Communicating scientific results to a general audience is difficult. Communicating the tangle of methods and analysis that support neatly packaged results, not to mention the uncertainties, is even more challenging. To lift the hood on the process, I suggest a method to explain science in the most direct way possible: by doodling annotations on scientific papers.
The idea came about two years ago when my mom mentioned that she was excited to read a recent paper of mine. The research was on a subtle systematic effect in cosmological surveys, a topic specific enough that I worried even people in my field would have difficulty understanding it. I wanted to explain the paper in a way that gave my mom a real idea of my work and what went into it.
The result was a doodle summary. I placed the PDF version of my paper in PowerPoint and annotated it with...
