Nerd entertainment: meditating on ESI science lectures at UT

Hooray! to the Austin American-Statesman for previewing Dr. Donald Blankenship’s lecture, “Beginning the Search for Life on the Outer Planets,” hosted by the Environmental Science Institute, Jackson School of Geosciences, University of Texas at Austin. I thoroughly enjoyed the presentation, as I do every month; however, Blankenship actually discussed radar imaging, developed to peer beneath ice sheets in the Antarctic and elsewhere. NASA lately recruited Blankenship and colleagues to design remote sensing science projects to peer beneath the icy “crust” of Jovian satellite Europa. Maybe the host, Jay Banner, and his band of merry ESI scientists thought that the search for life on a radiation-bathed moon of our solar system’s largest gas giant would attract a bigger crowd than any title containing the words “cryosphere” or “lithosphere” would attract. Well, I guess they guessed right; once again Friday night nerd entertainment (my appellation, not Dr. Banner’s) at Welch Hall attracted an overflow crowd.

Never a great math whiz or scientific genius, I defensively avoided any college courses involving calculus or anything remotely resembling it. I can discuss scientific topics in the abstract, but immediately get lost when faced with formulas involving Greek symbols. Nevertheless, listening to scientific lectures, delivered by learned and accomplished college professors and scholars, causes synapses to fire in my brain that normally lie dormant since I graduated from The University.

Reading and hearing about scientific research projects has become a kind of escapist entertainment for me of late. The daily drudgery of news – politics, economic meltdown, environmental catastrophe, war, pestilence, and natural disasters – wears me down and drains all the joy out of my spirit. The news of the weak accentuates my sense of powerlessness and shame that I could never focus enough to pursue a more intellectually sophisticated career. Pondering distant worlds, solar systems, and other scientific conundrums makes me feel serene and satisfied with my miniscule place in the universe. I can add that to my gratitude list.

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