This week's interview is with Damian Pope, senior manager of scientific outreach at Perimeter Institute, and an old colleague and friend of mine.

How did you get interested in science?

Even back in primary school I really liked math - I was relatively good at it and got good marks.  I found it fun and satisfying because there were orderly patterns that you could use to solve problems just like puzzles.  I think a lot of my interest in science grew out of that.  For example, in grade 11, we studied trigonometric identites.  You'd have these horrible mathematical expressions, but if you knew the identities you could simplify it down to something simple.  I loved that.

Of course, I also love to read, I love to think - how could anyone not be interested in science?

But I had never had a science or physics teacher that I could describe as good - certainly no teachers in the inspiring style of Robin Williams in Dead Poets Society.  So it wasn't until university that I got interested in physics.  In first year, I read "In Search of Schodringer's Cat" by John Gribbin.  That was cool.  Physics became interesting because it was more alive.

What makes doing outreach seem worthwhile to you?

I feel that I can do some small amount of good because I know a bit about science, but most people don't.  Especially with physics, people can be overwhelmed if they try to find out about it.  And yet, I find that often when I talk to people about things like quantum physics and darkmatter, they really like it.  But they don't get to learn about it in school - they just learn about blocks sliding down frictionless planes and so on, which is boring.  So I sometimes think of myself as being a physics translator.

I also love the dimension of interacting with people, especially the psychology of how to get and engage people's attention.

What comes to mind as one of the more interesting things happening in the outreach world today?

One thing that I'm really interested in is how internet-based technologies have opened up all sorts of possibilities for interaction.  For example, take the recent webcast from the Large Hadron Collider at CERN.  An amazing experience the other side of the world, and we can get it for free!  Another example from the LHC: the LHC discussion group on Facebook, where I have found this community with similar interests to me.  I find that very exciting.

More generally I find it very exciting when people are looking at really creative ways to do outreach, such as a play about physics, or a physics-based video game.  An interesting example of science outreach is "Through Einstein's Eyes" - a freely available series of videos showing what the world would look like if the speed of light was only a few meters per second.

Finally, I think it's really interesting that outreach is becoming a more mature field.  It used to be very isolated - pockets of people doing it in their spare time - but now it's coming to be recognised as a profession.

What are you currently up to?

Following on from the Mystery of Dark Matter (a PI Explorations video), I'm working on making a video for high school kids on quantum physcis.  It will be a short video about half an hour long that will open the door to the mysteries of "inner space".  I'm focusing on this because quantum is such a hugely important topic in modern physics, but it's taught poorly at high school level because there aren't good resources available.  This isn't surprising, because it's such a tough, abstract topic.

My goal is to create something immensely useful to teachers and students and to really make quantum physics accessible.  I want to put it in its rightful place, instead of having it seen as a sort of add-on - this post-Newton crazy stuff - I want to show how it is central to modern physics.

After a few weeks of hiatus on the blogging, we're back with the third in the series of science outreach interviews.  This week it's a pleasure to hear from Chad Orzel, a blogger, author, and physicist at Union College in Schenectady, NY.

(P.S.:  If you enjoy the interview, you might like to go help him in his blog's DonorsChoose campaign for raising money for high schools.)

How did you get into science?

Depends on what you mean by "get into science."

I quite literally can't remember a time when I wasn't interested in science. My grandmother tells a story about taking me to work with her once when I was about four, and having one of her co-workers ask what I wanted to be when I grew up. I replied "I'm going to be a paleontologist" (or, in one version, a "vertebrate paleontologist," just to be extra clear).

Exactly which science I was interested in changed from time to time growing up, but I was always interested in some sort of science. I latched onto physics in my junior year of high school, when I took physics (out of the usual order, for reasons that escape me), and saw all the cool toys that my teacher got to play with. I went to college being pretty sure I was going to major in physics, and stuck with it.

I really enjoyed being a physics major at a small liberal arts college, especially because it gave me the opportunity to get involved in research very early on, starting the summer after my first year. It seemed to me that my professors had a pretty sweet job, so I went to graduate school with the goal of getting a Ph.D. and ending up teaching physics at a small liberal arts college, and I was lucky enough to manage that.

I can't really say I've fulfilled my childhood dream (I'm not, after all, a vertebrate paleontologist), save in the very general sense of becoming a professional scientist, but I have ended up pretty much exactly where I wanted to be when I graduated college, which is pretty cool.

You have written a book about quantum mechanics and you have been blogging about physics for many years.  What motivates you to put so much effort into these projects?

In the case of the book, I've been paid a substantial sum of money. That never hurts...

The book came from the blog, though, and I was writing about physics on the Internet well before people started paying me. I started the blog because I was a big reader of blogs already in 2001, and I like to hear myself talk. I started talking about physics on the blog because it's an area where I have actual knowledge to share, as opposed to just running my mouth about things I don't really understand (which is not to say I don't do that, too, but I like to have a little credibility...).

I keep doing it because when it goes well, it's a real kick. It's the same thing as teaching a class, in some ways-- when a lecture goes really well, and I can see a difficult idea really "click" with a class, that's a huge kick. It makes the occasional drudgery involved in the job seem insignificant.

The same sort of thing happens with the blog. When I find some novel way of explaining a difficult idea, and manage to do a good job of getting across the excitement and wonder of physics research, I find that really exhilarating. And knowing that hundreds or thousands of people read that explanation makes it even better.

The origin of the book project was completely surreal, but once I was convinced that it was a worthwhile idea, it was actually a lot of fun to write. In the first pass, at least-- editing drafts down is always a world of pain. After a little fumbling around, though, the dog voice turned out to flow really easily, and I found it really helpful to the straight physics explanations to be able to use the dog to interrupt things when the going started to get a bit rough. It injects a little much-needed levity into what can otherwise be a pretty ponderous
subject.

The book has ended up being both more and less work than I thought it would be. Polishing the text has been really annoying - it's amazing how much I overuse the word "really" - but the actual writing went faster than I expected in a lot of places.

Do you do other outreach work, or have some ideas for the future that you'd like to share with us?

I floated the idea of an online "film festival" a while back, and discussions over how to make that happen have gotten bogged down a ouple of times, but I still like the idea. I've been really impressed by the creativity and ingenuity people display on YouTube, and I think it would be really great if we could harness that to do something ositive for science. I'm going to keep re-visiting that idea, and see what we can pull together.

I'm also signing up for things like the "Adopt-a-Physicist" program, and trying to do more to help local outreach efforts (the college chapter of the Society of Physics students has done demonstration days at local high schools, for example). I'm also trying to push the sort of outreach evangelism I was preaching in my talk at the Science21 meeting into new venues, with mixed success.

What do you think is one of the most interesting new things happening in science outreach?

I think the broadening of communications options has really done a lot to expand the audience - and the potential audience - for science content. When I was a kid, the only place you could really find science programming was on PBS, maybe two or three nights a week. Now, I've got a half-dozen channels on my cable tv that carry science (or at least science-ish) programs every night. ScienceBlogs has an audience of millions, and there's a respectable number of other sites bringing science to the web.

I'm also really encouraged by things like the Science Cafe phenomenon and the success of the World Science Festival in New York this past May. I think that, contrary to a lot of the siege mentality you hear from science bloggers, it's actually a great time to be a scientist, and that a larger fraction of the public than we realize is willing and eager to hear about science, if we make the effort to reach out to them.

Our second in this series of interviews with people who do science outreach, this time with Joel Gilmore, science communicator at the University of Queensland.

How did you get interested in science?

I've always been fascinated by how things work and uncovering the underlying principles - whether it be physics or lockpicking! What really set me on my course to physics, however, was picking up a popular science book for $2 at the Brisbane "Ekka" (a cross between a fair and a produce/cattle display!) called "The Edge of Science" about cosmology and particle physics.  It was a great read and actually went into quite a bit of detail, and I was totally hooked.  At the age of 12, I was proudly telling everyone who asked I wanted to be an astrophysicist!

What makes doing outreach seem worthwhile to you?

What comes to mind as one of the more interesting things happening in the outreach world today?

Tricky! I think one of the best things are the many blogs run by scientists around the world. Not only are they great sources of first hand information for increasingly tech-savvy audiences, by they also give insight into what has traditionally been quite a mysterious world: academia! Combined with tech sites like Slashdot.org and online podcasts like Australia's The Science Show, the internet is helping communicators to reach more people more easily.

 What are you currently up to?

I'm currently employed by the University of Queensland as a science communicator.  A big chunk of my day is running the Physics Demo Troupe which travels out to schools around
Australia doing science shows, talks and workshops. I just got back from a month of travel from the outback mining town of Mt Isa to the beautiful Thursday Island in the Torres Straits, and it was immensely encouraging to see so many enthusiastic physics students.

I also help coordinate a public lecture series called BrisScience - founded by none other than Jen Dodd when she was at UQ! I also write physics parodies and run a blog when I get time!

Having made the switch from academia to science outreach a couple of years ago, I have been teaching myself how to systematically meet new people.  Although this is an important skill for academics just as for everybody else, it's usually de-emphasised pretty strongly.  In any case, I certainly emerged from my PhD with virtually no experience doing this.  (A great article on why it's important for academics and how to do it is Phil Agre's "Networking on the Network".)

I got to wondering just how well I've been doing at this, so I tried to list all the people I've met and formed a positive relationship with since moving to Canada a year and three
months ago.  By "positive relationship" I mean someone who I could ask a small favor of (say, an introduction to someone else, a question, or a piece of advice) or meet for a chat over coffee.  In almost all cases these are people I would pick out in a crowd (and remember their name!), although a small number of them are online acquaintances who I only know by name.

I was shocked to discover at least 300 people on my list.  I'm certain that I've left off many people who I would think of in the right context, so the number is probably closer to 350 or 400.  Maybe 5%-10% of them are primarily social contacts (friends and their families, spouses of colleagues, etc), while the rest are primarily professional contacts.  Around 25% come from an event I recently coorganised (SciBarCamp), 25% are people I deliberately set out to meet, 25% are colleagues and connections from my last workplace, and the remaining
25% are more or less random meetings.  Since I have only been in Canada for around 450 days, this works out to around 5 people a week - a new face most days.

I feel really privileged to have met all these people, both professionally and personally.  On the professional side, projects such as the one I'm currently working on (developing a science festival for Toronto) would be impossible without the help and advice of a surprisingly large percentage of this network of people.  On the personal side, of course not all 300+ have become close friends, but certainly one of the best side-effects of having met so many people has been new friendships.