The beauty - and insights - of science

The “ten biggest science stories of the decade?”  Well there’s the Higgs. And HIV can be prevented. And Ebola vaccines. And imbeciles brought back measles and blocked extinction for polio. 

How about synthetic biology - building life forms from scratch? Does anyone recall 20 years ago when religious fundamentalists called that a red line, usurping the Creator’s powers and drawing likely revenge? Okay, score one for the fundies, because they inflicted that revenge - politically-driven lobotomization - upon our nerdy civilization.  Boy did they. 

But gravitational waves are my top. Kip Thorne was a leader in that and another top ten item, his perfect prediction of what an active black hole would look like. Good decade, Kip!

One for the prediction registry. In my 1989 novel EARTH, a plot current hinges on the fact that the most plentiful mineral in the planet’s mantle is Perovskite. When gravity laser beams (another increasingly plausible Brin-vention!) crisscross those regions, lining up quasi-crystal domains, it leads to a… well… major, unexpected plot development. At the time, I knew perovskites offered some higher temperature superconductors. But apparently uses are taking off! Including the possibility of Spray-On Solar Cells. 

If it happens, it could be as much a game changer as LED light bulbs… or if we save civilization form science hating moron-cultists. We need game-changers.

Speaking of crystals, do you still doubt overlap between the natural and machine worlds? Look at these astonishing microscope images of snowflakes… as if constructed out of metal on a lathe and drill press. 

For an array of stunning beauty: see a collection of some of the best, award-winning science photographs of the year - and the stories behind them. Plus one hundred of the best space photographs of the year - from professionals and amateurs, with glorious images of aurora, meteors, eclipses and galaxies.

Yet.... Heinlein predicted this: Recently, “The Ohio House on Wednesday passed the ‘Student Religious Liberties Act.’ Under the law, students can’t be penalized if their work is scientifically wrong as long as the reasoning is because of their religious beliefs.” Further: “Every Republican in the House supported the bill. It now moves to the Republican-controlled Senate.”  

Yes, science fiction grand master Robert Heinlein predicted this. And you liberals need to re-admit him into the circle, and Berry Goldwater and every crewcut and hairbun former military officer who stands up for fact-civilization in red & purple districts. We will only beat this insanity with a broad coalition of people who believe that facts are things. Once facts become a basis for disproof, yet again, then racism and oligarchy and environmental denialism and all the rest will collapse organically. Not just because they are immoral, but also because they are... wrong.

Oh, and astronomers identified a trio of faraway galaxies that seem to be radiating some of the earliest light ever observed, dating  to approximately 680 million years after the Big Bang (roughly 5% of the universe's current age of 13.8 billion years) and appears to be surrounded by three overlapping bubbles of plasma — meaning these pioneering galaxies may have been caught in the act of reionizing their corner of the universe and bringing the cosmic dark ages to an end.

== Reflecting on science and beauty ==

I love the web comic Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal. This particular one is fun and cool, especially if you compare it to a work I detest -- Walt Whitman’s smugly-vile and zero-sum poem “When I heard the Learn’d Astronomer.”

… or to this passage by Richard Feynman who – along with being one of the most brilliant physicists – was also a noted painter and one of the greatest bongos-players of all time. (And who I saw wearing his Nobel like a 1970s guru pendant with a hole drilled through it, at a Caltech dance.):

“I have a friend who’s an artist and has sometimes taken a view which I don’t agree with very well. He’ll hold up a flower and say “look how beautiful it is,” and I’ll agree. Then he says “I as an artist can see how beautiful this is but you as a scientist take this all apart and it becomes a dull thing,” and I think that he’s kind of nutty. 

"First of all, the beauty that he sees is available to other people and to me too, I believe. Although I may not be quite as refined aesthetically as he is … I can appreciate the beauty of a flower. At the same time, I see much more about the flower than he sees. I could imagine the cells in there, the complicated actions inside, which also have a beauty. 

"I mean it’s not just beauty at this dimension, at one centimeter; there’s also beauty at smaller dimensions, the inner structure, also the processes. The fact that the colors in the flower evolved in order to attract insects to pollinate it is interesting; it means that insects can see the color. It adds a question: does this aesthetic sense also exist in the lower forms? Why is it aesthetic? All kinds of interesting questions which the science knowledge only adds to the excitement, the mystery and the awe of a flower. It only adds. I don’t understand how it subtracts.”

It doesn’t, except in the desperate perception of zero-sum fools.

On another occasion: “Poets say science takes away from the beauty of the stars - mere globs of gas atoms. I too can see the stars on a desert night, and feel them. But do I see less or more? The vastness of the heavens stretches my imagination - stuck on this carousel my little eye can catch one - million - year - old light. A vast pattern - of which I am a part... What is the pattern, or the meaning, or the why? It does not do harm to the mystery to know a little about it. For far more marvelous is the truth than any artists of the past imagined it. Why do the poets of the present not speak of it? What men are poets who can speak of Jupiter if he were a man, but if he is an immense spinning sphere of methane and ammonia must be silent?"

Except not much methane, even less ammonia, and a lot more hydrogen. But then, I am a picky sci-fi poet.

Finally... combining science and creativity, watch the winners of this year's Dance Your Ph.D. contest, with inspiring entries from chemistry, biology, and physics.