07.19 Black Holes: Digging Deeper - by Lynn Cominsky, Ph.D.

Astrophysicist Lynn Cominsky and her colleagues brought down the house at the Science Buzz Café Thursday night July 19th. For the past 5 Thursday evenings dozens of people have jammed into Coffee Catz Restaurant at Gravenstein Station for Science Buzz Café. What’s the buzz about Science in West Sonoma County these days? It’s science – café style – a playful, friendly and often controversial scene that features a guest scientist that introduces a topic that then turns into open and colorful dialogue that all present can join in.

Lynn Cominsky is the Chair of the Physics department at Sonoma State University and did a presentation based on the NASA Education and Public Outreach Program that she directs at SSU. The wonderful educational activities materials for students are based on the science behind the upcoming space mission: the Gamma-ray Large Area Space Telescope - GLAST. As one participant said, “Finally, a fun way to shed light on a deep subject, without the big brained, long-winded explanations that scares the simple folks like me away!” With the power of plain English and an active imagination, Lynn easily engaged the coffee crowd in the astounding happenings now detectable in the universe. The GLAST telescope detects gamma rays, the highest energy light in the electromagnetic spectrum.

The Science Buzz Café, an effort to bring science to where the people are, is based on the idea that anything that affects the world as much as science should be more accessible and interesting that it is to most Americans. Polls indicated that many people opposed genetically modified foods because they contain genes! Other polls show that 25% of our population thinks the sun revolves around the earth!