Pippa Goldschmidt : Writing the World

Literature is made-up and science is real, so what do the two have in common? In fact, the process of writing literature is a lot like a scientific 'thought experiment', and conversely science relies on tools more commonly associated with creating prose and poetry. Pippa will be talking to Edinburgh Skeptics about how literature can be used to interrogate and celebrate science, using examples from her own work and other writers.

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Pippa Goldschmidt has a PhD in astronomy and worked as an astronomer for several years at Imperial College, where she studied quasars and galaxies in the early Universe using data collected from telescopes and satellites.

She writes long and short fiction, poetry and non-fiction, all inspired by science. Her novel ‘The Falling Sky’, about an astronomer who discovers the Universe and loses her mind, is published by Freight Books. Pippa's essay about European astronomers working in Chile, which was first published in the New York Times, has been selected for inclusion in the 2014 anthology 'Best American Science and Nature writing'.

Pippa was a winner of a Scottish Book Trust/Creative Scotland New Writers Award for 2011/2012 and she was a writer in residence at the ESRC Genomics Policy and Research Forum (based at the University of Edinburgh) from 2008 to 2010. Currently Pippa is a visiting writer in residence at the School of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Edinburgh.

Website : http://www.pippagoldschmidt.co.uk/

Twitter : @goldipipschmidt