Tomorrow and Tuesday I’m attending the #astro2020 decadal early career researchers workshop and as part of the requirements to attend, I had to read about 200 pages of (publicly available) documentation relating to the last decadal. I learned some things!
1. Apparently the NASA budget doubled between 1988 and 1991
2. The National Research Council *is* part of the National Academies (which are charged by law to produce a decadal survey in the various earth and space sciences every 10 years)
3. For the purposes of the decadal and therefore funding, physics and astronomy are so definitively separate that “dark matter research” is considered an *interdisciplinary* topic
3 con,t. This means that I am a tri-disciplinary researcher, when you take my science and society research into account.
!!
!!
4. The 2010 decadal viewed computational astrophysics and theoretical astrophysics as separate work. People can be kind of sensitive about this distinction, which is weird because some but not all people do both.
I could never call myself a computational astrophysicist because I don’t write no fuckin code lol
5. I think all first year graduate students in astronomy/astrophysics should read the most recent decadal available so they can start to learn about how the community is thinking about itself as a discipline and also about the politics of funding and priority setting.
The decadal actually has some decent introductions to the science that will be a priority.
6. There’s lots of interesting propaganda in the decadal that piques my interest as a #histSTM and #STS researcher
Specifically, there’s a lot of “science is about wonder” paired with “but how about that nationalism?!?”
7. The minorities in astronomy white paper that had the largest buy-in didn’t ask for money to support URM researchers past the PhD stage and heavily focused on K-12 recruiting. I disagree with the weighting of the recommendations, even as I admire many ppl who co-signed.
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