Sunday I went to the Fete de la Science at Paris 6. Contrary to the name, this was nothing approaching a celebration. Rather, it was a bunch of grad students presenting their research, or at least their topic, typically in a child-friendly way. By going and writing something up, I was able to satisfy both the FLE homework, a pro-seminar blog post, and add something new to this blog. Triple duty!
For the FLE homework, I needed to educate myself about some of the projects relating to climate change. This was a slight problem, because I was way more drawn to the techy and even physicsy projects than the environmental science ones. The couple of times I did make an effort to approach a table that didn’t have too many children at it, I got a pretty chilly reception. I’d look at the fliers and wait for someone to approach me. Eventually they would, and ask what I wanted to know more about. The answer was basically everything, though the students did not seem to like that and could only give an extremely basic general summary.
By contrast, every time I stopped by a table with information about physics or engineering, I was given a decently thorough summary of the project, sometimes with a demonstration going on as well. And I was typically greeted more enthusiastically as well. (It’s the exact opposite of what one might stereotypically expect.) So after a bit I started trying to think of more creative ways of framing the projects that I was seeing into being about climate change.
Some of them were easy. For instance, the table for Fablab, where I stood for over an hour, was doing things with air quality monitors. I mean, their main attraction was a 3D printer that was constantly working on printing tiny orange octopi. I spent most of the time listening to people talking about that, and near the end even found myself trying to explain one of the more complicated pieces that they’d printed. (It didn’t look like a flower, but it did open like one with petals and a bulb. And inside the bulb was a duck. Everything except the duck had been printed in a single go. The duck had been added while it was being printed.)
However, I was there long enough to ask about a poster that included talk about open source geiger counters. The person I asked wasn’t super-familiar with the details, but he was able to show me the air quality monitor that seemed to operate under similar principles. Just by turning it on, an LED would show color to give general state (when he did, it was yellow) and, if someone connected it to their smartphone, it would give exact measurements. Further, it would automatically gather that data and the location so that it could make a map of air quality. (That’s so much easier to explain in English than in French.) And best of all, it’s all open source.
Other tables took more of a stretch to relate to climate. Like the presentation about how we know what the interiors of the planets is like. It was mainly focused on Earth because, even if finding out information about Earth’s core isn’t exactly easy, it’s a lot simpler than studying the cores of other planets. It was interesting, because it was both unfamiliar and comprehensible, talking about how both natural effects (like earthquakes) and simulations (involving diamonds, since nothing else can withstand the extreme pressure and heat) can be studied, and what they learned.
Other people I talked to just for the fun of it. Like the person who was standing by an open (and very old) computer. The information for that one was more familiar, which made my greatest challenge adjusting to the French vocabulary. (Because French needs to be stubborn and try to avoid taking words from English. English has no such issue, which makes math much easier to understand.)
Probably the most enthusiastic response I got was from people who were giving information about the big mirror in telescopes. When I stopped by their table, they asked, a little listlessly, if I wanted to learn about telescopes. But when I said “sure,” they perked up immediately with surprise and delight. Apparently most people weren’t interested.
Which is kind of surprising, because their presentation was pretty good. It began with an activity to polish a salt crystal (I think that was geared more towards children. After a little bit, the woman who was there told me that it gave me some idea what polishing was like and had me move over to someone else who talked about how that related to telescopes.
Short answer: telescopes need a lot of polishing. The long answer involves six different samples of the various stages of the mirror, looking in a microscope to better appreciate the differences in smoothness, and thirty hours. (Thirty hours to make the small sample, not thirty hours of description. Though that would have explained why they were so delighted to get a new victim.) All this, just to create the main mirror of a telescope. Reminds me of a joke.
The head of a university goes to the chemistry department. “I looked at your budget request… that’s a lot of lab equipment you need. Why can’t you be more like the math department? All they need is pencils and erasers. Or, better yet, the philosophy department. All they need is pencils.”
It’s not that I’m jealous of my programmates taking humanities classes and no finals and feel a need to make cheap jokes at their expense. Definitely not that.
