At the meeting

Why do scientists go to such great lengths to meet in person?

Our astronomer has just returned from a meeting of the American Astronomical Society.  The meetings are held every six months, and this one was just a few miles away, at a convention center on the other side of the Potomac.  He is still organizing his thoughts and reactions, but we can give a preliminary account.

There were over 3700 astronomers at the meeting, a significant fraction of the total in the US (though it includes many from other countries).  The main activity, if you judged from the program, was presenting results of their research.  There were plenary talks, thought to be of interest to wide sections of the community and held in a great hall; some of a more specialized nature, in smaller halls; and many collections of short talks, with only one or two dozen in the audience.  Added to those there were the poster sessions, now entirely electronic.  In the exhibit hall were booths from many companies and organizations of interest to astronomy and space science.  There were also meetings of collaborations and committees of various sorts.

But why go to enormous trouble and expense to gather all these people together?  Science results are available through many online methods, requiring no personal travel at all.  And collaborators and committees have long become used to Zoom calls and other equivalents.  It all seems so unnecessary, especially when our astronomer reported on the prices of food at the hotel restaurants.

Part of the answer is that the meeting is a chance to present interim results and ideas, things that are not ready for peer review or formal publication.  A final result in any sort of science masks many paths and methods that didn’t work out and many moments of not having a clue what to do next.  Seeing what others are doing can be amazingly helpful.

Another part of the answer involves early-career astronomers, especially students.  Describing one’s poster, or condensing last year’s effort into a ten-minute talk, is a challenge.  It requires a good bit of clear thinking and improvisation when the questions come.  Science communication is quite as important as doing the science in the first place.

But the important hidden result, as one of our astronomer’s colleagues said, is serendipity.  A meeting of this size means you’ll wander into a session and find something unexpected but interesting, and perhaps even useful.  More important, you may well run into someone (from your past or introduced by another) and a fruitful collaboration is born.  Something unplanned and unscheduled is often the most productive.  And astronomers are so thin on the ground that they need to travel long distances in order to gather in any numbers.

Our astronomer admitted that he felt a bit discouraged when he initially looked at the program.  There were many sessions treating details of things he knew little about, and the fields he had spent so much effort on in the past seemed mostly to have moved on.  But the plenary talks were illuminating.  And he met colleagues he hadn’t seen for years.  People are the important part.