The distance between the knowledge that accumulates within academia and what reaches the public outside it remains large, despite the growing efforts in outreach. As an example, although a century has passed and despite their technological impact on everyday life, two of the most important intellectual revolutions of the XX century, namely quantum mechanics and relativity, have not conceptually reached the general public, without significantly affecting its worldview. Similarly, the idea persists that humanity is divided into biologically distinct groups, races, despite genetic studies that have made it possible to reconstruct the trajectory of humanity over time. At La Ricotta we believe it is of fundamental importance to contribute to reducing this distance and to carry out this work outside cities. While it is true that advances in knowledge entail a technical component that is not a perversion of researchers, rather a necessity, it is also true that the impact on society does not lie in understanding these details, but in communicating the scientific mental habit, that is, how knowledge is accumulated, its limits of validity, how a broad and vague question can be transformed into a series of answerable questions, and how to understand the context of the available information.

The Open Events are designed to reduce this distance within the region. Taking advantage of the presence of scientists in the context of the Eventos Académicos, those who are fluent in Spanish or Galician will take part in activities open to people from the region, whose content may be related both to the topic of the academic event and to other subjects that form part of their background knowledge. These activities may take the form of talks, workshops, or experiments, and will tend to actively involve the audience.

The Open Events are an integral part of the programme Jornadas de ciencias en el rural and took place for the first time within the framework of the summer school The Disordered Universe 2025, marking the beginning of the series Dende o Universo ata o Rural, which included four talks on topics related to the school, one on a socially relevant topic with scientific content, and an experiment in which a homemade cloud chamber was built, in front of and together with the audience, to detect cosmic rays. The series Dende o Universo ata o Rural will continue with the second edition of the school The Disordered Universe and with the workshop Expanding Thoughts on de Sitter. This year, a new series of open events will begin, Sementes de información, within the framework of the summer school The Quantum in the Haystack.