Tales and Textiles Can Communicate the Science of Planets – GWC Mag

According to Sabine Stanley, planetary formation is a bit like baking bread: A bunch of different ingredients react to create one new product, leaving a few clues of its origin around the messy kitchen.

Stanley is a planetary scientist at Johns Hopkins University. In her research, she uses these clues to figure out how planets formed and what they’re made of.

Her new book What’s Hidden Inside Planets? takes readers on a journey through planetary interiors, from Earth to outside our solar system, and an accompanying art exhibit brings the science into another form for the public to explore. There’s a lot of popular science literature about planets, Stanley said, “but what really goes on inside a planet is just not something people have a lot of experience with.”

Recognizing this gap in science communication, Stanley aimed to deepen public understanding of how those interiors influence crucial processes while making the science familiar through personal anecdotes and metaphors.

Humanizing Planetary Science

Writing a book was much different from Stanley’s usual work of penning academic papers, requiring her to structure her ideas differently and adopt a more personal, narrative style. Stanley said she chose to write a book because it seemed the best way to convey the human side of science.“You can combine learning the science with also a great story about the scientist, and I think that’s really important.”

“The more that we can get people to understand who a scientist is, the more we can increase people’s trust in science.”

Stanley was particularly inspired by two popular science books: planetary scientist Lindy Elkins-Tanton’s A Portrait of the Scientist as a Young Woman and geochemist Hope Jahren’s Lab Girl. Both are memoirs that humanized science in a way Stanley wanted to emulate. “That’s something that needs to be out there,” she said. “The more that we can get people to understand who a scientist is, the more we can increase people’s trust in science.”

Though What’s Hidden Inside Planets? isn’t a memoir, glimpses of Stanley’s life as a scientist are peppered throughout as anecdotes and metaphors to explain planetary processes. Stanley’s family owned a restaurant when she was growing up, so many of her metaphors, such as those explaining planetary formation, convection forces inside planets, and models of Earth’s interior, are food related and personal, making the science more accessible to the reader.

For example, she explains dynamos—the creation of planets’ magnetic fields via convection of material in their cores—using soup. As soup comes to a boil on the stove, motions start to occur close to the bottom of the pot, increasing the buoyancy of the materials at the bottom of the soup and creating movement, like the molten iron moving in Earth’s core.

Stanley said she hopes that her personal experiences will help readers relate to scientists and perhaps bring a new understanding of science into their own work. “The idea is not necessarily that people have to do the science themselves, but that they can respect and understand the importance of it and be able to use it” when the subject comes up in their own lives, she said.

Collaborate to Communicate

The book benefited from the expertise of science writer John Wenz. Wenz helped Stanley realize when certain sections of the book used too much technical language, wouldn’t be interesting to the public, or needed more examples. “I know the science, but that doesn’t mean I’m an expert in communicating the science,” Stanley said.

The work was produced alongside a traveling exhibit of textile art inspired by planetary science and arranged by Studio Art Quilt Associates (SAQA) called Fierce Planets. Stanley helped select 42 pieces from about 200 submissions from artists across six continents. Select works were unveiled in December at San Francisco’s Exploratorium museum, and the full show will premiere in mid-April at the Louisiana State University Museum of Art in Baton Rouge before traveling to other venues in 2025 and beyond.

One of the selected artworks, Hot Stuff by Mauritian artist Claire Passmore, was inspired by the idea of lava tubes on Earth, Venus, Mars, and Jupiter’s moons. Another, Postcard from Space, The Largest Planet by Joan Huffman from Michigan, illustrates Jupiter’s volatile weather.

As part of the Fierce Planets collaboration, Stanley gave a presentation to SAQA textile artists, explaining her research and answering artists’ questions. “When you think about what’s happening inside planets, it’s no-holds-barred—they do things that we never thought would be possible,” she told the group, explaining the choice for the exhibit’s title.

“Sometimes, science gets so focused on minute details that it’s easy to lose track of the inspiration or the ideas that got someone interested in the first place.”

“Sometimes, science gets so focused on minute details that it’s easy to lose track of the inspiration or the ideas that got someone interested in the first place,” said Martha Sielman, a textile artist and director of SAQA. “Art is about giving expression to those ideas.” Stanley said she hopes the public will be able to engage with science through the exhibit’s art, even if visitors are not interested in reading the book.

Reaching new audiences is just one of the many benefits of pairing art with science, said Baudouin Saintyves, a physicist and artist at the University of Chicago. Art can also convey the feeling of discovery that scientists experience through their work and highlight the beauty of simple scientific concepts, he said. “The goal is that when people are inspired by an art piece and its scientific content, that person would also get excited about the research.”

Saintyves recommended that scientists looking to collaborate go into the process with an open mind and learn about an artist’s medium before committing to a concept. “You as a scientist can see something in this medium, connect it with your interest, and build a narrative,” he said.

Stanley urged scientists interested in taking the leap into science communication to look for help from experts such as Wenz and to be prepared for the time such a project takes. “You really do have to commit to it,” she said. “Work with experts, pair up with a science writer, and it can be incredibly valuable.”

—Grace van Deelen (@GVD__), Staff Writer

Citation: van Deelen, G. (2024), Tales and textiles can communicate the science of planets, Eos, 105, https://doi.org/10.1029/2024EO240024. Published on 17 January 2024.

Text © 2024. AGU. CC BY-NC-ND 3.0
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