everyone can make some kind of a useful contribution to that effort… these concepts capture the imagination of science geeks and science fans and everyday people in ways that are difficult to describe, and difficult to quantify, but it provides a shared philosophical vocabulary shorthand that we all collectively speak.
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