Ancestors

Written by Michael Porter on 2025-01-15 at 15:17

I'm preparing to give a cosmology talk to a group of octa- and nonagenarians in a few weeks... The challenge is to give a digestible talk on Big Bang theory to a group of people who are intelligent but mostly uninformed on the topic... In 40 minutes!

When I was asked, I thought, "easy, I've done this for grade 9 students dozens of times" but then found out about the time constraint. I could spend more than 40 minutes just talking about how we came to measuring distances in the cosmos, never mind the evolution of it.

Never mind the technical details, I could spend 40 minutes just reviewing how our view of the universe has expanded from just our solar system, with a celstial sphere just beyond Saturn, to thinking the Milky Way was the universe, to where we are now, observing the vast billions-of-light-years-wide bubble that is our observatble universe.

Or how about talking about the evolution of tehcnology (never mind the evolution of the necessary mindsets!) that made the observations possible?

Geez, just explaining line spectra and redshift could take 40 minutes.

I'm tempted to prepare talks on everything and present the talk as a "choose your own adventure" book. Maybe they'll have me back to explore the paths not taken?

Any advice on how the astro communicators would approach this is welcome (or suggestions for perspcetives I might have missed!).

[#]Astronomy #Cosmology #ITeachScience #BigBangTheory

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Written by Alan Langford on 2025-01-15 at 16:16

@MichaelPorter Call me crazy but I'd do a ten minute grand overview and open it to questions.

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Toot

Written by Michael Porter on 2025-01-15 at 17:10

@alan You're crazy 😄

That's very tempting - definitely feeds the audience, but I do much better with structure. 😊

Plus, I'm talkative - it takes me 10 minutes just to give the background to answer a question. I definitely have to put a lid on that tendency.

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Descendants

Written by Alan Langford on 2025-01-15 at 17:18

@MichaelPorter A while back I had 30 minutes to describe the current publishing landscape (traditional, self, hybrid) to a group of writers with a median age in the upper 60's. I sent out a prompt for questions ahead of time and got nothing. So then I sent out a survey designed to figure out what their objectives were and a little of what they knew. That helped, but the results were all over the map. Some questions did come in though!

So I did a "brain dump" presentation, and opened it to questions. I could anticipate many of them, field almost all of them, and research the ones I couldn't.

Overall it was surprisingly well-received

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Written by Michael Porter on 2025-01-15 at 18:01

@alan I’ve been floating ideas with my father, but he’s interested in everything so I’m not making progress on whittling things down 😄

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