# Natalie Wolchover

Natalie Ann Wolchover (born October 16, 1986) is a British-born, American science journalist, senior writer and editor for Quanta Magazine, and a winner in 2022 of a Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Reporting.

## Quotes

* Astronomers mapped the motions of hundreds of stars in the Milky Way in order to deduce the amount of dark matter that must be tugging on them from the vicinity of our sun. Their surprising conclusion? There's no dark matter around here. As the researchers write in a forthcoming paper in the Astrophysical Journal, the stellar motion implies that the stars, all within 13,000 light-years of Earth, are gravitationally attracted by the visible material in our solar system — the sun, planets and surrounding gas and dust — and not by any unseen matter. "Our calculations show that [dark matter] should have shown up very clearly in our measurements. But it was just not there!" said lead study author Christian Moni-Bidin, an astronomer at the University of Concepción in Chile.
** If Not Dark Matter, Then What?. livescience.com (19 April 2012).
* I decided to become a physicist when I read A Brief History of Time ... age thirteen. I think it was the tenth anniversary edition of the book ... So I went to Tufts University (for undergrad) ... majored in physics. ... from there I went to grad school at Berkeley — which is where I had always wanted to go. ... And I really liked it there. But then something kind of remarkable happened that I don't really understand very well. ... in the course of one sleepless night during my first year at Berkeley, I had a complete crisis — and realized that I didn't want to be a physicist. I wanted to be a physics writer.
** (August 2, 2016)"Science Reporting in the Age of Sound Bites ▸ by Natalie Wolchover | KITP-Writer-in-Residence". Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics, YouTube. (quote at 1:25 of 51:41 in video)
* Above all, I am looking for a new idea or finding that scientists in the relevant community think is important. Even if it’s something really abstruse that doesn’t seem like it would have broad appeal and doesn’t have any buzzwords to speak of, if actual experts think something is a big deal, then there’s a reason for that, and it’s up to me to figure out what the story is and how to tell it. Everything else that makes a compelling story — interesting historical background, strong characters, controversy, vivid scenes — is incidental. I’m thrilled when it’s there (and it almost always is), but I’m first and foremost going after groundbreaking new developments, as judged by experts. Now to find out about those developments before everybody else does, I have to be tapped in and talk to a lot of scientists. Building and maintaining those relationships takes time and is tough to balance with all of one’s other duties as a reporter, but it’s the springboard for everything else.
** as quoted by Shannon Hall, An Interview with Natalie Wolchover. Council for the Advancement of Science Writing (September 6, 2016).
* Among the brilliant theorists cloistered in the quiet woodside campus of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, Edward Witten stands out as a kind of high priest.
* A Physicist's Physicist Ponders the Nature of Reality. Quanta Magazine (28 November 2017).
* WHY WRITE? Reasons to do science communication: • Societal progress • Scientific progress • Enrich people's intellectual lives • Enrich your own intellectual life
** (October 1, 2020)"Principles of Science Writing - Natalie Wolchover". ComSciCon-San Diego, YouTube. (quote at 4:40 of 1:01:09 in video)

## External links

Encyclopedic article on Natalie Wolchover on Wikipedia