An Astrophysicist Take On Storytelling

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    • Publish Date: Feb 7 2019 12:17PM
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    • Updated Date: Feb 7 2019 12:17PM
An Astrophysicist Take On Storytelling

Some 30 years ago, a wide-eyed member of an amateur astronomers’ club stood behind a telescope at the Nehru Planetarium and watched the Halley’s Comet zoom by. The fascinated teenager is now a ‘Black Hole Hunter,’ a theoretical astrophysicist at Yale University and an author.  Priyamvada Natarajan speaks about the importance of storytelling in science

What is interesting about your debut book ‘Mapping the Heavens: The Radical Scientific Ideas That Reveal the Cosmos’ is that it attracts non-science readers...

When we look at the history of cosmology of the last 100 years, we’ve made enormous progress. I was always intrigued by what catalysed the people who proposed these radical ideas, and the process by which they were accepted. When radical ideas are proposed, there’s always pushback. There’s a complicated process by which you reach consensus, both within the scientific community and in public. That process intrigues me greatly because as someone producing these ideas myself now, I have encountered resistance. What I’m really after is clarity of understanding in abstract things. The test of how good my understanding is depends on whether I can explain it to somebody with no mathematical background. I’m quite invested  in the public dissemination of science, particularly in the US where I live now.

Why specifically in the US?
There’s a lot of rampant denialism of science and scientific beliefs. Like vaccinations are no good, not believing the data on climate change. We live in a world shaped by science and technology, and this paradox is just too crazy.

Scientists will always cite facts and logic but what about the role of imagination?
This idea that creativity is not part of science is quite silly. Science is pretty much a very creative endeavour fuelled by imagination. There’s this misinformation that scientists are not passionate, that we are these people in lab coats with a sanitised, objective view.

So, do you spend all day in a lab, looking through telescopes?
No no, I don’t actually look through a telescope at all because a lot of the data I want from space telescopes comes straight to my computer. I have a lot of other interests. I read like crazy. I collect maps and I’m crazy about modern art. Right now I’m doing an AR-VR project on what it feels like to be in space, with eminent sculptor, Sir Antony Gormley, in London. I also love to cook. But if you tell me, three ounces of something, I don’t have a great sense for that. Whereas if you tell me something is a billion times the mass of the sun, I’ll be like ‘oh yeah!’

Do you feel science and math should be integral parts of our culture and society?
Scientific and numerical literacy are really important. Often when girls find maths slightly challenging, a teacher will say, maybe that’s not for you. That completely puts off a whole set of people from sciences and mathematics. That’s where we really have to revamp our education system. Teachers have to understand that children are born scientists, all curious. That level of curiosity has to be retained.

What fired your curiosity about the cosmos?
By nature, I was very curious and I won the birth lottery. I was born into a family of academics, who let me figure out whatever I wanted to do. I looked through a microscope, a telescope, and fell in love with the cosmos. I was also obsessed with maps. Thanks to my dad’s conferences in the US, I got a Commodore 64 before anybody had computers in the 1980s. I learned to programme and made a star map for Delhi. Things just took off.

You’ve been actively pushing for gender equality in academia in your past role as chair of the Women’s Faculty Forum at Yale...
My field is very male dominated and the demographics really need to shift to change the culture. The culture of science could do with improvement, and we would have that if it was open to all kinds of people, including LGBT persons. My students feel that me standing at Yale and lecturing, makes a difference to them. For the first time, a girl was inducted into Yale’s legendary all-male a capella choir last month. That is amazing. I think barriers are breaking down though the pace of change is slow.

Any attempt to level the playing field?
I recently did something interesting. Astronomy has grants and resources that are doled out competitively. One of them is time alloted to study the Hubble Space Telescope. I chaired the first double blind review ever in the physical sciences – where you don’t know who the proposer is because all kinds of biases can creep in. For the first time in 25 years, the proportion of women getting time was commensurate  with the applicant pool percentage. That’s never happened before. I think this success is going to force big granting agencies like Nasa and NSF (National Science Foundation) to go double blind in a year or two. Everyone was waiting for somebody to do it, and see if there was an effect but I was surprised at how dramatic it was.

Finally, a question that haunts us all. Any chance of earthlings getting gobbled up by the black hole?
We don’t have to worry about it at all! (Laughs) The black hole in the centre of our galaxy is way too far away. I think we have more things that we can do to each other to destroy each other than any cosmic object can. 




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