"Public" Science

Last week I got an e-mail from the San Diego Supercomputing Center asking if I would be willing to provide one of the images for their 2008 calendar. Every year SDSC puts out a calendar that they give to people that donate money, funding agencies, people that SDSC wishes would give them money, etc. Since July, I have been working with Steve Cutchin, director of visualization services at SDSC, on adapting our data and his 3-D volume rendering program, Vista, to work with each other. It's been a productive collaboration and I've enjoyed working with Steve, so when SDSC came calling, I was happy to provide one of the images and a short caption.

Little did I know what I was getting myself into. I have made publication quality figures before and I know that a good figure is a bit of trick, but "public" quality figures are a different story. The image I submitted is shown on the right, and let me tell you, it's hard to try and make a scientific image both visually appealing and, in some small degree, understandable to someone who does work in astrophysical fluid dynamics.

The image shows the large (greater than 5 Tesla in magnitude) components of the toroidal magnetic field (red positive, blue negative) in one of our simulations of a sun-like star spinning at three times the solar rate. As you can see, the star's rotation has organized the random, chaotic small magnetic fields generated by the turbulent convection below the star's surface into strong, organized magnetic fields that last for thousands of days (as long as we've run the simulations).

In the sun, the global magnetic fields are believed to be generated in random, small segments in the turbulence of the sun's convection zone and then pulled by down-flows into a region where the sun switches differential rotation (near the Sun's surface, the equator rotates faster than the poles) to solid body rotation rather abruptly. This region of strong shear known as the tachocline organizes the magnetic field into large, coherent structures.

The reason that the image above is remarkable is that in this simulation, there was no tachocline. The simulated region only covered the convection zone, so in some way, this star was able to organize its magnetic field without a layer of strong shear. As far as we know, this is the first time this has ever been demonstrated and there is no known theoretical method for creating this type of field - yet there it is.

The problem is how on earth do I convey the importance of this image to non-physicists in a three sentence caption?

Sadly, the answer is that I can't. It is simply not possible to explain the importance of this image if it is displayed opposite the month of March or June. So the question then becomes, what is my objective? Do I even try to explain what the image means or do I just go for the "Wow, that's very important science" effect?

I'm not sure that there is a good answer to this question, and it certainly isn't going away anytime soon. So how do we make our physics relevant to the public?