Native American Heritage Month

Meet the Mother-Son Duo Translating Astrophysics Into Blackfoot

Corey Gray is the lead operator at LIGO (Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory) and part of the group of researchers that confirmed the existence of Einsteins’ theory of gravitational waves – a major discovery for the fields of physics and astronomy.

As Gray, who is a member of the Siksika Nation of Alberta, Canada, began to think about how this news would spread around the world, he realized it would be translated into multiple languages. While it was assumed that it would be translated into widely spoken languages like French, Japanese and Mandarin, he thought about what it would mean to be translated into Native American languages like Blackfoot. He called his mom, Sharon Yellowfly, a fluent speaker in Blackfoot. She helped him write a press release detailing the news in their native language.

Blackfoot traditionally has no words for many of these kinds of observations. This means that sometimes her act of translation was as simple as combining two words together, or establishing new terms altogether. For example, after hearing an astronomer describe the sound black holes make as a “chirp,” Yellowfly translated the term into biixiini_gi, or “bird singing.”

So now, whenever her son detects a strange force rippling in the fabric of spacetime, such as a gravitational wave or binary black hole, Sharon Yellowfly begins the delicate work of translating the vocabulary of his work —astrophysics—into her mother tongue.

Check out this video to hear Sharon Yellowfly’s Blackfoot translation for yourself, and learn more about this passion project from Corey Gray.

SCIENCE MATTERS

MYTHBUSTING MISINFORMATION

Over the past few years, Orlando Science Center has come to understand that our role in the community has grown beyond education and inspiration. It is our calling to promote science literacy and provide our community with the tools they need to think critically and discern accurate information.

If you ever played the game of telephone as a kid, you already know that meaning can be lost through replication. Down the phone line, the message is garbled little by little, until the final spoken phrase makes very little sense. It’s a fun game for kids, but it illustrates a larger problem today. Just like the message in a game of telephone, scientific information can become garbled as it’s phrased and rephrased through the news cycle. This fall, we launch Science Matters: Mythbusting Misinformation - the next in our series of programming to help foster science literacy for our guests and community. Science Matters is about helping our friends and neighbors understand the process of sorting through the sheer, overwhelming volume of information out there, thinking critically about the sources they’re trusting, and coming to educated conclusions of their own.

As part of this new initiative, we will have special programming in the building through the end of the year. You can also learn more about discerning valuable and trustworthy sources on our website. We look forward to expanding the Science Matters program in the future as we take a closer look at the everyday challenges we face as a society and explore how scientific processes can help us tackle them. 17