Science – Page 9 – Wis[s]e Words

Beyond Apollo

Published on July 21, 20092 Comments

We went to the Moon, and returned, and stopped. There was no moment of disappointment. It just grew over the decades. We were promised the Moon.

James Nicoll’s:

What the US didn’t do in space since the end of Apollo:

Put a human on the surface of another planet.

What the US did do in space since the end of Apollo:

Place a variety of advanced telescopes in space

Sent fly-by missions to every planet.

Put orbiters around Earth, the Moon, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn.

Put landers in or on Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Titan.

Mapped numerous bodies in the Solar System.

(The list continues)

Classical science fiction really believed in space exploration, as humanity’s destiny, as the final frontier we needed to keep ourselves sane, as a way out of the Hobbesian struggle of all versus all. It promised that it would be easy, that it only needed a maverick scientist and his adventorous young nephews to build a rocket in his garage and go to the Moon, that space travel would be an untroubled linear process: from the first satellite to the first men in space to a trip to the Moon followed by a Moonbase, permanent space stations, a Mars colony….

Up until Apollo reality seemed to conform to this fantasy of easy travel to other planets. But then reality set in and all the ambitious plans foresee in the pulps of the forties and fifties and formalised in the classic space books by Willy Ley and von Braun and others were put on hold and then cancelled. For a while there were still the Viking (thirtythree years ago yesterday) and Voyager missions to be excited about, but with the eighties and the disastrous space shuttle programmes and “Star Wars” the dream seemed to die.

Meanwhile, unnoticed by this “old guard” of space enthusiasts, we got a real space research revival in the nineties, one that didn’t fit the neat space race template of the sixties, but which did reveal a Solar system much stranger and more interesting than the boring old “nine planets, a coule more moons and some junk” the old guard grew up with. What’s more, while space colonisation seemed to grow more and more difficult and distant, it turned out you can do a lot of interesting research from right here on Earth, up to and including the discovery of planets around other stars. The Campbellian idea of three men in a scout rocket having to find out if Gliese 581 has habitable planets or not turned out to be unnecessary, which is a pity if you wanted to be a scout, but less so if you’re interested in what the universe looks like.

So now we got a bifurcation in science fiction: on the one hand those who are disappointed that we won’t “Inherit the Stars”, on the other those who argue that “Earth is Room Enough”. And on the gripping hand there are of course those that don’t really care one way or another but just like to read “Of Time and Stars” without having it be anything more than entertainment.

Forty years ago today

Published on July 20, 2009

Buzz Aldrin on the Moon

And only fifteen years after Tintin, Snowy and captain Haddock, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walked on the moon, as the first non-fictional characters to do so. All skepticism about what Apollo accomplished aside, it was a hell of an achievement, to get human beings walking another world in less than a decade. that Apollo then didn’t lead to a permanent presence on the moon is a pity, at least for this science fiction fan, but it should not distract us from this triumph.

To rate “the space programme” on what it did for us back on Earth, as they’re doing over at Charlie’s, may be interesting but missing the point. Most of those socalled spinoffs always turn out to be not invented for the space race, much of the rest never needed manned spaceflight to get them going. If we’re looking at space exploration from a purely “economic” point of view, we don’t need more than communications, weather and GPS satellites; certainly not manned space flight or space exploration.

Who cares about what Apollo did for us? People walked the fucking moon!

In Search of Planet Vulcan – Richard Baum and William Sheehan

Published on July 16, 2009

In Search of Planet Vulcan
Richard Baum & William Sheehan
310 pages including index
published in 1997

The classic idea of the universe was that it was geocentric: the Earth in the centre, with the planets, moon and the sun circling around it and the fixed stars as background. Over the centuries that central idea had to be modified with increasingly complex epicycles as the theory had to be adjusted to observational evidence. It was only in the sixteenth century that Copernicus, Kepler and Bruno challenged this Ptolemaic model and replaced it with the truth: that all the planets, including Earth revolved around the Sun. Copernicus was the first to propose this, Bruno would die at the stake for his advocacy but it was Kepler who figured out how the planets revolved and what governed their orbits. more than half a century later Isaac Newton formulated his laws of gravity, joining Kepler’s laws with more mundane events on Earth, finally providing a complete model of the workings of the Solar System. From then on, any planetary orbit could be calculated with the right observations and the use of Kepler’s and Newton’s laws.

except for one. The orbit of Mercury remained, as the subtitle of Baum and Sheehan’s book has it, “the ghost in Newton’s clockwork universe”. Time and again, no matter how carefully the observations were made and how intricate the calculations were, the two just would not line up. Even the best astronomers in the world, with the best observations could not make Mercury’s orbit confirm to what it should be according to Newtonian physics. It wasn’t until Einstein reformulated the laws of gravity that the reason why became clear. Newton’s laws break down near massive objects like the Sun and although “good enough” for most situations, Mercury’s orbit was just too close to the Sun and Newtonian physics just wasn’t accurate enough. Of course, until Einstein found the real answer, astronomers sought for other explenations for Mercury’s wrong orbit — and the most likely candidate was an undiscovered planet even closer to the Sun: Vulcan.

Pink Floyd on the Moon

Published on July 11, 2009

An audio recording of what Pink Floyd was up to in the night of the Moon landing, courtesy of the BBC, who as Paul McAuley puts “had bought into the 60s” enough to invite them to play live during that long night. It seems fitting to have such a mystic, psychedelic band as audio commentary on the zenith of the greatest technocratic undertaking of the twentieth century. Today both are minority interests as going concerns, objects of nostalgia to everybody else. Even to me, a longlife science fiction fan and firm believer in space exploration, the Apollo project looks obsolete, irrelevant, the last hurrah of the technocratic age. The Apollo project is an awesome, inspiring story and I’m glad we did it, but we don’t need to repeat it, just like we don’t need to repeat Dark Side of the Moon.

The State of the Universe – Pedro G. Ferreira

Published on May 7, 2009

Cover of The State of the Universe

The State of the Universe
Pedro G. Ferreira
320 pages including index
published in 2006

I felt the need to reacquaint myself with modern astrophysics as it has been far too long since I’ve read anything about it. Sure, I do watch The History Channel’s Universe series whever I catch it, but that doesn’t tell me much I don’t know already, while following the vast array of astronomy blogs out there is no real substitute, as they do assume a certain familiarity with the current state of the art. Long live the public library therefore, for providing quick access to what looks like exactly the book I need: The State of the Universe: a Cosmic Primer. Written by Pedro Ferreira, a lecturer in Astrophysics at Oxford, it’s meant as a layperson’s introduction to what astrophysics thinks the universe looks like and what makes it tick.

The State of the Universe is built up logically from first principles. Ferreira starts with a short overview of classical Ptolemaic cosmology, with the Sun revolving around the Earth and how it was succeeded by the heliocentric cosmology of Copernicus and Gallileo. Over several chapters he then shows how our knowledge of the size and complexity of the universe expanded, from what was once thought to be no bigger than our Solar System, through an understanding of how big our Galaxy actually and finally to an appreciation of the idea that all those galaxy shaped nebulas are actually galaxies as well. Then he goes on to the other end of the scale and explains the physics of the universe: the fundamental forces that shape it (gravity, electromagnetism, the strong and weak force), a quick sketch of the whole zoo of the particles that make up the matter and energy in it and how it all sits together. From the classic Big Bang idea of the evolution of the universe he finally moves on to the cutting edge of current physics, where it all gets a lot less clear what’s real and what’s just clever theorising.