Dr Phil Plait on bad astronomy, good sci-comms and finding the ‘it factor’ in every discipline.
At just five years old, Dr Phil Plait was gripped by the mysteries of space. When his local newspaper reported that Saturn was close to Earth and relatively easy to see, his parents bought a cheap telescope, set it up in the driveway and the family looked up at the night sky.
“I remember looking at Saturn and thinking: ‘This is real. This is like the pictures I see in books,’” says Plait, an American astronomer and communicator. “I remember saying to myself, ‘This is this is what I want to do.’”
For decades, Plait has been urging people to look up. In the 1990s, he was part of NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope team. He’s since swapped research for outreach as a popular science communicator across television, books, blogs, podcasts, video and social media, his content reaching an audience of millions.
A pioneering storyteller from the internet’s early days, Plait is celebrated as “The Bad Astronomer”, taking aim at bad science, from dubious Hollywood movie scenarios to weird conspiracy theories. He has a long-standing blog of the same name and, in 2002, published his first book, Bad Astronomy: Misconceptions and Misuses Revealed, from Astrology to the Moon Landing “Hoax”.
Correcting “fake news”, Plait notes ruefully, is a task without end.
A different trajectory
Plait’s experience as a researcher, at the University of Virginia and NASA’s Goddard Flight Centre in Maryland, and public speaker, combine with his no-nonsense style to give him a unique perspective on science communication: what works, how science communicators can amplify their stories and why it matters.
His biggest impact has been through Crash Course: Astronomy – part of John and Hank Green’s hit YouTube explainer series, Crash Course. Plait says he had few expectations when he embarked on the year-long task of writing and editing 46 astronomy episodes for the Green brothers in 2012 but creating a “guided tour of the entire Universe” gave him his own lesson in sci-comm impact.
I thought, ‘This will be nice … maybe a few thousand people will use it,” he recalls from his home in Colorado. “And then it turns out that it’s had at least something like 70 million views! I get emails from kids all the time saying, ‘I was taking astronomy in college and I was having a hard time then I watched Crash Course and I aced my test!’”
“Every now and again, I’ll get something like, ‘I’m in grad school in astronomy. In college I watched your thing and I decided to be an astronomer.’ That’s just unbelievable,” says Plait. “If I want to be remembered for something, it’s going to be that.”
After years spent as researcher for his degrees and with various Hubble project teams, Plait grew to understand his limits as a scientist, while also recognising his capacity to tell a compelling story.
Starting in the late 1990s with a community outreach presentation about a meteor shower, opportunities to share his knowledge with an information-hungry audience have kept coming. Plait was an advisor on the 2016 sci-fi movie Arrival and, in 2017, was the head science writer for the Emmy-nominated Bill Nye Saves the World series on Netflix.
Science communication has exploded in the past 50 years, says Plait, yet some in the scientific community are yet to embrace it. “I still get pushback, sometimes – astronomers telling me that I’m wasting my time,” he says. “And I’m like, ‘Your paycheck comes from the public! If you want to sit in your office with a pencil and paper and figure out all this physics, that’s great! And if you don’t want to communicate it, except through the journals, that’s okay. But in the end, the taxpayers are paying for what you’re doing. At some level, that needs to be discussed, and I’m happy to do it.”
Tapping into curiosity – whatever the discipline
Not everyone is happy or comfortable as a communicator, Plait acknowledges, but he urges scientists to experiment with ways to share their findings with wider audiences. He welcomes the new generation of young, diverse and savvy science storytellers who are making their mark on social media.
“Some people really have a knack for it. They’re amazing,” says Plait. “I find TikTok super irritating because I’m the Old,” he laughs. “But there are young astronomers, many of them women, just ruling TikTok when it comes to science communication. There’ll be some press release and a couple of hours later, I see a great story [on TikTok] with a lot of people watching it.
“The important thing is to try,” says Plait. “If it doesn’t work for you, it doesn’t work. I tried research: it didn’t work for me. Neither did teaching. I tried formal public outreach, working on classroom exercises and developing activities and I was good at it, but it just wasn’t what I wanted to do. Writing is what I wanted to do.”
Plait used to set up a telescope on Halloween and when trick-or-treaters knocked on the door, he’d make them look in the eyepiece in exchange for candy. It wasn’t a hard sell, and it would result in gasps of disbelief and wonder, he recalls.
It helps that astronomy is a broadly accessible field of research, replete with breathtakingly beautiful concepts and images, such as those taken recently by NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope.
But that doesn’t mean that disciplines without such stunning visual assets should abandon hope of capturing the public’s imagination, says Plait.
“If you were to give me a field of science, I bet I could find something that would interest the public, and it wouldn’t take me long,” he says.
“An expert in that field definitely could do it. Stories go viral – maybe it’s something unique that was found at the bottom of the ocean, for example – and it’s like, that’s what the public likes! You just have to find that, whatever it is, in your field. For astronomy, it’s photos, but maybe it’s also meteorites that you can pick up off the ground, or these big questions like, ‘How did the Universe come to be?’
“Astronomy has lots of these,” says Plait, “but that’s true for any field of science, because science is about understanding reality.”
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Article by Michelle Fincke
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