Flagship Science on Main

We had our first-ever Science on Main in Downtown Mesa last Friday night.

To all small-business owners and entrepreneurs out there: I salute you. It's a scary thing to put together a network of people, organize an event, order a custom table runner and supplies, and have no idea if it is going to be worth the money and effort. Fortunately, the organizers at Second Friday make it easy and inexpensive to try out a pilot project like this. Thank you Second Friday, and thank you Arizona Museum of Natural History for loaning us some materials!

Here we go! It almost looks like we know what we're doing!

The anticipation is kind of making us flustered.

That said, we had a ton of folks come out and talk to us about some pretty cool topics! Some of our conversations ranged from stellar nucleosynthesis, to the origin of life, to shark rabies, to properties of ice and water. It was so much fun!

In addition to questions, we got some important feedback. One woman commented that she appreciated that we weren't on "a soapbox" with a lecture prepared. Some people were pretty surprised that we had nothing to sell or demonstrate, and that we're just giving away free knowledge. There were other scientists and engineers in the crowd on Friday that seemed inspired by the idea, so let's hope this project spreads! 

Other science people came to talk to us, too! It's always fun finding fellow science people running wild and out in the world (there are more out there than you think!).

Thank you Dr. Smith for taking pics! We were all too engrossed in discussions to think about documenting it ;-)

We had a great question later in the night that I wanted to re-iterate: "So what are you getting out of this? What's your agenda?"
We just think science is cool, and want people to know how cool (and understandable) it is. We want people to know that science experts are pretty regular people. We also want science experts to be more accessible, and be better communicators. That's it.

So, some of our lessons learned from our inaugural Science on Main:
1. People really seemed to like this idea.
     a) People have a lot of fun and interesting questions
     b) Sure, one can always Google an answer to a question, but talking to a real-live science person is more fun. Who knows where the conversation will go next?
     c) Chatting with people is way more engaging than a lecture or demo.
     d) Some people just want to hang and listen to us talk about stuff. By all means, do so!
2. We should probably bring in more experts
3. We should definitely do this again :-)

Most importantly, we want to thank all of the people that came by to see us on Friday. We hear you: this is worth it, and we'll keep bringing this back for you.

Fear not, we'll be out on January 12 in the same spot (in front of Pomeroy's).