In the years I’ve lived in Glasgow I’ve had the chance to experience quite a number of the big events which the city has a tendency to attract: The Commonwealth Games, The UCI Championships, COP-22, those sorts of things. I’ve also had the chance to talk to lots of people about my research, and the science which we do in my research group at the University of Glasgow. Over the last week I had an opportunity to talk to a lot of people at one of these big international events: The World Science Fiction Convention, or WorldCon as it’s known.
We had a stand in Hall 4 at the SEC for five days, and we talked to what felt like thousands of people over that time (it was probably hundreds; I’m bad at counting and talking at the same time). I’ve never done anything quite like this, or encountered an audience who knew quite as much about what we did before we chatted to them, so that was rather exciting! I had a lot of conversations about speculative fictional ways in which gravitational waves might be an important part of a plotline in a novel, and some shockingly detailed discussions about finding low signal-to-noisen ratio events in data. As a result I’ve come away as tired as if I’d been at a science (non-fiction!) conference. It was a lot of fun, and I’m very glad to have had the chance to be a small part of yet another one of these big things Glasgow is a part of.
Our stall at WorldCon, before the crowds arrived.
The stall which was very nearly the downfall of my bank account.
The stall which was very nearly the downfall of my bank account (part 2/N).