Communications to the Past: Astrolabes to Zodiacs

Teaching and Communicating Astronomy – JENAM’04 A. Ortiz-Gil and V. Mart´inez (eds) EAS Publications Series, 16 (2005) 45–53 COMMUNICATIONS TO THE PAST: ASTROLABES TO ZODIACS V. Trimble 1 Abstract. In past centuries, astronomers have used a very wide range of techniques to explain what they are doing, how, and why it was worth doing to their equivalents of sponsoring agencies, voters, and students. We here examine an inital set of seven examples of seemingly successful communication, each with lesson to offer, and then, more briefly a wider range of examples, some apparently very good for their purpose and a few that were perfectly awful. Introduction: Motivations, Audiences, and Media Before starting out to do something, it is perhaps wise to ask why, who, and how. “What” will be dealt with in the following sections. It is actually a little difficult to describe the motivations, past to present, for explaining science to the rest of the world. It tends to come out sounding very much like, “we want more funding”. This is, of course, true and not unique to our generation. But anyone who worries about the future of the world also wants an informed electorate, and this is clearly also part of our motivation. Who should we be trying to reach? It is a long list, beginning with the spon- soring agencies, from the Emperor Rudolph to PPARC. The second-order spon- sors, voters and taxpayers, are a more recent audience. One can describe various parts of the public as “interested” –the traditional educated layman and (at one time at least perceived as a separate audience) women, children, and amateur as- tronomers. There is also the uninterested public, at whom one gets an occasional brief chance through moments like eclipses and meteor showers and the appear- ance of naked-eye comets. There is the future educated public, reached in medieval times through the quadrivium and more recently (at least in the USA) through compulsory science courses taken by college students aiming at medical, business, legal, and other careers. Special techniques will be needed to reach scientists in other disciplines, who can be our allies, and the pipeline of future scientists, who Dept. of Physics and Astronomy, Univ. of California, Irvine CA 92697-4575, USA c EAS, EDP Sciences 2005 DOI: 10.1051/eas:2005061