Life in optical

Your secret from Jean-Sebastien Monzani on Vimeo.

I dreamt of a night sky full of colourful stars – of course :) What did you think of?

In this telephone interview of Nathi Mthethwa, South African minister of police, a BBC journalist is desperately fishing for bad news about South Africa’s security records for the upcoming football world cup after the death of the white supremacist Eugene Terreblanche. The minister’s replies are pragmatic and rational and well balanced and the journalist really appears to be fishing – and failing to get what he wants.

FYI, this is what the minister refers to: The 2009 season of the Indian cricket Premier league coincided with the general elections in India. Due to concerns regarding players’ security, the venue was shifted to South Africa.

I am at the ‘Communicating Astronomy with the Public’ conference in Cape Town, South Africa. Actually, the conference starts next week but this week we’ve had a great Astronomy Communication school with professional astronomers, journalists, communicators, educators, students etc. and it’s been great.

One of the topics that has come up, that we have just touched upon is: ‘What tough questions the public poses us?’

This propped up once with one of the participants mentioning that the most difficult questions they have ever been asked was by a young child, and we (as in scientists), have no idea about the answer.

So we went around the audience and collected a few questions. Here is what we got:

• Why are there so many stars? (Girl, 6 years old)
• How can you take a picture of the Milky Way if you’re in it?
• Where is heaven?
• Why are the stars so different from each other?
• What is the Universe? A good answer is to quote Carl Sagan: “The Universe is all there is, everything there ever was and everything there ever will be.” (Cosmos Chapter 1)

Good questions! Now I’m asking everyone to throw in their ‘toughest question’ into the conversation. When has a member of the public, a child, an adult, anyone – caught you off guard and asked you a question you couldn’t answer straight away?

And how would you answer the questions above?

Update: Some of my fave tweeps have already contributed great input:

• 11 year old “My mum says God made the universe and anything else is heresay [sic]‘. More of a statement I suppose.
• 14 year old asking me to explain why black holes decay, another one was 6 year old asking my why the Universe is full of gravity

J’ai eu la chance d’avoir une longue conversation avec André Brahic qui m’a accordé un peu de son temps à l’assemblée générale de l’Union Astronomique Internationale en août 2009.

André Brahic, en plus d’être un explorateur de l’univers, est un philosophe dont on ne se lasse pas, avec un sens de l’humour et une joie de vivre que je tenais à partager. Voici donc le premier épisode de notre conversation.