Another day when everything changed...

If you follow along here, you'll remember that last month I wrote about how when history takes a decisive turn is not always readily apparent at the time. That usually, it takes awhile for us to catch up with events and realize that the world in permanently different in some way.

That's not necessarily the case with an event that took place on October 4, 1957.

That was the day the Space Age began, with the first successful launch of an artificial satellite. The USSR (now Russia) launched Sputnik 1 that day, taking the world a bit by surprise. The US had been working toward such a launch for awhile, and it was an embarrassment, in the middle of the Cold War, that the Soviets got there first. It wasn't that long before the Americans finally made a successful launch when it put Explorer I into orbit on January 31, 1958, just less than four months later.

Still, for nearly a month, until Sputnik stopped broadcasting its radio signals, which any amateur radio operator could listen to, on October 26, the Soviet satellite continued to taunt the Americans. At least, when Explorer did get into orbit it did something besides beep - it verified the existence of a radiation belt around the Earth, the Van Allen belt.

Sputnik's launch caused more than embarrassment in the United States. The fact that the Soviets were able to launch a satellite into orbit meant something else, that they could also had a rocket that could carry a nuclear weapon anywhere in the world. This was frightening news. But, really, the embarrassment was more productive than the fear of nuclear war. That embarrassment, that the Soviets had done something before the US and, so far, better than the US, meant that we had to get on the stick and up our game. By February 7, 1958, just days after the US finally got Explorer into space, the US government had launched something else, The Advanced Research Projects Agency, under the Department of Defense, as an effort to regain the lead in science and technology from the Soviets. By the middle of 1958, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, NASA, had also been founded. Additionally, new educational initiatives were put in place to advance education in science and technology so that we would not again be bested by the Soviets.

So, yes, things changed dramatically following on the launch of that 23-inch-diameter beeping sphere. Three and a half years later, on April 12, 1961, the Soviets put the first human into space, with an American following less than a month later. Once again, the Soviets got there first and better, with Yuri Gagarin orbiting the earth, while Alan Shepard just got a sub-orbital flight. However, the US sent John Glenn up for three orbits on February 20, 1962, and the Americans pretty much led the space race from then on. It only took until July 20, 1969, to put Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin on the moon.

Well, until recently.

The US currently has no operating space vehicle capable of carrying humans into space. We rely on the Russians to ferry our astronauts to the International Space Station. This makes me sad...not that it's the Russians doing this (or that China has also recently, so the reports say, put people into space), but that my country does not care enough about the exploration of the cosmos, to give sufficient funds to the effort to advance human exploration of the solar system and the universe.

This is part of a trend in our culture to discount science generally, at least partly for ideological reasons. I have my suspicious about why this is so, but that's another topic for another day. For now, lets just say that I believe that if we continue, as a country, to belittle and degrade real science in general in the way that some of our politicians have been doing in an attempt to advance their own agenda (climate change denialists, and creationist and intelligent design theorists, I'm looking at you), it is going to come back and bite us in the ass, and it isn't going to be very comfortable.

Here...have some science talk

I'm not saying a thing. I'm just leaving this here for you:



It'll make you think. Have fun with it.

Happy Science Popularizer Day - and, yes, I just made that holiday up

Today, coincidentally, is the birthday of not one but two scientists who are notable for writing books about scientific subjects for the general public. The work of the popularizer is often a thankless job, but one that I think is important because I believe that the more one knows about the world, the better off one is, and the sad fact is that each person cannot be an expert in every field. Therefore, popular works that inform about fields that can be technical to the point of confusion for one who is not an expert can be quite valuable.

So, today is the birthday of Jared Diamond, who was born on this day in 1937. Diamond has written such books as The Third Chimpanzee (1991), Guns, Germs, and Steel (1997), Collapse (2005), and The World Until Yesterday (2012). His training was in physiology, and that is what he has taught at UCLA, in the medical school there. His writing, however, has seen him branch out into a number of fields, including anthropology, human evolution, and history.

Diamond has come into for his share of criticism for his work, including charges that he is too Eurocentric, that the arguments he makes in his books are weak, and that the large roles he assigns to geography and environment in the shaping of civilization are misplaced.

Like Diamond, Stephen Jay Gould, who was born on this day in 1941, has been criticized for things he wrote and said in the course of his career as a paleontologist, evolutionary biologist, science historian, and prolific author of both specialist and popular books and articles. Among those criticisms were, like Diamond, that some of his explanations and arguments were weak. It is probably important to note that, especially in Gould's case, this criticism particularly has mostly come from those who disagree with his ideas and want to discount them.

It also probably has to be said that Gould did indeed take some stands that were controversial. He was co-developer, with Niles Eldredge, of the theory of punctuated equilibrium, which claims that evolutionary change is not a slow, steady process, but occurs rapidly and in bursts, with long periods of stability in between. Gould was very vocal, as well, about his rejection of sociobiology, the idea that social behaviors are rooted in biology and evolution. Additionally, Gould did not approve of cladistics, a method of biological classification, which brought him a measure of criticism as the use of cladistics became more and more widespread.

Gould was also criticized for his politics, which some critics characterized as "Marxist," charging that he let his politics interfere with his scientific positions. This was probably exacerbated by Gould's willingness to discuss his father's Marxism and his statements that his own politics were probably to the left of center. But, he also claimed that his politics were different from those of his father. Still, today, there are those people who discount Gould's contributions by pulling out the "Marxist" label.

Gould did not hesitate to address the subject of religion, and claimed that science and religion are not, as some argue, in conflict. However, he also claimed that the two areas comprised "non-overlapping magisterial" that, while they do not conflict, also do not really have anything to say to or about each other. He spent some of his time writing about this idea in a book called Rock of Ages: Science and Religion in the Fullness of Life (1999).

While Gould did not criticize religion as a category of knowledge as some scientists, notably Richard Dawkins, do, he also spent a significant amount of his time arguing against creationism and intelligent design and against their inclusion in public school science classrooms. Among his efforts on this topic, Gould testified against giving creationism equal time in the classroom in the landmark case McLean v. Arkansas in 1982. The case, which ruled that "creation science" is actually religion and not science and that its inclusion in public school science classrooms violates the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment to the Unites States Constitution, has been influential in subsequent rulings relating to the teaching of creationism and intelligent design.

Gould was a prolific and eloquent writer. He wrote nearly 500 peer-reviewed papers during his career, around 100 book reviews, 22 books, and a long series of essays that included a series called "This View of Life" in Natural History magazine. He published several collections of these essays in book form. Gould was also a fixture in science documentaries on PBS and elsewhere.

Sadly, Gould died in 2002, at the age of 60, cutting short a remarkable career that, among many other accomplishments, saw him named a "Living Legend" by the US Library of Congress in April 2000.

In honor of the day, your assignment, should you decide to accept it, is to go out and find some good popular science writing to read. I don't care what subject you choose, and it doesn't have to be something by either Gould or Diamond - although as a huge fan of Gould's writing, I would certainly not be sad if you chose to read some of his work, which can be challenging but is always rewarding.

History, geology, and calendars, oh, my...

I love it when different events in different years but on the same day have a resonance of some kind with each other.

Today is one of those days. Well, depending on which calendar you use, but still...Let me tell you a story.

Nicolas Steno was born on this day in 1638. Kind of.

The Gregorian Calendar, the calendar we use today, was decreed by Pope Gregory XIII in 1582, and was pretty much immediately adopted by the European Catholic countries. However, Denmark, where Steno was born, was a Lutheran country and so kept on using the Julian Calendar and resisted adopting Gregory's calendar until March 1, 1700. So, according to the calendar used when and where he was born, Steno was born on January 1. But, not only because we use the Gregorian Calendar today but because Steno converted from Lutheranism to Roman Catholicism (in 1667), it is appropriate to mark his birthday on January 11.

Before his conversion and ordniation to the priesthood, Steno had studied both anatomy and geology. Besides having taught anatomy, he is considered to be one of the founders of modern geology. In 1669, published a work in which he recognized the basic principles of stratigraphy, the basis of all modern geological studies. These were 1) the law of superposition, which says that in undisturbed geolgoical layers, the lower strata are older than higher strata; 2) the principle of original horizontality, the idea that tilted strata were horizontal at their deposition; and 3) the principle of lateral continuity, which says that material in a stratum was continuous unless a solid body stood in the way. He also recognized the principle of cross-cutting relationships, the idea that a discontinuity or body that intrudes into a stratum is younger than the stratum, as well as articulating the theory that fossils represent the remains of life in different geolgical eras.

Today in the Roman Catholic church, Steno is known as the Blesssed Nicolas Steno, having been beatified, the last step before sainthood, by Pope John Paul II in 1988. I don't know if that status makes Steno unique among scientists, but I'm pretty sure there are not that many scientists on their way to sainthood.

But that isn't what makes the fact that today is Steno's birthday interesting to me. What makes it interesting to me is the fact that January 11, in 1908, is the day that Grand Canyon National Monument was created. It had been named Grand Canyon Game Preserve in 1906, but would not be created as a national park until 1919.

Nicolas Steno would have loved the Grand Canyon, considering that it contains one of the most complete geologic columns in the world. This is true even though down near the bottom of the canyon there is what is called the Great Unconformity. At that point, there is a gap of around one billion years between rocks that are 1.5 billion years old and rocks that were depostied about 500 million years ago. The Unconformity represents a period of erosion between depositions.

Can you imagine how much fun Steno would have had studying all those strata in the Canyon? It seems to me that there is some sort of poetic justice in the Canyon being created a national monument on the 270th anniversary of Steno's birth.

Which only goes to prove, I suppose, that I am both a science geek and a history geek, and that if I try really, really hard, I can manage to combine them.