The Last Mile of discovery: Why communication decides what science becomes

Dr. Arnaud Stiepen
Nexus by Arnaud Stiepen

We often treat communication as what happens after the science is done: the press release, the outreach event, the final slide. I want to argue the opposite. In the era of big, international space science, communication is not the last, optional step of discovery but the infrastructure that makes discovery matter, and often the infrastructure that makes it possible at all. A mission today is a conversation among hundreds of engineers and scientists across continents, languages and institutions; it survives on how well they understand one another. It is funded by publics who will never read a paper, but who decide, through the stories they are told, whether a journey to an asteroid or a distant planet is worth their trust. And it endures across borders because science remains one of the few languages nations still share. Having spent years inside international collaborations on NASA and European missions, then a decade devoted to making science understood, I have come to see communication as the hardest and most underestimated problem in research, harder, often, than the physics itself. Drawing on examples from NASA, ESA and the private sector, this talk asks what we lose when science is not communicated, what we gain when it is, and why the ability to turn data into meaning may be one of the most important skills a scientist never trained for.

Conference Hall (2nd floor/ Research and Administration Building A),　Via Zoom