At Harvard, a Report of the Committee on General Education was released to faculty recently, and although I haven’t been able to find the report online yet, I am impressed with some thoughts about it that Steven Pinker shares in this opinion piece in the Harvard Crimson. He acknowledges the value of the report but addresses two areas of concern, one a proposed “reason and faith” requirement, and the other the lukewarm language about science that the report uses. Regarding the latter, Pinker has some wonderful things to say about the worth of science:
…it is a remarkable fact that we have come to understand as much as we do about the natural world: the history of the universe and our planet, the forces that make it tick, the stuff we’re made of, the origin of living things, and the machinery of life, including our own mental life.
…
Also, the picture of humanity’s place in nature that has emerged from scientific inquiry has profound consequences for people’s understanding of the human condition. The discoveries of science have cascading effects, many unforeseeable, on how we view ourselves and the world in which we live: for example, that our planet is an undistinguished speck in an inconceivably vast cosmos; that all the hope and ingenuity in the world can’t create energy or use it without loss; that our species has existed for a tiny fraction of the history of the earth; that humans are primates; that the mind is the activity of an organ that runs by physiological processes; that there are methods for ascertaining the truth that can force us to conclusions which violate common sense, sometimes radically so at scales very large and very small; that precious and widely held beliefs, when subjected to empirical tests, are often cruelly falsified.
That’s a pretty good summary of some of the key features of thinking meat’s place in the cosmos and some of the challenges it faces, and I was pleased that he went on to say that education consists of understanding those facts to the point that they are second nature. And in the spirit of celebrating some of the wonderful things the human mind is capable of, I’m going to take bloggers’ license to cover a couple of stories that are only very loosely related to the Thinking Meat theme, but that are so cool I really wanted to write about them.
The first is the news that came from NASA today about the discovery that water has likely flowed recently on the surface of Mars, at least briefly. Using images taken by the orbiting Mars Global Surveyor (MGS), scientists found evidence that water might have flowed down gullies on the surface sometime since a 2001 image was taken. You can read about it in this press release from JPL; there are before and after pictures that show the deposits that appeared since 2001 and are believed to have been left behind by flowing water. It’s another tantalizing bit of information in the story of the possibility of microbial life on Mars, which makes it plenty interesting.
It’s also fairly mind-boggling when you stop to think that we are capable of seeing this kind of change on the surface of another world so far away. I’m on a mailing list that receives weekly lists of the best recent images from Mars Global Surveyor (which fell silent recently after an amazingly long and productive life in which it returned more than 240,000 images of Mars), and I’ve been regularly amazed at the wonderful things we’ve learned about the planet, not to mention the fact that I can sit cozily on my couch and with a few keystrokes call up sights that the most intrepid explorer of earlier times could only dream of seeing. In my opinion, missions like MGS, the Mars rovers, Galileo (which studied the Jovian system well past the end of its original mission), and Cassini (which is currently studying Saturn and its moon) represent some of the best things that human beings are capable of.
Another story in the news this week is about an ancient astronomical computer that was discovered in 1900 in the wreckage of a ship that sank in 80 BC. The Antikythera mechanism, named for the island off the coast of which the ship sank, has intrigued historians of science for decades, who have tried to figure out exactly what celestial motions it calculated. A recent analysis using nifty new imaging techniques has revealed new features of the mechanism and a previously unknown function (it computed solar and lunar eclipses). In fact, the analysis shows that it was more complex and sophisticated than anything that was produced in the thousand years following its creation. Researchers have been able to essentially reconstruct the innards of the mechanism and figure out how it worked to a degree impossible before. The link I originally put here in 2006 is now behind a paywall, so I will anachronistically link to a 2015 write-up by Jo Marchant in Smithsonian Magazine. An Astronomy Picture of the Day shows the mechanism itself, in all its mute encrusted glory.
This story is exciting for several reasons. First, no one knew until now that anyone in 80 BC was able to create such a sophisticated device for recreating the motions of the sun, moon, and planets. Second, the fact that we now have techniques for figuring out the way it worked despite the fact that it spent 2,000 years on the bottom of the sea is pretty impressive. The curiosity and ingenuity of our species are evident in both achievements. Also, there’s something very moving about this ancient piece of astro-gear being brought to light and studied so many centuries after it was made. I find today’s astro-gear fascinating, especially the huge new telescopes built over the last 10–15 years (or the ones still under construction), and this early example of the art and science of astronomical instrumentation seems equally beautiful and impressive to me.
It sure makes me appreciate the scientific process. We spend so much time focused on the results of science, or the limits of experimentation, or experimental tooling. But the real magic that makes science possible is communication. Observe, hypothesize, yada yada, PUBLISH. It seems inevitable (can you use that word for speculative histories?) that before sharing became ingrained in a scientific community, many isolated groups came up with all sorts of deep understanding, shared them with no one, then sank to the bottom of the sea. By contrast, as an open source programmer, my most insignificant hack is shared with thousands of other programmers practically instantaneously.
The point is that what makes mankind great is not the same as what makes men great. The individuals who built the Antikythera device were obviously brilliant, but they didn’t amount to a hill of beans because they didn’t publish, the community didn’t exist. Discovering the mechanics of celestial motion is essentially meaningless (and presumably happened zillions of times independently), but adding even the tiniest contribution to the community’s understanding allows us to compound our knowledge through the generations.