Blueshift - December 4, 2012: Science in a Nutshell, Part 2 of our interview with Dr. Phil Plait

12/04/12 • 6 min

As science educators, encouraging critical thinking and skepticism is something we think is really important. We interviewed the "Bad Astronomer," Dr. Phil Plait, to get his thoughts on the subject. He is a trained scientist who used to work at NASA Goddard... but now he works full-time as a science writer and a public advocate for good science. In Part 1 of our interview with Phil, we learned why he started blogging about hoaxes and misconceptions, about the importance of asking "why," and ended with the start of an intriguing discussion about how the trend today in entertainment is for scientists to actually be the heroes and the good guys. This podcast is Part 2 of our interview (with two more to come), in which Phil shares his experiences with the TV shows The Big Bang Theory and Mythbusters, and tells us why he gets such joy out of teaching people about how great science is.

Previous Episode

Blueshift - October 12, 2012: NuStar: NASA's Newest X-Ray Eyes

It's an exciting experience for any space geek to watch a new satellite launch into orbit. Earlier in 2012, we were excited about the launch of NuSTAR, a small explorer X-ray mission collaboratively created by teams at Caltech, NASA, and over a dozen other institutions around the world. NuSTAR advances the international astronomical community's ability to observe some of the hottest, densest, and most energetic objects in the Universe. We were interested to find out more about NASA Goddard's involvement in the mission, so we interviewed post-doc Dr. Dan Wik about his work with the satellite's optics and his interest in observing galaxy clusters with NuSTAR.

Next Episode

Blueshift - December 20, 2012: Hubble's Scientific Successor

As you might imagine, the James Webb Space Telescope is a pretty big deal here at NASA Goddard, because much of it is being assembled here. As a companion to all our tech coverage of Webb, we thought it would be nice to talk about the science it will do and how it is the scientific successor to, rather than the replacement for, the Hubble Space Telescope. We chatted with Dr. Amber Straughn, one of the project scientists on Webb, to learn about what this new observatory will bring to the scientific community. We also talked about Amber’s own research, how she uses Hubble data, and what she hopes to get out of Webb data in the future.