Many years ago I discovered the joy of sharing my love of science with non-experts: initially within schools (all the way to Years 4 and 5, e.g. here) and then to lay adult groups. Since retiring I’ve focused primarily on the lovely retired or semi-retired people of the U3A, both in my home town (e.g. here)and more widely e.g. here). I have learnt, and continue to learn, how to communicate science-based topics. Spending more than four decades speaking at meetings and conferences, and three of those teaching physics students, has brought me to the point of being able to perform satisfactorily – yes, teaching is in part a performance art – and to enjoy the process. I’d now miss being able to talk to people about science and being a scientist. All this has taken place against the background of being a social/thinking introvert (see here for an explanation of these terms).
However, woven through those Science Communication activities has been a less conventional thread: invitations to join projects associated with festivals (e.g. here and links therein) and others coming from the arts (e.g. here or here). Each of these latter activities has taken me away from anything I might describe as my comfort zone; they have been ‘scary’ at one level or another, but also immensely rewarding. There have been fewer such opportunities since I retired, which is both understandable and a little sad. In a year of SARS-COV2 lockdown I confess to expecting nothing of the sort to come my way. What a lovely surprise, then, to have had two invitations arrive: it is these two activities – a recorded conversation for a new podcast series using Zoom and a conversation about and within the natural world as part of a broader philosophical project.
Towards the end of June 2020 I had an email from Dan Harding. I am a long-time admirer of his work as Director of Music Performance at my old university and I follow his Twitter stream and music blog assiduously. Exactly as I had done in the context of the U3A, he too had decided that lockdown required of him another new venture: this one would comprise a series of podcast conversations on the theme of creativity within the pandemic. The series title captured the essence of the experiment very well in my opinion: ‘Zoom for Thought’. His email invited me to participate in the first episode. I went through my usual list of reasons why I absolutely couldn’t do this – it’s a long list – but said “Yes” anyway. A conversation with Dan is always a pleasure and this screen-mediated one was no exception, despite its novelty. I came away pleased I had agreed to do it and uplifted by the fresh recognition of so many aspects of creativity that transcended the differences between our respective areas of expertise. There have been many guests since, all more erudite and accomplished in areas I am not, and the podcast is now in its second series: do listen if you have a mind to.
“The first episode features a conversation with Bob Newport, Emeritus Professor of Materials Physics at the University of Kent. In which we talk about finding creative ways of continuing to explore physics at home, engaging listeners during lockdown in both science and music, finding teaching tools within the home and grappling with the exciting unpredictably of a dodgy wifi signal... "I'm an experimental scientist, after all: I should be good at putting odd things together," Having retired from teaching at the University of Kent, Bob now teaches for the University of the Third Age in a series of blog articles and videos. Since lockdown, Dan has been engaging the community of musicians at the university through the Virtual Music Project, creating a series of recordings of music by Vivaldi and Mozart from recordings made in isolation…” Taken from here.
Skip forward to March 2021 and a message from Sarah Dance via Twitter. I first met Sarah many years ago in connection with one of the less conventional science communication avenues mentioned earlier; she works in the arts and creative industries (see here) and has been based in my part of the UK for a couple of decades. She was playing match-maker, and her follow-up email ‘e-introduced’ me to Russell Burdon in the context of his current philosophical artistic project (see here). To paraphrase the project’s website, his art residency seeks to deliver responses to the landscape and its biodiversity and history as he finds inspiration – and this inspiration may be fed from across intellectual disciplines and media types … enter yours truly, stage left, scientist.
Russell and I met a few weeks later on a sunny day and spent almost two hours walking and talking on and around the Crab and Winkle Way https://www.sustrans.org.uk/find-a-route-on-the-national-cycle-network/crab-and-winkle-way/, mostly on pathways through mixed woodland. I say ‘walking’ as though there might have been planned and purposeful progress, but in truth there was a lot of strolling and quite a bit of standing still. The conversation let up only when an unusual butterfly or colourful patch of wild flowers held our gaze for a while. We had some things in common but by no means all, and together with a willingness to be open that admixture led to an unpredictable but wholly positive flow of words in pursuit of understanding. I’m not sure whether my contribution from the perspective of a scientist in retirement will prove useful within Russell’s project but, either way, I’m looking forward to seeing what eventually emerges.
In his novel ‘Till we have Faces’, a re-telling of the classical myth of Cupid and Psyche, C.S. Lewis uses the phrase “words going out to do battle with words”; sometimes words play a far, far more constructive role.
As the 1990’s TV advert told us: “It’s good to talk”.
In his novel ‘Till we have Faces’, a re-telling of the classical myth of Cupid and Psyche, C.S. Lewis uses the phrase “words going out to do battle with words”; sometimes words play a far, far more constructive role.
As the 1990’s TV advert told us: “It’s good to talk”.
