Year of Science redux

2009 was the Year of Science, through the cooperative vision of many leading national science organizations. Regular readers of this blog will be familiar with my thoughts about YoS's 12 monthly themes (and if you're curious, check out this tag). All in all, count me as a fan.

And so, I was delighted to see that the Coalition on the Public Understanding of Science the umbrella group behind YoS, is extending their efforts into the new year.

One of the new efforts is The Inaugural USA Science & Engineering Festival, to be held in my (generously defined) backyard, in Washington DC. It's scheduled to be a two-week  event -- I am eager to learn more. 

I like to think that the new event's overlap with Capclave, the DC area's annual science-fiction convention -- this year, October 22-24 -- isn't coincidental. Of course I also like to think country-fried steak is a health food. Even the hardest of hard SF authors needs a bit of fantasy :-)  

To your good health

The Year of Science enters its final month by celebrating health science. (Is health science different than medicine? Beats me.)

Health-wise, science must be doing something right. To know that, we need only look at trends in lifespan and at the once untreatable conditions that medicine can now address. And consider the many quality-of-life improvements, from prostheses to painkillers.

Health science will only get better -- if public policy doesn't kill off R&D in the name of funding universal care.

Below the fold, the shape of things to come:

Feel the chemistry

November's theme at the Year of Science is chemistry.

Good stuff, chemistry. You won't hear me complaining this month about wishy-washy, politically correct themes. This is science.

(But not, IIRC, the stuff of much SF. I'm hard-pressed to think of a single chemistry-centric SF novel. Can anyone out there suggest some?) 

And chemistry is the basis for indispensable technology. Think of DuPont (and countless others) bringing us Better Living through Chemistry. Where would we be -- no irony intended, if you should wonder -- sans (to name a few chemical products) preservatives, plastics, petrochemicals, and pesticides.

I'm inspired to remember long-ago chemistry classes -- where I learned to respect the people who really could ascertain something in the lab. (Ever been given a mystery chemical and a few hours to identify it? I might have been given been a flask of phlogiston dioxide for all I know.) Identifying mystery chemicals takes real skill.

But somehow the YoS people neglected to include Tom Lehrer singing the periodic table. Trust me: it's a hoot. The retconned video only makes it better.

Rock of ages

No one minds me calling a billion years an age, do they?

Earth, the third rock from the sun (I loved that show), is ~4.6 billion years old, the sun a bit older. (Exact estimates vary, of course.)  In that time, lots has happened.  The sun grew about 30% hotter (and it's not done).  The Earth cooled from the heat of collapse as it coalesced out of the primordial material of the pre-solar system. Oceans and atmosphere formed. Life emerged. In time, oxygen-producing life evolved and totally changed the atmosphere.

Interesting things keep happening. Radioactive decay keeps the core hot and drives plate tectonics. Carbon-bearing rock disappears into the inter-plate subduction regions, and is returned to the atmosphere by volcanic eruptions. Continents drift, also driven by plate tectonics. There's erosion, and mountain building, and sedimentation. Ice ages come and go.

Oh yeah: early in Earth's history, a Mars-sized object smashed into our planet, melted the top many miles of Earth's surface, and blasted enough stuff into space to re-coalesce as the moon. 

And on, and on. 

In short, Earth is a complicated place. Geoscience, this month's theme at the Year of Science, deals with this very complex amalgam of physics, biology, and chemistry. After I harped at the non-science of recent months' YoS themes, I'm happy to see a real science recognized this month. Check it out.

And don't miss this six-minute video that introduces geoscience and has some absolutely stunning imagery. Earth is a beautiful place.

Shakes his head ...

Do the folks organizing the Year of Science not know what a science is?  Or do they just not care?

Physics is the study of matter and energy and their interactions.  Chemistry is the study of the composition and properties of substances.  Biology is the study of living organisms. (Don't ask me to draw precise boundaries between physics, physical chemistry, and molecular biology.) Ecology is the study of the interrelations between living organisms and their environment.

What you don't see in any of those definitions is a value judgment.

This month's YoS theme is Biodiversity and Conservation.  Is anything wrong with preservation and efficiency? No (at least within limits). But this month's theme is about what to DO with nature, not how stuff in nature WORKS.

What goes beyond a reasonable limit? One extreme approach toward maintaining biodiversity (NOT suggested by the YoS folks) is the voluntary human extinction movement. That values conservation of every species but one: us.

My other gripe with this month's theme is that "conservation" sometimes masks a retreat from the notion of progress. Take eliminating the smogs that once blighted London and Los Angeles. Progress -- better ways of generating power; catalytic converters; more efficient auto engines -- had at least as much to do with that happy outcome as conservation -- driving fewer miles.

A note to YoS organizers: if it's not too late, let's talk about ... science.

Potpouri (the sequel)

I'm immersed in writing this week, so this post is going to be mostly a set of pointers -- with less commentary than usual -- to interesting stuff. (Well, I find it interesting. Your mileage may differ.)

August's Year of Science theme is Celebrate Weather and Climate. Important topics, to be sure. Much interesting stuff to be reviewed, and well-deserved credit for the increasing accuracy of weather forecasts. I'm less enamored of the superficial treatment of climate change.

Here's more news about the (in)security of RFIDs, in this case the cloning of proposed "unforgeable" UK identification cards.

Here's a recent fascinating extrasolar planet find: a world that orbits backward.

And a really humanoid robot.

Sorry to be so terse, but the muse is with me. Gotta write.

How poetic

If you've ever looked closely at the covers of newly released periodicals, you may have noticed magazines' curious ability to arrive from the future. For SF magazines, at least, that seems fitting.

And so the Analog that just arrived in my mailbox is dated October 2009 ...

I'm delighted with this particular exercise in time travel. Why? First, because on prime magazine real estate, immediately following Stan Schmidt's editorial, I see an astronomy poem --

And July is astronomy month in the year of science.

"Insignificance" deals (as did, in part, the above-referenced post) with how astronomy reshaped humanity's view of the cosmos and our place in it.

Second, because -- although my fiction and science articles appear regularly in Analog -- "Insignificance" makes me a professional poet.

It amuses me to imagine the horrified/mystified expressions this event might bring to the faces of quite a few of my English teachers and professors. Maybe we should add announcement of the apocalypse (or of an ice storm in the infernal regions) to the attributes of the issue :-)

To a galaxy far, far away

Woohoo! July's theme for the Year of Science is astronomy.

Astronomy is arguably the mother of sciences. Looking at the sky, and measuring and recording what is there to be seen, is very old. It goes back to Egypt and Babylonia (and other early civilizations, no doubt). The early predictions -- the timing of the Nile floods, say -- could be utilitarian; they were no less scientific for that. And the recording could be cumbersome -- such as, perhaps, Stonehenge, plausibly a big calculator of the seasons. Still: astronomy.

(Some would call astrology the mother of sciences. Not me: astrology is devoid of such basic scientific notions as "observation" and "test your theory by making predictions." Call astrology wishful thinking or magic or gibberish, as you wish. It's not a science.)

Certainly astronomy was my first science. I had a 3-inch telescope as a little kid. Even before that, I sometimes borrowed my dad's binocs to look at the moon.

2009 is the International Year of Astronomy, marking 400 years since Galileo first used a telescope to study objects in the sky.

It continues to amaze me how much, and how often, astronomers have recast our understanding of the universe and humanity's place in the universe. From Earth-centrism to heliocentrism. From heliocentrism to a place in the fringes of the galaxy. From humans living in the one all-encompassing sea of stars, to living in one of the many galaxies in a far grander universe. From living in a static universe to knowing that the universe is forever rushing apart.

Along the way, the human urge to know more about the sky has inspired amazing technologies, from single huge radio-astronomy antennae like the Green Bank Telescope, to arrays of radio telescopes, to the Hubble space telescope, to the SOHO spacecraft at the L1 Lagrange point, to an ever-increasing cadre of robotic explorers.

Some people look at the night sky and come away with a sense of their own insignificance. I look at it, and think how much we have learned, and come away inspired.

Ocean and water

The Year of Science returns, this month to celebrate The Ocean and Water.

I'm underwhelmed again this month. The Earth's surface is mostly water. Our cells are mostly water. Tell me something I didn't know in third grade (a long time ago).

How is trafficking in the trite supposed to get anyone excited about science?

Peeking ahead to July, though, we have astronomy. Yea!

Is that all there is?

May's theme for the Year of Science is "Celebrate sustainability and the environment." To which, for the first time in the YoS program, I say: Bah. And: Faugh. And: How disappointing.

Wait a bit on the torches and pitchforks.

By all means, let's study how the environment works. Heck, we live in it. And wouldn't it be great if we came to understand how to build a stable biosphere. It'd be handy for, say, long-term spaceflight or establishing off-world colonies. And certainly I have no quarrel with efficiency.

That's no reason to make a goal of "sustainability."

I find sustainability fatalistic and inward looking, lacking in ambition. Whether I put on my technologist hat or my SFnal specs, I have to ask: why should our aims -- and our imagination -- be so limited?

There's an entire UNIVERSE out there. Why isn't our ambition to tap a few off-Earth resources? Why don't we consider moving the dirtiest industries someplace -- in orbit a thousand miles up, say, or on the moon -- where sunlight is unfiltered by atmosphere and unaffected by weather? Someplace where pollution won't matter? Why don't we think about moving out to the moon, and Mars, and the Belt?

The universe, presumably, is a zero-sum game. But one tiny planet? We're nearing the level of technology at which Earth limits us only if we let it.

To me, sustainability is less about science than it is a mass movement. And the sad thing about sustainability as a goal, and about those situations where environmentalism becomes religion or politics, is that once we lower our sights it becomes all to easy to forget how to raise them.

Suffering through an energy literacy gap

If only that title were somehow an April Fool's item.

The title is a snippet from an essay on the Year of Science website. April's theme is Celebrate Energy Resources. Of course the knowledge gap is broader than the essay's scope: sources of energy and the consequences of using energy. The problem extends to general scientific illiteracy and mathematical innumeracy.

In my broader rant, I include economics -- the dismal science. The world would not be in its current fix if people (in which category I shall include politicians ;-) ) understood basic econ, nor would governments be so busily making things worse.

And when energy and econ intersect? Then, as the European cap-and-trade experiment shows, things get worse quickly.

Year of Science is all about addressing that galloping illiteracy problem. As Washington busily attempts to rework huge chunks of the American economy -- health care, energy, finance, the auto industry (and who knows what else next week) -- let's hope YoS makes some progress.

Physics rocks

The Year of Science continues. (Cue orchestra. If YoS doesn't have a theme, it should.)

In March, YoS is celebrating physics and technology. To which -- being a one-time physicist and technologist -- I can say, only, woohoo.

Through my years of education teacher after teacher made claims of universality for their subjects -- then other teachers (and experience) would refute them. But some claims are stronger than others ...

Let's look at physics and what it has brought us. For starters:

• Gadgets. Devices that were unimaginable not only became real, but also faster, smaller, and cheaper by the year. Computers, iPods, cell phones, GPS, antilock brakes ... the list is long. We shrink transistors by one order of magnitude after another, and quantum-mechanical rules persist.

• The internet. Consider the medium on which we hold this dialogue. Graybeard that I am, a global data network was incredible -- very literally -- within my lifetime. Now the internet is accessible from across the globe (faster all the time) and from near-Earth orbit. NASA plans to expand it to new worlds.

• Flight. It's progressed in scarcely a century from rickety wood-and-cloth contraptions barely able to get off the ground to transoceanic capability to supersonic flight to men on the moon to robotic explorers across the solar system.

• Worlds. 300+ planets have been identified around stars light-years distant.

• Cosmic insight. Think of the Hubble, and the GRO, and COBE, and (insert the name of your favorite observatory). Think of the information that's been gleaned from electromagnetic waves billions of light-years on their way -- and thus billions of years old.

And to repeat, that's only for starters.

Is any of that universality? Maybe not. Can anyone prove universality? No. We may yet discover different rules apply to some galaxy that's long ago and far, far away.

But if any candidate for universality has a track record as good as physics, I've yet to encounter it.

That's my opinion, and I'm sticking to it.

An evolving picture

February is the 200th birth anniversary of Charles Darwin and the 150th anniversary of first publication of his On the Origin of Species. Not surprisingly, the monthly theme for The Year of Science is evolution.

Evolution is, pure and simple, one of the most powerful and elegant ideas in science. That said, the last thing the web needs is more yammering on the meaning and power of evolution. So how, you ask, am I going to eke out a post from this topic?

My pre-authorial background is primarily in physics and computer science. Both disciplines rely powerfully -- if in very different ways -- on the power of abstraction. Knowing when it's okay (and when it's not!) to:

• leave pesky third-order effects out of a simulation
• apply idealized conditions ("Friction? We don't need no stinkin' friction.")
  
• calculate with difference equations (discrete-valued) rather than differential equations (continuous-valued)

is a key to success in both physics and CS. So: abstraction, approximation, simplification ... but how far can one carry it? Mae West to the contrary, too much of a good thing isn't always wonderful.

Albert Einstein once (apocryphally?) said: A theory should be as simple as possible, and no simpler. A good scientist has the insight to find the right degree of abstraction to make progress on the problem at hand.

Given my background, what most fascinates me about the discovery of evolution by Darwin (and, to be fair and complete, also by Alfred Russel Wallace) is the attendant use of abstraction. Think, for a moment, about random variation, aka genetic drift, and natural selection. Both are extremely powerful notions -- and no one 150 years ago had a clue what physical mechanism(s) might underlie either. Mendelian genetics, its significance unrecognized until the early twentieth century, began to give a clue about how evolution might work -- again, without any notion what the underlying mechanism(s) might be. Crick and Watson did not publish their seminal paper on DNA and its role in cellular biology until 1953. Not so much as an entire bacterial genome had been sequenced until 1995.

My point? How easy would it have been to abandon evolutionary theory in its early stages for lack of complementary theories/discoveries to explain evolution's deeper levels? Knowing how and when to abstract is a wonderful thing -- rarely so well and insightfully done as during the early stages of developing evolutionary theory.

So: Happy 200th, Mr. Darwin. And while I'm at it, thanks for the idea behind -- even the title of -- Fools' Experiments.

2009: The Year of Science

2009 happens to be the 200th anniversary of Darwin's birth (and the 150th anniversary of the publication of his On the Origin of Species). It's the 400th anniversary of Galileo's first use of the telescope for astronomy. It's the 100th anniversary of the discovery of the Burgess Shale fossil beds.

In recognition of these (and other) science-related anniversaries falling this year, the Coalition on the Public Understanding of Science has organized a year-long celebration of science. (COPUS was organized by the American Institute of Biological Sciences, the Geology Society of America, the University of California Museum of Paleontology, and the National Science Teachers Association. More than 400 other groups -- universities, museums, scientific societies, and the like -- participate.)

That leads us to 2009: The Year of Science. Each month YoS will celebrate a particular theme. January's theme, appropriately, is the process and nature of science itself. The YoS website is the hub of a great social network of participating organizations and events.

YoS is a worthy endeavor with noble goals: reminding us what science does for society and trying to rekindle popular interest in science. YoS officially kicks off today, in Boston, in coordination with the annual meeting of the Society of Integrative and Comparative Biology.

Check it out.