Outreach & Wonder
Serious ideas, playful formats, and a stubborn belief that science should feel alive.
I never really managed to leave astronomy behind. I may have wandered off into data science, software, teams, and large awkward systems full of humans, but the original fascination is still there. Outreach is one of the places where those threads come back together rather nicely.
For me, outreach isn't about dumbing anything down. It's about changing the setting. A festival field, a classroom, a browser window, a workshop table covered in solder and improbable ideas: all of those can be places where difficult things suddenly become approachable.
Learning through play
I've always found that people learn most when they're allowed to poke, prod, build, and ask slightly awkward questions. A bit of delight helps too.
Questions over lectures
The aim isn't to flatten science into trivia. It's to open a door, expand the context, and let curiosity do some of the heavy lifting.
Science, art, and code
My favourite outreach work sits between disciplines: part experiment, part performance, part data project, and occasionally a glorified excuse to play with LEDs.
CERN Festival Programme
Taking particle physics somewhere you really wouldn't expect it
Through The Big Bang Collective, I've had the pleasure of helping co-produce CERN's festival programme: bringing science into music festivals, art spaces, parks, and other gloriously non-laboratory environments.
That means building experiences rather than simply delivering explanations. Sometimes it's a soldering workshop using retired detector boards from ATLAS. Sometimes it's an installation about AI and creativity. Sometimes it's simply creating enough intrigue that someone who didn't expect to care about particle physics suddenly does.
I love this work because it makes science social again. It invites questions, conversation, and the occasional wonderfully offbeat analogy. And once that happens, people don't just remember a fact; they remember how it felt to discover it.
Found in Space
A dedicated home for learning through real space data
One of the nicest things to grow out of this wider outreach work is foundin.space, a dedicated platform for exploring the nearby stars through real astronomical catalogue data. I wanted it to sit next to this site rather than inside it: k-si.com explains the broader practice, while Found in Space is where the journeys, teaching material, and open code live.
It starts with open catalogues from Gaia, Hipparcos, and related surveys, then turns them into interactive 3D experiences. You can fly through Orion, feel parallax by moving the observer, or watch familiar sky patterns pull apart when the stars are placed at their estimated distances. The aim is not just to show a prettier sky. It is to make the data behind the view available enough to question.
That is the bit I find most exciting. Found in Space is part planetarium, part classroom, part open data lab: a place where a teacher can pick up an activity, a student can investigate a real measurement problem, and a curious coder can inspect the machinery. It is outreach in a different venue: less muddy field, more browser tab, but still built around learning by poking at things.
Where this work shows up
- Festival installations and public events with CERN and creative collaborators.
- Talks about science, data, creativity, and the odd surprising overlap between them.
- Hands-on workshops where people learn by making things rather than being talked at.
- Web projects like Found in Space that turn public engagement into a reusable learning platform.
What ties it together
Whether I'm talking about quantum mechanics, building a workshop around detector hardware, or visualising stars from open catalogues, I'm usually chasing the same thing: that moment when something large, abstract, or faintly intimidating becomes tangible enough to play with.
Talks & Presentations
A few examples of the public-facing side of all this
I enjoy talks most when they feel like invitations rather than performances. These are a couple of examples from recent years.
Quantum Creativity
"Quantum" is one of those words that gets stretched to cover everything from physics to shampoo. In this talk I tried to rescue it a little, and explore how ideas from quantum mechanics can still spark genuinely creative ways of thinking.
Event: THIS Aarhus 2024
Data & Visualisation
During lockdown I became mildly obsessed with making remote presentations feel less like punishment. Some of the experiments worked, some failed rather publicly, but that was part of the point: curiosity survives a surprising amount of chaos.
Related Content
A few posts that touch on the same territory: science, play, public engagement, and the joy of making complicated things feel a bit more human.
