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
Turning astronomical data into something people can actually explore
One of the nicest things to grow out of this wider outreach work is Found in Space. It's a way for me to come back to astronomy with all the tools I've picked up since leaving academia: data engineering, visualisation, interaction design, and a much better sense of how people actually learn.
The project starts with real astronomical data, especially from ESA's Gaia mission, and tries to make that data feel less like an intimidating archive and more like an invitation. Part exhibit, part classroom, part lab, it uses interactive visualisations and guided explorations to let people discover ideas for themselves.
In that sense it feels completely at home here. It's outreach, just in a different venue: less muddy field, more browser tab. The underlying philosophy is the same though. Give people something beautiful, make the questions irresistible, and don't hide the interesting machinery.
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 let curiosity continue long after the event ends.
What ties it together
Whether I'm talking about quantum mechanics, building a workshop around detector hardware, or visualising stars, 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.
