The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2010 Read online

  Three months after the landing, however, in October 1969, I began to wonder ... I was in Florida, at Cape Kennedy, the space program's launching facility, aboard a NASA tour bus. The bus's spielmeister was a tall-fair-and-handsome man in his late thirties ... and a real piece of lumber when it came to telling tourists on a tour bus what they were looking at. He was so bad, I couldn't resist striking up a conversation at the end of the tour.

  Sure enough, it turned out he had not been put on Earth for this job. He was an engineer who until recently had been a NASA heat-shield specialist. A baffling wave of layoffs had begun, and his job was eliminated. It was so bad he was lucky to have gotten this standup spielmeister gig on a tour bus. Neil Armstrong and his two crewmates, Buzz Aldrin and Mike Collins, were still on their triumphal world tour ... while back home, NASA's irreplaceable team of highly motivated space scientists—irreplaceable!—there were no others!...anywhere!...You couldn't just run an ad saying, "Help Wanted: Experienced heat-shield expert"...The irreplaceable team was breaking up, scattering in nobody knows how many hopeless directions.

  How could such a thing happen? In hindsight, the answer is obvious. NASA had neglected to recruit a corps of philosophers.

  From the moment the Soviets launched Sputnik I into orbit around Earth in 1957, everybody from Presidents Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson on down looked upon the so-called space race as just one thing: a military contest. At first there was alarm over the Soviets' seizure of the "strategic high ground" of space. They were already up there—right above us! They could now hurl thunderbolts down whenever and wherever they wanted. And what could we do about it? Nothing. Ka-boom! There goes Bangor... Ka-boom! There goes Boston... Ka-boom! There goes New York ... Baltimore ... Washington ... St. Louis ... Denver ... San Jose—blown away!—just like that.

  Physicists were quick to point out that nobody would choose space as a place from which to attack Earth. The spacecraft, the missile, Earth itself, plus Earth's own rotation, would be traveling at wildly different speeds upon wildly different geometric planes. You would run into the notorious "three-body problem" and then some. You'd have to be crazy. The target would be untouched and you would wind up on the floor in a fetal ball, twitching and gibbering. On the other hand, the rockets that had lifted the Soviets' five-ton manned ships into orbit were worth thinking about. They were clearly powerful enough to reach any place on Earth with nuclear warheads.

  But that wasn't what was on President Kennedy's mind when he summoned NASA's administrator, James Webb, and Webb's deputy, Hugh Dryden, to the White House in April 1961. The president was in a terrible funk. He kept muttering: "If somebody can just tell me how to catch up. Let's find somebody—anybody ... There's nothing more important." He kept saying, "We've got to catch up." Catching up had become his obsession. He never so much as mentioned the rockets.

  Dryden said that, frankly, there was no way we could catch up with the Soviets when it came to orbital flights. A better idea would be to announce a crash program on the scale of the Manhattan Project, which had produced the atomic bomb. Only the aim this time would be to put a man on the moon within the next ten years.

  Barely a month later Kennedy made his famous oration before Congress: "I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to Earth." He neglected to mention Dryden.

  Intuitively, not consciously, Kennedy had chosen another form of military contest, an oddly ancient and archaic one. It was called "single combat."

  The best known of all single combats was David versus Goliath. Before opposing armies clashed in all-out combat, each would send forth its "champion," and the two would fight to the death, usually with swords. The victor would cut off the head of the loser and brandish it aloft by its hair.

  The deadly duel didn't take the place of the all-out battle. It was regarded as a sign of which way the gods were leaning. The two armies then had it out on the battlefield ... unless one army fled in terror upon seeing its champion slaughtered. There you have the Philistines when Little David killed their giant, Goliath ... and cut his head off and brandished it aloft by its hair (1 Samuel 17:1—58). They were overcome by a mad desire to be somewhere else. (The Israelites pursued and destroyed them.)

  More than two millenniums later, the mental atmosphere of the space race was precisely that. The details of single combat were different. Cosmonauts and astronauts didn't fight hand to hand and behead one another. Instead, each side's brave champions, including one woman (Valentina Tereshkova), risked their lives by sitting on top of rockets and having their comrades on the ground light the fuse and fire them into space like the human cannonballs of yore.

  The Soviets rocketed off to an early lead. They were the first to put an object into orbit around Earth (Sputnik), the first to put an animal into orbit (a dog), the first to put a man in orbit (Yuri Gagarin). No sooner had NASA put two astronauts (Gus Grissom and Alan Shepard) into fifteen-minute suborbital flights to the Bahamas— the Bahamas!—fifteen minutes!—two miserable little mortar lobs! —than the Soviets put a second cosmonaut (Gherman Titov) into orbit. He stayed up there for twenty-five hours and went around the globe seventeen times. Three times he flew directly over the United States. The gods had shown which way they were leaning, all right!

  At this point, the mental atmospheres of the rocket-powered space race of the 1960s and the sword-clanking single combat of ancient days became so similar you had to ask: Does the human beast ever really change—or merely his artifacts? The Soviet cosmo-champions beat our astro-champions so handily, gloom spread like a gas. Every time you picked up a newspaper you saw headlines with the phrase, SPACE GAP ... SPACE GAP ... SPACE GAP ... The Soviets had produced a generation of scientific geniuses—while we slept, fat and self-satisfied! Educators began tearing curriculums apart as soon as Sputnik went up, introducing the New Math and stressing another latest thing, the Theory of Self-Esteem.

  At last, in February 1962, NASA managed to get a man into Earth orbit, John Glenn. You had to have been alive at that time to comprehend the reaction of the nation, practically all of it. He was up for only five hours, compared to Titov's twenty-five, but he was our ... Protector! Against all odds he had risked his very hide for ... us!—protected us from our mortal enemy!—struck back in the duel in the heavens!—showed the world that we Americans were born fighting and would never give up! John Glenn made us whole again!

  During his ticker-tape parade up Broadway, you have never heard such cheers or seen so many thousands of people crying. Big Irish cops, the classic New York breed, were out in the intersections in front of the world, sobbing, blubbering, boo-hooing, with tears streaming down their faces. John Glenn had protected all of us, cops too. All tears have to do with protection ... but I promise not to lay that theory on you now. John Glenn, in 1962, was the last true national hero America has ever had.

  There were three more Mercury flights, and then the Gemini series of two-man flights began. With Gemini, we dared to wonder if perhaps we weren't actually pulling closer to the Soviets in this greatest of all single combats. But we held our breath, fearful that the Soviets' anonymous Chief Designer would trump us again with some unimaginably spectacular feat.

  Sure enough, the CIA brought in sketchy reports that the Soviets were on the verge of a moon shot.

  NASA entered into the greatest crash program of all time, Apollo. It launched five lunar missions in one year, December 1968 to November 1969. With Apollo 11, we finally won the great race, landing a man on the moon before the end of this decade and returning him safely to Earth.

  Everybody, including Congress, was caught up in the adrenal rush of it all. But then, on the morning after, congressmen began to wonder about something that hadn't dawned on them since Kennedy's oration. What was this single-combat stuff—they didn't use the actual term—really all about? It had been a battle for morale at home and image abroad. Fine, OK, we won, but it had no tactic
al military meaning whatsoever. And it had cost a fortune, $150 billion or so. And this business of sending a man to Mars and whatnot? Just more of the same, when you got right down to it. How laudable ... how far-seeing ... but why don't we just do a Scarlett O'Hara and think about it tomorrow?

  And that NASA budget! Now there was some prime pork you could really sink your teeth into! And they don't need it anymore! Game's over, NASA won, congratulations. Who couldn't use some of that juicy meat to make the people happy? It had an ambrosial aroma ... made you think of reelection...

  NASA's annual budget sank like a stone from $5 billion in the mid-1960s to $3 billion in the mid-1970s. It was at this point that NASA's lack of a philosopher corps became a real problem. The fact was, NASA had only one philosopher, Wernher von Braun. Toward the end of his life, von Braun knew he was dying of cancer and became very contemplative. I happened to hear him speak at a dinner in his honor in San Francisco. He raised the question of what the space program was really all about.

  It's been a long time, but I remember him saying something like this: here on Earth we live on a planet that is in orbit around the sun. The sun itself is a star that is on fire and will someday burn up, leaving our solar system uninhabitable. Therefore we must build a bridge to the stars, because as far as we know, we are the only sentient creatures in the entire universe. When do we start building that bridge to the stars? We begin as soon as we are able, and this is that time. We must not fail in this obligation we have to keep alive the only meaningful life we know of.

  Unfortunately, NASA couldn't present as its spokesman and great philosopher a former high-ranking member of the Nazi Wehrmacht with a heavy German accent.

  As a result, the space program has been killing time for forty years with a series of orbital projects ... Skylab, the Apollo-Soyuz joint mission, the International Space Station, and the space shuttle. These programs have required a courage and an engineering brilliance comparable to the manned programs that preceded them. But their purpose has been mainly to keep the lights on at the Kennedy Space Center and Houston's Johnson Space Cen ter—by removing manned flight from the heavens and bringing it very much down to Earth. The shuttle program, for example, was actually supposed to appeal to the public by offering orbital tourist rides, only to end in the Challenger disaster, in which the first such passenger, Christa McAuliffe, a schoolteacher, perished.

  Forty years! For forty years, everybody at NASA has known that the only logical next step is a manned Mars mission, and every overture has been entertained only briefly by presidents and Congress. They have so many more luscious and appealing projects that could make better use of the close to $10 billion annually the Mars program would require. There is another overture even at this moment, and it does not stand a chance in the teeth of Depression II.

  "Why not send robots?" is a common refrain. And once more it is the late Wernher von Braun who comes up with the rejoinder. One of the things he most enjoyed saying was that there is no computerized explorer in the world with more than a tiny fraction of the power of a chemical analog computer known as the human brain, which is easily reproduced by unskilled labor.

  What NASA needs now is the power of the Word. On Darwin's tongue, the Word created a revolutionary and now well-nigh universal conception of the nature of human beings or, rather, human beasts. On Freud's tongue, the Word means that at this very moment there are probably several million orgasms occurring that would not have occurred had Freud never lived. Even the fact that he is proved to be a quack has not diminished the power of his Word.

  July 20, 1969, was the moment NASA needed, more than anything else in this world, the Word. But that was something NASA's engineers had no speci fi cations for. At this moment, that remains the only solution to recovering NASA's true destiny, which is, of course, to build that bridge to the stars.

  STEVEN WEINBERG The Missions of Astronomy

  FROM The New York Review of Books

  A FEW YEARS AGO, I decided that I needed to know more about the history of science, so naturally I volunteered to teach the subject. In working up my lectures, I was struck by the fact that in the ancient world, astronomy reached what from a modern perspective was a much higher level of accuracy and sophistication than any other science.1 One obvious reason for this is that visible astronomical phenomena are much simpler and easier to study than the things we can observe on Earth's surface. The ancients did not know it, but Earth and the moon and planets all spin at nearly constant rates, and they travel in their orbits under the influence of a single dominant force, that of gravitation.

  In consequence, the changes in what is seen in the sky are simple and periodic: the moon regularly waxes and wanes, the sun and moon and stars seem to revolve once a day around the celestial pole, and the sun traces a path through the same constellations of stars every year, those of the zodiac.2 Even with crude instruments, these periodic changes could be and were studied with a fair degree of mathematical precision, much greater than was possible for things on Earth like the flight of a bird or the flow of water in a river.

  But there was another reason why astronomy was so prominent in ancient and medieval science. It was useful in a way that the physics and biology of the time were not. Even before history began, people must have used the apparent motion of the sun as at least a crude clock, calendar, and compass. These functions became much more precise with the introduction of what may have been the first scientific instrument, the gnomon, attributed by the Greeks variously to Anaximander or to the Babylonians.

  The gnomon is simply a straight pole, set vertically in a flat, level patch of ground open to the sun's rays. When during each day the gnomon's shadow is shortest, that is noon. At noon the gnomon's shadow anywhere in the latitude of Greece or Mesopotamia points due north, so all the points of the compass can be permanently and accurately marked out on the ground around the gnomon. Watching the shadow from day to day, one can note the days when the noon shadow is shortest or longest. That is the summer or the winter solstice. From the length of the noon shadow at the summer solstice one can calculate the latitude. The shadow at sunset points somewhat south of east in the spring and summer, and somewhat north of east in the fall and winter; when the shadow at sunset points due east, that is the spring or fall equinox.3

  Using the gnomon as a calendar, the Athenian astronomers Meton and Euctemon made a discovery around 430 BC that was to trouble astronomers for two thousand years: the four seasons, whose beginnings and endings are precisely marked by the solstices and equinoxes, have slightly different lengths. This ruled out the possibility that the sun travels around Earth (or Earth around the sun) with constant velocity in a circle, for in that case the equinoxes and solstices would be evenly spaced throughout the year. This was one of the reasons that Hipparchus of Nicaea, the greatest observational astronomer of the ancient world, found it necessary around 150 BC to introduce the idea of epicycles, the idea that the sun (and planets) move on circles whose centers themselves move on circles around Earth, an idea that was picked up and elaborated three centuries later by Claudius Ptolemy.

  Even Copernicus, because he was committed to orbits composed of circles, retained the idea of epicycles. It was not until the early years of the seventeenth century that Johannes Kepler finally explained what Hipparchus and Ptolemy had attributed to epicycles. Earth's orbit around the sun is not a circle but an ellipse; the sun is not at the center of the ellipse but at a point called the focus, off to one side; and Earth's speed is not constant but faster when it is near the sun and slower when farther away.

  ***

  For the human uses I have been discussing, the sun has its limitations. The sun can of course be used to tell time and directions only during the day, and before the introduction of the gnomon its annual motions gave only a crude idea of the time of year. From earliest recorded times, the stars were put to use to fill these gaps. Homer knew of the stars' use at night as a compass. In the Odyssey, Calypso gives Odysseus instructions on how
to go from her island eastward toward Ithaca: he is told to keep the Bear on his left. The Bear, of course, is Ursa Major, aka the Big Dipper, a constellation near the North Pole of the sky (called the celestial pole), which in the latitude of the Mediterranean never sets beneath the horizon (or, as Homer says, never bathes in the ocean). With north on his left, Odysseus would be sailing east, toward home.4

  The stars were also put to use as a calendar. The Egyptians very early appear to have anticipated the flooding of the Nile by observing the rising of the star Sirius. Around 700 BC the Greek poet Hesiod in Works and Days advised farmers to plow at the cosmical setting of the Pleiades constellation—that is, on the day in the year on which the Pleiades star cluster is first seen to set before the sun comes up.

  Observing the stars for these reasons, it was noticed in many early civilizations that there are five "stars," called planets by the Greeks, that in the course of a year move against the background of all the other stars, staying pretty much on the same path along the zodiac as the sun, but sometimes seeming to reverse their course. The problem of understanding these motions perplexed astronomers for millennia and finally led to the birth of modern physics with the work of Isaac Newton.

  The usefulness of astronomy was important not only because it focused attention on the sun and stars and planets and thereby led to scientific discoveries. Utility was also important in the development of science, because when one is actually using a scientific theory rather than just speculating about it, there is a large premium on getting things right. If Calypso had told Odysseus to keep the moon on his left, he would have gone around in circles and never reached home. In contrast, Aristotle's theory of motion survived through the Middle Ages because it was never put to practical use in a way that could reveal how wrong it was. Astronomers did try to use Aristotle's theory of the planetary system (due originally to Plato's pupil Eudoxus and his pupil Callippus), in which the sun and moon and planets ride on coupled transparent spheres centered on Earth, a theory that (unlike the epicycle theory) was consistent with Aristotle's physics.