The World Sees Me as the One Who Will Find Another Earth
December 7, 2016 2:43 PM Subscribe
The star-crossed life of Sara Seager, an astrophysicist obsessed with discovering distant planets. A long read NYTMag article about a scientist that touches on exoplanets, starshades, daily commutes, love, loss, widowhood, and aliens. (As an aside: the WFIRST mission, and the proposed starshade.)
What an odd article. Is that typical for profiles of scientists? Part explanation of their work, part life story, part pop psychoanalysis?
(Incidentally, it was kind of neat to see the work of my spouse, also an exoplanetologist, mentioned in passing in it, even if she wasn't explicitly named. It's not an enormous field, as they go ...)
posted by kyrademon at 3:27 PM on December 7, 2016 [2 favorites]
(Incidentally, it was kind of neat to see the work of my spouse, also an exoplanetologist, mentioned in passing in it, even if she wasn't explicitly named. It's not an enormous field, as they go ...)
posted by kyrademon at 3:27 PM on December 7, 2016 [2 favorites]
I thought it was a generous piece of writing, but I agree it was maybe a strange mix of different views of her and her work.
posted by newdaddy at 5:18 PM on December 7, 2016
posted by newdaddy at 5:18 PM on December 7, 2016
It's not an enormous field
Nope, it sure isn't! I worked with Sara a while ago, so I found this article to be pretty fair. She is a bit odd (even by the standards of the lot of us...). But I will say that working with brusque brilliant people is *wonderful* for my productivity: I had five minute meetings with her that set me up for an entire week, and conveyed more information than other people I worked with could do in an hour. And I always knew exactly what she thought of an idea -- not a lot sometimes, but that made it more satisfying when I could convince her otherwise.
I am glad to hear that she has happily remarried too. Losing her first husband was a really cruel thing. The personal and the scientific lives have a way of blending in on each other no matter how you try to compartmentalize them -- if she had left the field as she apparently considered it would have been both understandable and a loss.
We can't spend everything we have on the here and now. Someone has to consider "arcane topics that have little or no relevance" that we can discern now. Or else really what's the point of civilization?
posted by puffyn at 6:42 PM on December 7, 2016 [11 favorites]
Nope, it sure isn't! I worked with Sara a while ago, so I found this article to be pretty fair. She is a bit odd (even by the standards of the lot of us...). But I will say that working with brusque brilliant people is *wonderful* for my productivity: I had five minute meetings with her that set me up for an entire week, and conveyed more information than other people I worked with could do in an hour. And I always knew exactly what she thought of an idea -- not a lot sometimes, but that made it more satisfying when I could convince her otherwise.
I am glad to hear that she has happily remarried too. Losing her first husband was a really cruel thing. The personal and the scientific lives have a way of blending in on each other no matter how you try to compartmentalize them -- if she had left the field as she apparently considered it would have been both understandable and a loss.
We can't spend everything we have on the here and now. Someone has to consider "arcane topics that have little or no relevance" that we can discern now. Or else really what's the point of civilization?
posted by puffyn at 6:42 PM on December 7, 2016 [11 favorites]
Someone has to consider "arcane topics that have little or no relevance" that we can discern now. Or else really what's the point of civilization?
Thanks for this - because, lately, I've been thinking, "It's just to keep corpses from stacking up like cordwood in the street, maybe". That's a much more beautiful and hopeful take.
posted by ryanshepard at 9:06 PM on December 7, 2016 [2 favorites]
Thanks for this - because, lately, I've been thinking, "It's just to keep corpses from stacking up like cordwood in the street, maybe". That's a much more beautiful and hopeful take.
posted by ryanshepard at 9:06 PM on December 7, 2016 [2 favorites]
We had her out to do a talk at our university a few years ago — here's the video if you want to see her in action. She was fantastic and more engaging with the students than you might expect from that article.
posted by wenat at 10:22 PM on December 7, 2016 [1 favorite]
posted by wenat at 10:22 PM on December 7, 2016 [1 favorite]
That is really a great talk, wenat.
I thought I would listen to five minutes or so to try to get a feel for her personality, but I was enthralled until she got to the question period 50+ minutes in (question periods are almost always too embarrassing for me).
I've been reading just about every astronomy/astrophysics/cosmology article on ScienceDaily and Phys.org for years now, and there have been plenty of articles on exoplanets, but 80% of what she said was new to me, and all of it was from a more sophisticated point of view than anything else I've seen.
posted by jamjam at 12:21 AM on December 8, 2016
I thought I would listen to five minutes or so to try to get a feel for her personality, but I was enthralled until she got to the question period 50+ minutes in (question periods are almost always too embarrassing for me).
I've been reading just about every astronomy/astrophysics/cosmology article on ScienceDaily and Phys.org for years now, and there have been plenty of articles on exoplanets, but 80% of what she said was new to me, and all of it was from a more sophisticated point of view than anything else I've seen.
posted by jamjam at 12:21 AM on December 8, 2016
> "Nope, it sure isn't!"
(Odds that I have met puffyn at some point: high.)
posted by kyrademon at 12:26 AM on December 8, 2016
(Odds that I have met puffyn at some point: high.)
posted by kyrademon at 12:26 AM on December 8, 2016
There's something about exoplanetology that's profoundly compelling, at least to me. When the first round of Kepler data was made available for analysis on PlanetHunters I spent a lot of my free time for months combing through light curves. For a few weeks it looked like I'd been the discovered a planet, one of the first eighty or so candidates PlanetHunters came up with--it turned out to be contamination from a nearby variable star--and I was walking on a cloud.
I think our fascination relates to Freud's statement that we've suffered three great revolutions in our perceived place in the universe. Finding a planet with life would be the fourth (unless "creating an artificial intelligence" happens first, I suppose). Copernicus, Darwin, and Freud are household names; I wonder if Seager will join them.
posted by Quindar Beep at 8:36 AM on December 8, 2016
I think our fascination relates to Freud's statement that we've suffered three great revolutions in our perceived place in the universe. Finding a planet with life would be the fourth (unless "creating an artificial intelligence" happens first, I suppose). Copernicus, Darwin, and Freud are household names; I wonder if Seager will join them.
posted by Quindar Beep at 8:36 AM on December 8, 2016
>(Odds that I have met puffyn at some point: high.)
And if we haven't, we probably have a dozen mutual friends and colleagues who could introduce us.
posted by puffyn at 8:51 AM on December 8, 2016
>> (Odds that I have met puffyn at some point: high.)
> And if we haven't, we probably have a dozen mutual friends and colleagues who could introduce us.
Huh. I wonder if we could get a quorum for a MeFi meetup at an AAS meeting, like in Grapevine in a month.
posted by RedOrGreen at 1:16 PM on December 8, 2016
> And if we haven't, we probably have a dozen mutual friends and colleagues who could introduce us.
Huh. I wonder if we could get a quorum for a MeFi meetup at an AAS meeting, like in Grapevine in a month.
posted by RedOrGreen at 1:16 PM on December 8, 2016
Unfortunately AAS is always our first week of classes -- I rarely can make it.
posted by janewman at 9:10 AM on December 9, 2016
posted by janewman at 9:10 AM on December 9, 2016
...and Austin's been eschewed for Grapevine, which doesn't have the same cachet. (Sorry Grapevine denizens, I'm sure it's lovely.)
posted by Upton O'Good at 11:16 AM on December 9, 2016
posted by Upton O'Good at 11:16 AM on December 9, 2016
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