My wife works at Quora (the one in the banana suit), and she’s been trying to get me to write for the site for some time. For those of you unfamiliar with Quora, it’s a pretty sweet Q&A site that has somehow managed to get an AMAZING community of users to answers questions (e.g., Ashton Kutcher, Jimmy Wales, etc.); the result is extremely high-quality answers to a slew of interesting questions.

I’d been putting off answering anything on Quora, but just yesterday I was at this conference where we had for one of our sessions an event called “Communicating Your Science & Engineering (CYSE).” Basically, a bunch of bloggers from Scientific American came and stressed to us the importance of building an online presence if we’re truly interested in sharing what we know with others.

And so I thought that Quora would be a good place to start due to its established content-distribution abilities. Picking an unanswered question on Quora in one of the science topics I’m more familiar with (optics), I spent the morning CYSE session trying to explain how exactly phase contrast imaging works. My answer ended up being a lot more convoluted than I would have liked, but it certainly felt good write and to hope that somehow my answer will help somebody out there.