Communicating your science to those who don’t know all of your jargon is tricky. It takes practice. My undergraduate professor Dan Clemens had us regularly explain topics to our fictional “Aunt Millie” to train us to do this.
xkcd took this concept to the logical extreme in attempting to explain a Saturn V rocket using only the 1,000 most common words in English.
The results are pretty funny (the rocket becomes “Up-goer Five”).
My team looks for worlds going around other stars. We look especially hard for the smallest ones, the ones that are not too hot and not too cold to have water on them, and the ones around the very nearest stars. These other worlds can be made of rock and water and air, but the smallest ones should be made almost all of rock, like ours.
We look for these by breaking up the light from the stars into lots of colors, and looking at the colors that are missing. These missing colors shift very slightly getting a bit bluer and redder as the world goes around it. Sometimes there are many worlds around a star, and the shifts are very confusing.
We also study a very close by group of stars. It is the oldest of the close by groups of stars, which makes it very interesting. Some stars in this group are a lot like the Sun, and some others are very very small and red. The smallest ones are the closest such single stars for which we have a good guess at their age. We have found over a hundred stars in this group so far, and have figured out how old and far away it is.
When trying to do this, at first I was in “talking to a reporter” mode, but that didn’t work very well. I ended up both oversimplifying AND using too many words outside the top 1,000. I’m certainly helped by the fact that “light”, “star”, and “world” are all in the top 1,000 words, so I found myself sticking to topics that could be described well with those, instead of the ones I would choose to bring up to a reporter. I was pleased with how Doppler shifts and spectroscopy came out.
This project is fun because it’s so restrictive, but it can also require so much circumlocution that it’s not a very good proxy for communicating with the public about complex topics. Good public communication involves vivid and apt metaphors, not a tiny vocabulary.
