Earlier this morning, Twitter user Sumrtime started following me, and I her. After a quick perusal of her profile and website, I realized that she was an astrophysicist.
I got all excited, because there’s this commercial for PBS’ “Nova” with Neil De Grasse Tyson, who’s pretty much my academic hero, talking about how there’s 6 billion people in the world, and only about 6 million astrophysicists. The odds of meeting an astrophysicist are literally one in a million.
I like astrophysicists. I used to want to be one when I grew up. When I was three, I actually understood what an astrophysicist was and did. I’d mentioned this to Sumrtime, and lamented the fact that I understood the world at three in a way I’ve never understood it before.
The only way, I told my new friend, I could get back to that was listening to WNYC’s “Radio Lab.”
Jump with me, won’t you?
If you listen to NPR much, you’re familiar with the voice of Robert Krulwich, NPR’s science desk correspondent. He and producer Jad Abumrad host the wonderful “Radio Lab” discussing science in very plain and understandable terms, which allows me to once again, understand science–without all the math that made it so painful to me during high school.
Krulwich brings the understanding, but the creative and disorienting sound design by Abumrad is what brings the sense of wonder back.
Seriously, listening to “Radio Lab” feels like the nights I spent in the mid-80′s laying in my parent’s front yard with my dad and trying to memorize the constellations and learning their stories.
So my scientific knowledge is not as transcendently complete as it once was, and “Radio Lab’s” science is simplistic – in that it tries merely to allow the listener to understand science, rather than participate in it – but it allows the adult I am to forge a deeper connection to the child I was than I would be able to otherwise.
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