Q&A: Astrophysicist Erin Macdonald on science and sci-fi

Awesome Con in Washington, DC, might seem like an unexpected place to find an astrophysicist. But for Erin Macdonald , fan conventions are a kind of second home.

Macdonald holds a PhD from the University of Glasgow in Scotland and was a graduate student and postdoc on the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) collaboration. She’s now a science communicator and YouTube host, a technical adviser on sci-fi novels and TV series, and a frequent guest at pop-culture conventions. In sessions like “The Science of Voltron: Legendary Defender” and “The Story and Science of Gravitational Waves,” she connects fantastical technologies from Star Trek and Mass Effect to the real-life physics of wormholes, black holes, and faster-than-light travel.

Physics Today sat down with Macdonald last month in the Awesome Con press room.

PT: What were you researching as a member of LIGO?

MACDONALD: My PhD work was on algorithms to detect continuous gravitational waves from neutron stars. My colleague Matt Pitkin had done a lot of work on seeing if we could detect gravitational waves from the Crab pulsar. The funny thing is that objects that emit gravitational waves do so at twice the object’s rotational frequency. The Crab pulsar’s is about 30 hertz, so double that is right in line with the AC electrical frequency in the US. So there’s a huge noise spike right through that signal.

A lot of different organizations had been trying to figure out how to detect those waves. I tried to combine all the algorithms in a way that would allow researchers to analyze a lot of data in a really deep way. Then I did postdoc work for a couple years at Cardiff University, still with LIGO but focusing on gamma-ray bursts.

PT: Considering your work on neutron stars, what was it like to hear about the detection of the neutron-star merger and associated gamma-ray burst in 2017?

MACDONALD: Amazing. Right before LIGO switched off to be upgraded in 2010, I took all kinds of data and compared them to the gamma-ray bursts that other telescopes had detected to see if we could find anything. We didn’t, but we could put upper limits on how many neutron stars are out there. So when the collaboration finally found an associated gamma-ray burst and gravitational wave, it was awesome.

PT: How did you move into science communication?

MACDONALD: During my postdoc, I found that I really enjoyed teaching. Then, as a sci-fi fan, I went to Dragon Con in Atlanta. They host panels on space and science where they bring in scientists to talk about their work, and I started participating in those. After seeing some recordings, I discovered that I had very clearly not spoken to a nonscientist in about five years. So I started taking some acting classes in Wales to get more comfortable on stage. From there, I looked for more opportunities to go to conventions to talk about science.

PT: What advice would you give scientists who want to do more communicating with the public or to make their teaching more accessible?

MACDONALD: I highly recommend volunteering at a science museum. If you’re able to volunteer even a couple hours of your time, you will get the chance to talk to people from every background and every area of expertise. You might have a five-year-old kid who just heard the term black hole and wants to know what that is. You might have a retired engineer who worked on the space program ask what we’re doing on Mars. You learn how to quickly gauge if you’re connecting with your audience.

Sometimes I think it’s hard for scientists to take every question seriously. You can get a question from someone who hasn’t taken a science class since they were 11, and they read some headlines and put pieces together that aren’t true and don’t make sense. But it’s on us to take their question seriously and say, “Okay, so what makes you think that?” without making the person feel dumb.

PT: You’re also the host of your own YouTube series , Dr. Erin Explains the Universe. Tell us a bit about how that got started.

MACDONALD: I’d been giving talks at conventions for a while. I was also teaching at a community college and working at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science. A lot of people were telling me things like “Oh, I wish I could show your stuff to my kid. Are your talks recorded?” So finally I decided to start putting my science talks on YouTube.

For a 10-minute video, you’re looking at a few hours’ worth of work. I have a camera, I have a green screen, and I literally just plug my lapel microphone into the camera and start talking. I edit it myself on the computer, put in the background and some graphics, and then publish it to YouTube. I’m in a one-bedroom apartment, so for every video I have to move all the furniture out of my living room to set up the screen and get the lighting right. It’s been a learning experience, but I really like being able to point people to those videos if they want to learn more.

PT: Do you have any favorite episodes?

MACDONALD: I really like the gravitational time dilation episode. I get asked about that all the time, especially after Interstellar came out. I love that time dilation is basically the only practical application of general relativity that we have in our everyday life. The GPS satellites we rely on have to account for the fact that their time moves faster than ours. So it’s fun to talk about, and there are some great examples in science fiction.

PT: What do you think sci-fi adds to your talks and videos? Why not just talk about the science?

MACDONALD: I really found the value of it when I was a professor. I was teaching Astronomy 101 to a lot of students who were taking the course because they had to get a science credit. They thought they’d get to sit and look at the stars, but then they found out they had to do math and learn about [Johannes] Kepler. But one day we were talking about the exoplanets we’ve discovered, and I mentioned offhand that one of them had two suns, like Luke Skywalker’s home planet of Tatooine. The whole room was like, “Wait a minute. For real? That exists? That’s so cool!”

When you teach science to members of the public who’ve never taken science beyond general education, a lot of times you’re just feeding them a bunch of information. But you can provide an anchor for those people if you’re able to relate the information to science fiction or popular culture. They can say, “I can picture that; I’ve thought about that.” I also like that when you start bringing in science fiction to teach science, people start asking questions about different films and wondering, “Wait, would that really work?” That’s a big part of why we teach science, to build those critical-thinking skills.

PT: Do you have any favorite examples from sci-fi that you think are particularly good at getting students engaged?

MACDONALD: The transporters from Star Trek are among my favorite examples. Why can’t we have transporters? The answer is Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle—you can never know exactly where all your particles are. At one point in Star Trek, they have a throwaway line about how the Heisenberg compensator is broken. It’s basically them saying, “We’re breaking physics, but we’re acknowledging it.”

PT: What about portrayals of scientists in science fiction? Scientists are often frustrated by being stereotyped as socially inept white men. Do you feel like that’s changing?

MACDONALD: I’ve talked a lot about how my inspiration for becoming a scientist was Dana Scully [in The X-Files]. For me, a redheaded woman fighting aliens with science was just objectively cool. Beverly Crusher [in Star Trek: The Next Generation] was another one. The movie Contact was another one that had an impact on me, because the main character was an astrophysicist. But it was pretty rare to see a woman scientist on-screen, and those were all white women.

I think people saw the impact on society of having those characters, and now writers are trying to introduce more characters from diverse backgrounds, which is so important. A fictional mentor is still a mentor. You attach yourself to mentors because you see yourself in them, because you have some way to relate to them. So we’re getting better, but there’s still a long ways to go.

PT: You’re also a technical adviser for writers and producers. How did you get started with that?

MACDONALD: I started meeting writers, actors, and showrunners at conventions. The consulting really took off once I moved to Los Angeles. People knew they could call me for help. I get calls at all stages of the process. Sometimes it’s help refining an idea. Sometimes I just get scripts for an entire television season, and I’m asked to read them and make sure the science is as good as possible.

The biggest faux pas I run into with science-fiction writers is the cosmological address. Solar systems and galaxies are not interchangeable things, but in science fiction they’re treated as if they are. You can’t just say, “Oh, we’re going to visit the nearby galaxy,” like you’re visiting someone in a nearby town.

PT: What’s coming up next for you?

MACDONALD: It’s staffing and pilot season, so I’m getting calls about reading scripts. And Awesome Con is kicking off the convention season. I’m booked for Dragon Con, and some of the others haven’t been announced yet.

PT: What are you reading, watching, or playing right now?

MACDONALD: I’m replaying Dragon Age: Inquisition—scientists don’t have to be sci-fi all the time! I’m also reading N. K. Jemisin’s The Fifth Season and I cannot put it down. It’s amazing.