The Interview
Alyssa Goodman
By John Koch, Boston Globe
How do nonscientists react when you tell them what you do?
It depends what I tell them. If I'm on an airplane and I'd like to talk to the person next to me, I tell them I do astronomy, and I'll explain more if they ask more questions. And if I want to work or read, I tell them I'm a physicist, and then they don't want to talk to me.
Summarize your main area of research.
I'm mostly interested in how all of the stuff that's in between the stars - what my father-in-law calls crap - forms new stars.
Stars are made out of crap?
Yes. It really is crap; it's gas and dust, very low density. Most of it probably came from old stars. Given millions of years, this stuff can come together under a variety of forces, and that variety of forces is my work. It comes together in higher-density regions, which eventually collapse under their own weight to form new stars. There's this whole issue of how efficient star formation is and how efficient star death is and how much is actually put back into the interstellar medium that then goes into the next generation of stars. The conservation in this process, though not actually calculated, is very high, much higher than what gets recycled by people on earth in Lexington, where I live, or Cambridge, where I work.
Does this work suggest anything new about the origins of the universe?
More about the fate of the universe. Many of us who worked on star formation the last 10 years thought stars took many, many tens of millions of years to form. But it turns out it really only takes maybe 10 million years or less. So we either have to come up with more stuff to form stars if we want star formation to last for a long time, or we have to allow for the possibility that galaxies burn out faster than we thought.
What's the status of the knowledge research like yours produces?
I don't think astrophysicists who work on anything farther than things we can travel to can ever produce a proven theory. You can never do an experiment in astrophysics - that's what's different about it from all other branches of physics. There are paradigms that are accepted for long periods of time, and if they stand up to challenge after challenge, they become part of this conventional wisdom that would be the closest thing to a proven theory we could ever hope to have.
Like the Big Bang, perhaps?
That's pretty darn close to a proven theory; many different lines of evidence point to the same conclusion. That's the best we can hope to do. But astrophysics has a long history of getting things wrong for long periods of time. People thought the earth was the center of the universe for many thousands of years. And up until the Big Bang hypothesis, there were all kinds of theories about how the universe existed in a static, unchanging state forever. Until you have these paradigm shifts, people try very hard to squeeze their data and theories into the previously prevailing paradigm. The theory of stellar evolution is pretty darn well worked out.
Were you a stargazer as a girl?
I always had a passing interest in astronomy. I had a telescope when I was a kid that I bought with my own money. But you should not get the idea that I was some kind of great amateur astronomer, member of the astronomy club. I also had a sled I was about as attached to as the telescope.
Life is hard for many female scientists at top universities. How about you?
I've managed to escape most of this. Part of it has to do with my parents - neither they nor any of my teachers ever said anything about girls being different than boys in terms of math or science. I lived this kind of utopian life, but I totally understand that most people don't live the utopian existence I did when I was young. I find it annoying that there aren't more women in this field, and I don't like when I go to conferences and meetings and I'm the only woman in the room for some 20-person session. But I'm really conflicted when people ask me to do things like speak at schools to little girls about how they should be taking science classes. They might not have thought before, "Oh, why wouldn't I take a science class?" You run the risk of putting the idea in their head that maybe there is adversity. But any program that gets more women into this field without being quota-based, and without compromising standards, I'm in favor of.
What do you burn to know that you might learn in your lifetime?
I would really like to know what the magnetic field looks like in three dimensions in our whole galaxy. The only way to do that is with a satellite that would go above the atmosphere.
You're part of a group that proposed a satellite-borne far-infrared telescope. Is it going to happen?
No. We have a lovely mug. Here it is [on it are the words "Milky Way Magnetic Field Mapping Mission"]. We've proposed it to NASA twice and may do it again. This would do wonders for understanding the role of magnetic fields in the evolution of molecular clouds and star formation. It's a great idea, but it costs $70 million.
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