编者按: Dr. 艾丽卡·哈姆登将在 2023年GRC大会, to take place 21-23 August in person in Las Vegas, Nevada, USA, and virtually. Hamden is an American astrophysicist and assistant professor at the University of Arizona and Steward Observatory. She is also a member of the Goddard Space Flight Center Cosmic Origins Science Working Group. Hamden recently visited with the ISACA现在 blog to discuss her passion for exploration and innovation. The following is a transcript of the interview, edited for length and clarity.
ISACA现在: Your ultimate career goal to see and measure “every atom that exists” is a tall order. How has this desire shaped your career so far, and how does it influence your day-to-day work life?
I know this goal is objectively impossible, but I love it! It’s driven me to work on projects that are really very hard! 但是完成一些困难的事情, 像建造望远镜这样具有挑战性的事情, 非常令人满意. 所以，工作很辛苦，但回报同样巨大. I also think it has motivated some of my most interesting technical work and it really motivates my technology development work. With better sensors and telescopes, it’ll be much easier to find every atom that exists! It’s also been helpful for my day-to-day work because when there are challenges or setbacks, 我知道我为什么要做这些项目. It really helps to have a long-term goal that I can point to when I ask myself why I’m doing what I’m doing. It also makes it easier to continue all the small-scale tasks because I know where they are leading.
ISACA现在: From developing telescopes to teaching astrophysics and working with NASA, 创新在澳门赌场官方下载中扮演了什么角色? 你如何定义创新?
对我来说，创新就是一切. 我喜欢每天的工作都不一样, 每个项目都有不同的挑战. 它永远不会无聊. I think innovation keeps fields interesting – there are always new papers to read and discoveries to keep up with, 这让所有的工作看起来都很新鲜. It’s particularly gratifying now that I've been in the field for 15 years, I can look back at ideas that seemed impossible or telescopes that I thought were so far from becoming reality, 现在他们正在工作和飞行. It’s really a source of inspiration for all the work I do. 我看到了新技术带来的巨大进步, 新的分析方法, 这让我想成为这一进步的一部分. Innovation is building a new way to look at the universe, and discovery always follows from there.
ISACA现在: Is there a technological development that has particularly surprised you in recent years?
从科学的角度来看, I’ve been so impressed by the work on LIGO and gravitational wave detection in the last decade. Our ability to measure disturbances in the very fabric of spacetime is just incredible. It’s both a validation of modern physics and a celebration of precision instrumentation. I cannot stress enough just how cool it is that we can observe something like two black holes merging billions of light years away just based on how they warp spacetime.
为了更正常, 人类很重要, I’ve been surprised and impressed by tech developments like rooftop solar and the push for electrifying everything. 生活在亚利桑那州, it’s really very cool to be able to run the air conditioning in my house with solar panels on the roof that were pretty cheap and installed in less than a day. 这是我家的迷你发电厂. 太棒了.
现在我在写这个, I’m also really into the increased access to space with commercial spaceflight! 这个问题已经讨论了很长时间, but the fact that now it’s actually happening is really exciting. 基本上，我对很多事情都很兴奋! 我必须停下来，否则这个清单就太长了!
ISACA现在: Which would you say has shaped your career more: your successes or your failures? 他们如何激励你达到或重新定义你的目标?
失败，轻而易举! The failures are all the places where I’ve been forced to stop and really examine what I’m doing and learn from it. The failures have been points where I need to re-think my approach, or where I need to maybe delve deeper into a subject to understand it better. I find the failures, if you really examine them, can be incredibly motivating. They demonstrate the gaps between your current status and where you are trying to get to, and that illumination really helps to move things forward. 如果你忽略失败, 或者你没有真正从中吸取教训, then it’s easy to get trapped in the same patterns and never move forward. The successes are great, but they are not as interesting to me. 他们通常在失败后跟进, 我总是很高兴能完成一些事情, but when I look back at parts of projects that I remember most fondly, 这是我所能想到的最艰难最具挑战性的部分.
ISACA现在: Between your aspiration to become an astronaut and your goal of earning your private pilot’s license, what is it about flying and exploration that excites you the most?
在某种程度上，我喜欢这里的景色! The view is supposedly the best thing about going to space – hopefully one day I can confirm! And the view from a small plane is so much more immediate and interesting than being in a commercial aircraft. I also like the feeling of possibility that I get in a plane. 我可以把它指向任何地方! One of my favorite parts of my job and of flying is getting perspective on my life and the world. The problems that feel very big to me aren’t really so big when you consider the rest of the galaxy, 或者与从7点看到的沙漠景色相比,000英尺的高空. It helps to make me feel like I’m a small, tiny part of a huge universe. 能来到这里，我感到很谦卑，也很惊讶, 是我们不可思议的世界和宇宙的一部分, 我喜欢思考这个问题.
