By Jeffrey Felshman
At 48, Kolb is that rare thinker whose discourse is equally accessible to technicians and laypeople. He’s fluent not only in math but in plain English. At the University of Chicago he teaches cosmology to nonscience majors, and for 15 years he’s given public lectures to general audiences. He serves on the editorial board of the nontechnical magazine Astronomy and appeared in the Imax film Cosmic Voyage. “A cosmetic voyage for me,” he recalls. “I got an allergic reaction to the makeup.” His popular book Blind Watchers of the Sky: The People and Ideas That Shaped Our View of the Universe is credited to Rocky (not Edward) Kolb. As he explains in the preface, the nickname is “a constant reminder to myself that the audience for this book is not the usual target audience for whom I write.” In the acknowledgments, he thanks Verdi.
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Kolb married in 1972, while he was still in college, and earned his PhD from the University of Texas at Austin. Then he headed for California to take a postdoctoral job. “You go to graduate school and then you become something we call a ‘migrant physicist.’ You go someplace for two or three years and work there, then you go someplace else for two or three years.” Kolb worked for the California Institute of Technology, better known as Caltech, and then Los Alamos National Laboratory.
First, compare space to the air. “We live, luckily, on a planet with an atmosphere. If you go out, there’s a certain density to the air around us. We can feel the air, the wind, and things like that. If you go to Los Angeles, you can even see and smell the air. So we’re familiar with an atmosphere. But what if you had completely empty space? The vacuum of empty space? Does space itself have a structure, a density? Some recent astronomical observations have suggested that it does.”
Not too long ago, public lectures or teaching nonscience majors wouldn’t have been part of Kolb’s job. Practically every profession has its popularizers, who like to talk to common folk about what they do, and its initiates, who consider it pointless or even dangerous to promote their discipline. “Twenty years ago it was considered a waste of your time to give public lectures and communicate with the public,” says Kolb. “It certainly was not considered something in your favor. It did not further your career. And it was considered something people would raise their eyebrows about. Now it’s to the point where it’s sort of neutral, it’s not held against you. And perhaps it’s slowly changing, where it’s regarded as something that should be valued by our profession.”
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photo/Lloyd DeGrane.
