{"id":12743,"date":"2016-03-29T14:43:29","date_gmt":"2016-03-29T21:43:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/?p=12743"},"modified":"2016-03-29T14:43:29","modified_gmt":"2016-03-29T21:43:29","slug":"science-career-stories","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/2016\/03\/29\/science-career-stories\/","title":{"rendered":"Science Career Stories"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.storycollider.org\/\">The Story Collider<\/a> is a wonderful institution with a simple mission: getting scientists to share stories with a broad audience. Literal, old-fashioned storytelling: standing up in front of a group of people and spinning a tale, typically with a scientific slant but always about real human life. It was founded in 2010 by Ben Lillie and Brian Wecht; I got to know Ben way back when he was a postdoc at Argonne and the University of Chicago, before he switched from academia to the less well-trodden paths of communication and the wrangling of non-profit organizations.<\/p>\n<p>By now the Story Collider has accumulated quite a large number of great tales from scientists young and old, and I encourage you to catch a <a href=\"http:\/\/www.storycollider.org\/upcoming-shows\/\">live show<\/a> or crawl through their <a href=\"http:\/\/www.storycollider.org\/podcasts\/\">archives<\/a>. I was able to participate in one about a year ago, where I shared the stage with a number of fascinating scientific storytellers. One of them was one of my mentors and favorite physicists, Alan Guth. Of course he has an advantage at this game in comparison to most other scientists, as he gets to tell the story of how he came up with one of the most influential ideas in modern cosmology: the inflationary universe.<\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" scrolling=\"no\" frameborder=\"no\" src=\"https:\/\/w.soundcloud.com\/player\/?url=https%3A\/\/api.soundcloud.com\/tracks\/235034372&#038;color=ff5500\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>It&#8217;s a great story, both for the science and for the personal aspect: Alan was near the end of his third postdoc at the time, and his academic prospects were far from clear. You just need that one brilliant idea to pop up at the right time.<\/p>\n<p>But everyone&#8217;s path is different. Here, from a different event, is my young Caltech colleague Chiara Mingarelli, who explains how she ended up studying gravitational waves at the center of the universe.<\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" scrolling=\"no\" frameborder=\"no\" src=\"https:\/\/w.soundcloud.com\/player\/?url=https%3A\/\/api.soundcloud.com\/tracks\/241975787&amp;color=ff5500\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>Finally, it is my blog, so here is the story I told. I basically talked about myself, but I used my (occasionally humorous) interactions with Stephen Hawking as a hook. Never be afraid to hitch a ride on the coattails of someone immensely more successful, I always say.<\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"https:\/\/w.soundcloud.com\/player\/?url=https%3A\/\/api.soundcloud.com\/tracks\/208784623&amp;color=ff5500\" width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" frameborder=\"no\" scrolling=\"no\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The Story Collider is a wonderful institution with a simple mission: getting scientists to share stories with a broad audience. Literal, old-fashioned storytelling: standing up in front of a group of people and spinning a tale, typically with a scientific slant but always about real human life. It was founded in 2010 by Ben Lillie [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,24],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-12743","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-academia","category-personal"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12743","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12743"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12743\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12747,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12743\/revisions\/12747"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12743"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12743"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12743"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}