Universal Languages
Join Astronomy on Tap’s next virtual lecture, presented entirely in Chinese, on February 18.
In 2016, postdoctoral scholar Cameron Hummels began a Pasadena chapter of Astronomy on Tap (AoT), a national public-outreach program in which astronomers and planetary scientists from Caltech and other institutions delve into the mysteries of the cosmos and answer audience questions over pints of lager at a local tavern. In the last five years, the event has taken place more than 70 times, usually at Der Wolf in Pasadena.
But Hummels and his AoT team wanted to do more with the program. Because more than half of residents in the city of Los Angeles can speak a language other than English, according to U.S. Census data, Hummels and his collaborators sought to broaden AoT lectures to make them accessible to speakers of other tongues. The most commonly spoken languages other than English in the L.A. area are Spanish and Mandarin Chinese, so Hummels and graduate student Yuguang Chen began to recruit astronomy experts fluent in those languages.
Then COVID-19 changed everything. With in-person events shut down by the pandemic, the AoT team pivoted to a virtual format in which lectures were still given live but online, with recordings made available afterward. The move online not only made it possible to continue the series but also expanded its reach. Before the pandemic, 100 to 200 people attended in-person events. The live virtual events have had roughly the same number of attendees, Hummels says, but the recorded videos typically receive another 1,000 views.
“Certainly, in the last 18 months, we’ve seen how important science can be for everyone’s well-being and life,” Hummels says. “Astronomy doesn’t always have the most obvious impact on our daily lives, but I think it’s important to provide people with opportunities to broaden their horizons and learn about our origins, and teach critical thinking at the same time.”
The unexpected change in plans also expanded the Astronomy on Tap audience beyond the Los Angeles community. When Chen organized two virtual lectures in Mandarin and hosted the events on Chinese video platforms, each talk saw around 8,000 attendees join in to learn about merging black holes and asteroids. The recordings have garnered nearly 45,000 combined views.
“I was absolutely astonished to see the enthusiasm among our audience,” says Chen. “Thousands of people tuned in to our live events and participated in the Q&A session. It definitely encouraged us to organize more high-quality content in the future.”
The Spanish-language events have featured researchers from Caltech and NASA discussing black holes, dark matter, and brown dwarfs (objects in between planets and stars in size). Two PhD students in astronomy and planetary sciences, Tony Rodriguez and Benjamin Idini (MS ’19), have hosted these events and provide context and commentary.
“These events attempt to reach the full Spanish diaspora, with speakers from Mexico, Spain, and South America, and are timed so that all of the Americas can watch live,” Hummels says.
The team plans to continue the the events and hopes to host talks four times per year in Spanish and four times in Mandarin in addition to the usual programs in English.
“We plan to achieve a balance between in-person and online events after the pandemic,” says Hummels. “Online content reaches a much larger audience and is preserved for longer, but there’s something special about interacting with people in an in-person intimate setting, so we’ll try to have it both ways. This is all about just trying to reach more people regardless of nationality, regardless of cultural background.”—LORI DAJOSE