Reflective

About the process of doing a PhD and perhaps being an early-career researcher.

SmartSTEMs, and excellent questions

Last week I took part in a day run by SmartSTEMs at one of the local schools. About two hundred primary and middle school aged kids spent the day hearing from myself and lots of other sciencey people about what we do, and doing activities that we provided. I had them playing a computer game about managing a power grid, in small groups, and then thinking about the functions of different power sources.

Three tweenage boys gathered around a laptop, playing a game that involves some graphs. A teacher watches from behind.

Some of the kids were really engaged and interested. Some weren’t, which is perhaps inevitable. The organisers had a nice system set up to encourage questions: if you asked a sensible, non-silly, question, you got a raffle ticket. At the end of the day there was a raffle draw for an iPad. There were a couple of very happy winners, but it also worked well as encouragement for the students not only to ask questions, but to ask some with a bit of thought behind them. A few did this in class or in other exposed spaces, but most waited and found me at lunchtime. Either way it takes a lot of courage… it’s an approach that I might think about using myself.

One girl came up to me after one of my workshops and very timidly asked me, “Before you started your job, how did you know that you could do it?”. It was perhaps the best question that I had all day, and I suspect represents not just her worries but those of many of her peers. I gave a fairly straightforward answer about how I had got feedback about my teaching, and I’d done some research before so I knew that I enjoyed that aspect, and so forth, and none of that was wrong – but it wasn’t the answer that she really deserved.

When I thought about it some more, later, I realised that what I should have said is,
“I didn’t. We can do things to try to find out if a job is right for us, but we can never be sure; at some point the only way to find out whether we can a do job — and whether we want to do that job — is to try it and see. And if it turns out to be the wrong thing for you, that’s not the end of the world, because you can change and do something different.”

Posted by simon in Professional updates, Reflective

Examining

Today has been the fourth viva that I’ve been a part of, including my own. It was the first as the external examiner, which feels like a bit of a milestone. This involved travelling from Orkney down to England, spending half the day in the exam, then a few more hours with the internal examiner having lunch and doing paperwork…. it’s been nice. It’s always rewarding to examine a good student, but more than that, it’s been delightful to spend a day thinking and talking about science rather than answering emails.

It’s quite a time-consuming activity: 1.5-2 days to read the thesis carefully and think on it. And a minimum of a 3-day trip to do the exam (one day here, one day travelling each way). And that isn’t something that workload models allow for, so one can’t do too many. But the occasional one is not only essential for the system, it’s also good for the soul 🙂

Posted by simon in Professional updates, Reflective

Feeling useful

This week brought a professional milestone of sorts: it’s the first time that I’ve been called up and asked to share my expertise to feed into policy. I’ve been approached once before by a company who were interested in some research I’d done, which was also nice, but this was the first time for “We’re revising x, and we’re reaching out to people who have published on the topic to have conversations…”

It felt good. It helped me feel that what I do can make a difference; that it’s worthwhile, on the research side as well as the teaching. Maybe it will lead to future things – there is talk of a possible working group – but if it doesn’t, that’s OK too. It’s given a positive glow to the last couple of days.

Posted by simon in Professional updates, Reflective

Record of a Spaceborn Few : on stories

A few days ago I finished reading Becky Chambers’s novel “Record of a spaceborn few“. I already mentioned this book in my last post, because of something she wrote in the first few pages that struck me. But it turned out to have more that belonged on this blog. I’m not going to get into the plot here, but the setting is the Exodus Fleet: a series of generation ships on which part of humanity embarked when Earth became unable to support us. Here’s a lengthy quote:

“Our species doesn’t operate by reality. It operates by stories. Cities are a story. Money is a story. Space was a story, once. A king tells us a story about who we are and why we’re great, and that story is enough to make us go kill people who tell a different story. Or maybe the people kill the king because they don’t like his story and have begun to tell themselves a different one. When our planet started dying, our species was so caught up in stories. We had thousands of stories about ourselves…but not enough of us were looking at the reality of things. Once reality caught up with us and we started changing our stories to acknowledge it, it was too late.

It is easy to remember that story here, in the Fleet. Every time you touch a bulkhead, every time you tend a garden, every time you watch the water in your hex’s cistern dip a little lower, you remember. You know what the story is here.”

Humans run on stories, not reality. We can see this by looking around us; it’s something that populists and propagandists understand well. But I hadn’t thought about it quite like this before.

There’s optimistic SF out there that shows what a sustainable civilization on Earth could look like. Becky Chambers wrote some of it. This is important. But there’s not much that gives us stories of getting from here to there. That feels like something we’re missing. It’s probably very hard to write those, because it’s not obvious how to do that. Star Trek does offer one narrative if one gets into the backstory, but it involves WW3, so it’s hardly aspirational… perhaps until we have popular / folk narratives that people can relate to that show the sort of change that we need – systemic, disruptive, society-wide change – actually happening, rather than having happened, it’ll continue to be very hard for most of us to really engage on a path of sustainability and transition at more than an intellectual level. We need a story to follow. We need to change our stories to acknowledge reality.

Of course, none of this is new or groundbreaking thought. Humanities folk, and any storytellers and folklorists in particular, who read this will no doubt be saying “duh, obviously”. But it’s some new thinking for me, at least in the sustainability domain.

Perhaps it’s worth noting that a lot of the stories we have about dealing with shorter timescale threats are either historical, or grounded in things that have happened. It’s a challenge to do this with climate change. Science fiction can help us, perhaps. While history doesn’t give much that’s comparable at global scale, it’s hardly the first time that a civilization has been threatened by a self-inflicted change in its environment. But we remember those that fell, not those that successfully changed their behaviour and survived.

“Make sure people don’t forget. Make sure people remember that a closed system is a closed system even when you can’t see the edges”

Posted by simon in Reflective

Overview effect

Overview effect” is the name given to something experienced by some, but not all, astronauts, when they see the Earth from space. The view of the whole planet, and hence the whole human race, from a distance can bring about a marked shift in perspective, in attitudes, in thinking, that favours peace and cooperation and values the environment 1. It’s probably more common in those who have seen Earth from a great distance – most famously the Apollo astronauts – than those who have only been to low earth orbit, although it certainly happens there too.

View of the Earth rising over the lunar surface, taken by William Anders on board Apollo 8.
Image: Earthrise, William Anders / NASA, 1968. Public domain. Taken on board Apollo 8.

The famous “Earthrise” photo of 1968 probably helped some people feel the same, although looking at a picture is hardly the same as being there and knowing that the rest of humanity is beneath you.

Carl Sagan’s “Pale blue dot” photo and the powerful accompanying speech were (among other things) presumably an attempt to bring some overview effect to the masses. More recently, some wealthy space tourists have spoken about seeking out the effect.

I mention this now because I’ve recently started reading Becky Chambers’s novel, “Record of a spaceborn few“. In it much of humanity lives, and has lived for generations, on a fleet of huge spaceships. This speech is something like liturgy:

“We destroyed our world, and left it for the skies.
Our numbers were few. Our species had scattered.
We were the last to leave.
We left the ground behind. We left the oceans. We left the air
We watched these things grow small. We watched them shrink into a point of light.
As we watched, we understood. We understood what we were. We understood what we had lost. We understood what we would need to do to survive. We abandoned more than our ancestors’ world. We abandoned our short sight. We abandoned our bloody ways. We made ourselves anew.”

This version of humanity experienced the overview effect en masse, as a species, far too late. Let’s not do the same as them.

[1] As I’m currently between jobs, I don’t have journal access. So these two links have been included on the basis of their abstracts.

Posted by simon in Reflective, The wider world