The University Library will host Ariel Waldman, who will give a lecture titled “Hacker’s Guide to the Galaxy” at 4 p.m. March 1 at the Alice Campbell Alumni Center, 601 S. Lincoln Ave., Urbana. A reception will follow.
The next big science revolution isn’t just for asteroid miners or CERN scientists. There’s an emerging movement toward “massively multiplayer science” – empowering people from a variety of backgrounds to be explorers and contributors to new scientific discoveries and methods. Just as science fiction has often shown the way to future inventions, the act of hacking is now generating prototypes that act as footholds for future explorations, discoveries and epiphanies in science. Leagues of multidisciplinary science hackers are mashing up ideas, mediums, industries to create crude-yet-cunning devices that change how people experience science. From the collisions of subatomic particles to the explosions of supernovas, this presentation takes participants on an unusual trip through the weird, whimsical and surprisingly useful ways to explore the galaxy.
Waldman makes “massively multiplayer science” – instigating unusual collaborations that spark clever creations for science and space exploration.
She is the founder of Spacehack.org, a directory of ways to participate in space exploration, and the global director of Science Hack Day, a 20-countries-and-growing grassroots endeavor to make things with science.
Waldman is the author of “What’s It Like in Space? Stories from Astronauts Who’ve Been There.” She also is the co-author of a congressionally requested National Academy of Sciences study on the future of human spaceflight. She sits on the council for NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts, a program that nurtures radical, sci-fi-esque ideas that could transform future space missions. In 2013, Waldman received an honor from the White House for being a Champion of Change in citizen science.
Waldman lives in San Francisco, but travels across the globe to speak to a variety of audiences and work on interesting projects.
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