Squeezing Uncertainty: A human story on a physics backdrop
During my senior year at MIT I took a class focused on science writing and communication. The capstone project for this class involved writing a mid-length article about an MIT physics graduate student and their work. I approached this project with two goals in mind: 1) to show why my graduate student, Nancy Aggarwal, and her work were significant, and 2) tell a story about a human being. The first goal was fairly easy—Nancy’s work with LIGO was both physically elegant and historically relevant. The only significant challenge involved explaining fairly subtle quantum mechanics both simply and succinctly. I found that I could pass questionable sentences by non-scientists to see what they did or didn’t understand, which I would then iterate upon, trying different approaches or explanations, until they got it. Finding the human story, however, would prove more challenging. I sat down for several meetings and phone calls with Nancy, trying to flesh out why she became a scientist. Finally, I found inspiration in a comment she made about why she decided to become an experimental physicist: she had observed a gender bias in her cohort with respect to building physical things which she wanted to challenge. Using this new understanding of her background to frame her work, the article fell into place. You can listen to the key, inspirational excerpt of our interview below, as well as select the image of the piece to read the version published in 2016’s physics@MIT (the annual physics department alumni newsletter).
