Wednesday Nite at the Lab

press release: WN@TL goes hybrid both with Zoom and with in-person (Room 1111) presentations. The zoom registration link is still go.wisc.edu/240r59. You can also watch a live web stream at on YouTube.

On January 25 Tom Zinnen be giving the talk on “The Xenos Paradox & the Futures of Science Outreach.”

Description:  Zeno’s Paradox of Achilles & the Tortoise was that rare example of a story from Greek philosophy that leaked into my high school math class.  Plus, it was best presented as a cartoon of two faces rather than a diagram of two facets.  However, the first of Zeno’s paradoxes was that of Atalanta (she of the golden apples), and the argument that fleet of feet though she may be, her motion (and actually any motion) is illogical, and therefore, merely an illusion.  Or as the Wikipedia author distills it

“Suppose Atalanta wishes to walk to the end of a path. Before she can get there, she must get halfway there. Before she can get halfway there, she must get a quarter of the way there. Before traveling a quarter, she must travel one-eighth; before an eighth, one-sixteenth; and so on….This description requires one to complete an infinite number of tasks, which Zeno maintains is an impossibility.”  

Thus, the original paralysis by analysis.  Luckily, other competing rational analyses demonstrate that motion is not only real, but logical.  (Whew)

Happily, there’s another Xenos Paradox, a pun upon a homophone, based on the Greek word xenos which can have at least three distinct meanings:  foreigner, visitor, or guest.  It is the root of both xenophobia—the fear of foreigners—and xenium—a gift to welcome guests.  The xenial is congenial:  it is the heart of hospitality.

In the field of science outreach, universities have distinct advantages (and perhaps, duties) compared to some other sources of informal science learning for the public, based in part on the fact that universities have both people and places dedicated to doing science as probing the unknown.  Public universities—and especially public land-grant universities such as UW-Madison that embrace (and are funded to fulfill) three missions of instruction, research, and extension—face a formidable question: 

How do we view the public:  as foreigners to be feared, as visitors to be tolerated, or as guests to be welcomed and engaged?

The past 15 years have brought some transformative changes in science outreach.  Among these are three key to me:  

1.  Cell phones & wifi put the world’s information in Everyone’s pocket:  nearly all of us now can be reader & writer, videographer & broadcaster, influencer & pundit;

2.  Constrictions or cuts in state budgets for universities are shifting how researchers & outreachers share science and engage the public; and 

3. The pandemic that began three years ago lit a helpful lamp of zooms and similar technologies, but also spawned a secondary epidemic of misinformation & disinformation as well as a corrosion of confidence in science and scientists, in expertise and experts.  

This essay-talk will consider ways that the methods, mindsets and money that universities may use in the coming months & years as we wrestle with some perennial questions:  how do we best organize, fund, facilitate, staff & evaluate our science outreach mission?  And most pointedly, how do we ensure that we view the public as guests to be welcomed into this scientific enterprise of exploring the unknown and inventing the future?