Sabine Stanley is a people’s scientist. No solar aurora, seismic wave, nebula, or proto-planet is too complex for her to explain clearly in everyday language.
“I’ve spent many years trying to get science to a broader audience,” says Stanley, Bloomberg Distinguished Professor in the Morton K. Blaustein Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences and Vice Provost for Graduate and Professional Education. “I want to show them how important and cool it is to understand science.”
Inside of planets
Her first book, What’s Hidden Inside Planets?, does exactly that. In seven brief chapters, she creates a primer on the rocks, gases, and ice that comprise the centers of the planets and moons in the solar system—and beyond. She explains not only what scientists find inside of planets, but how they find it, introducing a lay audience to the techniques and mechanisms of interstellar exploration, a field she excels in. Stanley was part of the NASA mission dedicated to studying the interior of Mars with the InSight lander.
Despite her impressive credentials, Stanley is a down-home writer, tackling the subject of astrogeology with humor, personal anecdotes, and occasional snark. The arrows in her writer’s quiver pierce bloated language, jargon, and pretension, and she deftly uses analogies as chapter starters to ground her readers before leading them through the mesosphere and into space. Many of her analogies involve either family or food— fitting for someone who began her working career waiting tables at her parents’ Italian restaurant in Ontario, Canada.
“The entire book has food all the way through it. It’s in my heart because I’m so close to my family,” she says.
Solar family members
For example, in the second chapter, “Gazing Outward,” Stanley describes the formation of the solar system:
“We can learn a lot about ourselves from our family ecosystems. The solar system can be considered a family as well. The planets ‘grew up’ together as they formed the same solar nebula. In some ways, you can think of Earth and other planets as sharing some DNA the way family members do. Our closest solar family members [are] the ‘rocky’ planets: Mercury, Venus, and Mars.”
Stanley credits her writing partner, John Wenz, an acclaimed science writer and consulting editor at her publisher, Johns Hopkins University Press, with keeping her on track as she drafted What’s Hidden Inside Planets?
“I’d never written anything on this scale, and I needed to learn from experts,” she says. “John was instrumental in establishing the consistently [user-friendly] tone of the book. He’d review my first draft and know what to do to make sure the book was in my voice and saying what I wanted to.”
Bringing science out of the lab
What’s Hidden Inside Planets? is one of seven volumes in a series of explanatory nonfiction written by Bloomberg Distinguished Professors like Stanley. The series is part of a greater endeavor, the Johns Hopkins Wavelengths science communication program, a multimedia initiative to bring science out of the laboratory and into the public sphere.
Wavelengths enlisted artists from 11 countries to draw inspiration from What’s Hidden Inside Planets? to create contemporary artworks—including quilts, collages, and paintings— and present visual interpretations of each artist’s concept of the universe. The ensuing global exhibition, “Fierce Planets,” was launched in San Francisco in December 2023 and will be traveling the country until 2027. “I think science will have more impact as people grow to understand it and know scientists as people they can trust to give them information,” Stanley says.
