On Goals / (I'm back)

Freeman Dyson's piece on Steven Weinberg's recently published collection of writings was a beautiful and informative exploration of science, history, and politics^1,2. One quote, about the differing goals of the Russian and American space programs, struck me in particular. Perhaps I found it so intriguing because it highlights a an ever-present conflict in my own life: short-term vs. long-term goals. An excerpt:

"[American] unmanned missions to explore the planets and stars and galaxies have made us truly at home in the universe, while our manned missions after the Apollo program to land on the moon have been scientifically fruitless. Forty years after Apollo, the manned program is still stuck aimlessly in low orbit around the earth, while politicians debate what it should try to do next.

...In Russia you do not go into space to do science. You go into space because it is a part of human destiny... Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, the schoolteacher who worked out the mathematics of interplanetary rocketry in the nineteenth century, said, “The earth is the cradle of the mind, but we cannot live forever in a cradle.” It may take us a few centuries to get to the planets, but we are on our way. We will keep going, no matter how long it takes.

If you think as Americans do, on a time scale of decades, then unmanned missions succeed and manned missions fail. The grandest unmanned missions, such as the Cassini mission now exploring the satellites of Saturn, take about one decade to build and another decade to fly. The grandest manned mission, the Apollo moon landing, ended after a decade and could not be sustained. The time scale of a decade is fundamentally right for unmanned missions and wrong for manned missions. If you think as Russians do, on a time scale of centuries, then the situation is reversed. Russian space science activities have failed to achieve much because they did not concentrate their attention on immediate scientific objectives. Russian manned mission activities, driven not by science but by a belief in human destiny, keep moving quietly forward. There is room for both cultures in our future. Space is big enough for both." (my emphasis)

Here's to moving quietly forward.

References
1. Dyson, F. (2010) What Price Glory?, The New York Review of Books LVII-10: 8-12
2. Weinberg, Steven. Lake Views: This World and the Universe, Belknap Press/Harvard University Press.

On Presidents and Science

I'm not the first by far to point this out, but I'm so happy that Barack Obama has been elected that I had to do something to mark the occasion. In fact I was totally oblivious to this imagistic event until Jessica excitedly picked up the magazine from my desk and proclaimed: "You have it!" Below are the front and back cover images from the September 25th issue of Nature magazine. It's not clear if this move was in any way intentional on the publisher's part, but it's pretty hilarious.

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On Art from Science

Copyright © 2005 Hunter O'Reilly


"Hunter O’Reilly obtained a Ph.D. in genetics from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and graduated cum laude from the University of California, Berkeley. Her abstractions have been shown internationally including galleries in New York, San Francisco, England, Italy, Japan, the Czech Republic, Indiana and Wisconsin."





"Observations in the laboratory and the world around her inspire the shapes in her abstract oil paintings. Hunter's abstract art hints at both organic matter at the highest level (human faces) and at the smallest level (single cells). This section includes many images of artwork."

"O'Reilly teaches biology and art at Loyola University Chicago. She created a course, Biology Through Art, where students have the opportunity to create innovative artworks in a biology laboratory. Students view microorganisms, use DNA as an artistic medium, create music based on DNA sequence and see anatomy as art. The course culminates in students creating their own biological self-portrait."

More images here.

On the 2007 Science and Engineering Visualization Challenge

A runner-up in the photography category.

Each year, Science magazine and the National Science Foundation hold a competition to select the best of the best in scientific imagery. Awards are given in several categories, and the contents range from tiny sub-domains to entire galaxies. These renderings are freely available to all on Science Magazine's website.

Quote

ÖSTERREICHISCHE NATIONALBIBLIOTHEK

Personally, I see no contest between a belief in the existence of a deity and the study of science. Indeed, many of our greatest scientists have been strongly religious (Aristotle, Einstein, Newton, et cetera). Nonetheless, the world-wide conflict between the two rages on. Here I present an excerpt from an essay published in Nature about the very birth of science and it's seemingly automatic perception as challenging religious faith.

"[William of Conches] argued that natural phenomena arise from forces that, although created by God, act under their own agency. William insisted, echoing Plato, that the divine system of nature is coherent and consistent, and therefore comprehensible: if we ask questions of nature, we can expect to get answers, and to be able to understand them.

That is a necessary belief for one even to imagine conducting science. If everything is subject to the whim of God, there is no guarantee that a phenomenon will happen tomorrow as it does today, therefore there is then no point in seeking any consistency in nature. But William of Conches could not countenance a Creator who was constantly intervening in the world. He saw the Universe as a divinely wrought mechanism: God simply set the wheels in motion. It is in the twelfth century that the first references to the Universe as machina begin to appear.

Some conservative theologians denounced this attempt to develop a Christian platonic natural philosophy. They felt that taking too strong an interest in nature as a physical entity was tantamount to second-guessing God's plans. As everything was surely determined moment to moment by the will of God, it was futile and impious, they believed, to seek anything akin to what we now regard as physical law. The quest for laws of nature was also condemned because it seemed to limit God's omnipotence. As the eleventh-century Italian cleric Peter Damian insisted, one could not know anything for certain, as God could alter it all in an instant.

...

Opposition to medieval rationalism was motivated in part by valid concerns about the dangers of bringing science into scripture. When, for example, William of Conches was denounced for seeking physical explanations for the creation of Eve from one of Adam's ribs, conservatives were right to voice dismay at this apparent transformation of the Bible into a work of science. Read as a kind of moral mythology, holy books may have some social value. Deeming them sources of natural facts must lead to the absurdities of today's creationism.

By making God a natural phenomenon, the medieval rationalists turned Him into an explicatory contingency for which there has since seemed ever less need. By degrees, such secular learning was found to have so much explanatory power that it rivalled, rather than rationalized, theology itself. The consequent rift between faith and reason has now left traditional religions so compromised they are susceptible to displacement by more naive and dogmatic varieties."

from Triumph of the medieval mind by Philip Ball (Nature 452, 816-818 (17 April 2008) | doi:10.1038/452816a)