Spotlights on Outreach and Engaging the Public with FOEP’s Nicholson Medal Winner
Questions and Answers with Michael Barnett, 2020 Dwight Nicholson Medal for Outreach Recipient.
Michael Barnett,
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
For a lifetime of innovations in outreach bringing the discoveries and searches of particle physicists and cosmologists to multitudes of students and lay-people around the world.
Q. You have done so much over the years. Let’s focus in on your older work first. You created the Contemporary Physics Education Project, which was started in 1987, the QuarkNet education program in 1997, and the Particle Adventure in 1995. You were also coordinator of the education and outreach program of the ATLAS Experiment at the Large Hadron Collider. What drove you to start on these projects and what compelled you to continue?
It was not in my life plan to do outreach in physics. Unknown to me, in 1986 a conference was held at Fermilab called the Conference on Teaching of Modern Physics. In attendance was an inspiring high school teacher, Fred Priebe, who was determined to have materials for teaching contemporary physics. They were not teaching what modern physicists were actually doing. Priebe made contact with Helen Quinn at SLAC. She in turn contacted me, because I worked in the international Particle Data Group, which summarizes particle physics. Fred and Helen inspired me to join them in projects that would allow us to share our excitement about physics with generations of students.
Fred recruited more high school teachers onto our committee, and that collaboration of high school teachers with physicists was essential in producing products that would actually work in the classroom. I found working with high school teachers quite rewarding, and the success of our products in and out of the classroom also continued to inspire me to continue doing outreach.
Q. More recently, you created and were executive producer of a planetarium show called Phantom of the Universe – The Hunt for Dark Matter, in which you had the help of some well-known talent and which has been well received globally. How was this more recent project different than your previous ones?
This project involved a very large set of people of different skills, and they lived in the US and several European countries. Therefore, coordination and management was complicated, though it actually went surprisingly smoothly. The biggest problem is no one in the project had ever made a planetarium show before. It is a lot more complex than a film because the screen is not flat. The animators had to learn how to develop for a spherical screen, and everyone had to envision how to make this work. However, I wanted to do a planetarium show, because I had visions of multiple scenes that could only work in a planetarium. Because of the novelty of this for our team, we had to go to planetariums (in several countries) to see the work in progress.
It was also great fun to work for a day with Academy Award-winning actor Tilda Swinton while recording the narration. Another two days was dedicated to working on sound with an Academy Award-winning team at Skywalker Sound, which makes films such as Star Wars.
Among our original motivations were that it was a new avenue of outreach to students and the public, and it is more dramatic than IMAX (it surrounds you). We realized along the way that for most planetariums, school visits account for about half their audiences. We also found that there are hundreds of planetariums with an interest in a dark matter show. They will present our show for months at a time (unlike feature films). Planetariums have the perfect science-interested audience for us in the general public and K through 12.
Our show has now been seen in 22 languages, in 67 countries, in 550 planetariums. We never imagined such success as we developed the show.
Q. Through this all, you’ve also been involved in your research. How did you manage the balance?
Some of these projects could be done with a small fraction of one’s time (over a long period), although the planetarium show took at least a third of my time. It would have been more, but we hired a great Hollywood producer and a brilliant director. Sometimes one’s research will make doing outreach difficult, but as a senior physicist, I had some flexibility.
Q. One thing I have truly appreciated is the time you also devoted in the Forum on Outreach and Engaging the Public’s chair line. I recall you surveyed our members to help find out what interests our forum members had, what direction they wanted to go in, what sector our members tended to be in, and tried to steer the then young forum into a direction that serviced its members. You even created our very nice FOEP logo. It seems like you have been willing to do a lot of the heavy lifting to help others do outreach and engage the public. What words can you provide to encourage physicists to get involved, not only in their own outreach, but with pushing forth the efforts on the “business” side of it all as well?
Many of us are involved with large experiments, but by contrast, most outreach is done by small groups, and the feedback you get from students, teachers, and the public can be extremely rewarding. You can see directly from emailed comments or in person that your efforts in outreach work have had a big impact. I especially like interactions with middle school and high school students whose enthusiasm is often fantastic. Explaining your work to others can lead you to new insights to your research.
Q. Last words of wisdom. If you could give only one bit of advice to our members, what would it be?
You did not learn to do research instantly, and outreach takes some ongoing interactions with your audience or audiences, whether they are students, teachers, politicians, news media, or the general public. Perseverance will lead to better and better outcomes in your outreach.