Commentary

Recent Commentaries

The Allure of Manned Space Flight.

At one time in the technological vanguard, manned space flight long ago slipped into irrelevance, as the technological forefront passed to computer science and biotechnology. Manned space flight remains frozen in time, but the roar of a rocket rising on a column of fire still has its visceral allure.

What's in a Name? (September 6, 2006).

The recent IAU decision to precisely define the word planet brings the word more in line with how scientists think about objects orbiting the Sun. This evolution of a term in astronomy as our understanding improves is not unusual; terminology is born in phenomenology, but it is refined in the confrontation of theory with observation. The demotion of Pluto to dwarf planet status has more impact outside of the scientific community than within the community.

Astronomy and the Liberal Arts (August 16, 2006).

Not every subject that a scholar finds fascinating is worth studying. Universities can approach the question of what to study from two standpoints: what does a professional need to know to perform his job, and what does a man need to know to live life. Astronomy has no commercial value; its study is justified by helping us answering some of our universal and timeless questions. In short, astronomy is part of a liberal arts education.

Content-Free Academic Freedom (August 2, 2006).

Professor Stanley Fish's idea of academic freedom is that the scholar can study anything that has an “intellectually payoff,” but he cannot proselytize his students to his beliefs. This view of academic freedom cannot work in the sciences, where an undergraduate education consists of nothing but proselytizing students to our basic understanding of science.

Estranged Theory (June 7, 2006).

The theoretical astrophysics community is limited in its ability to describe what we see in our universe, in part because our information on astronomical objects is limit, and in part because the physics underlying astronomical objects is too difficult to solve with pencil and paper or to simulate with a computer. For this reason, the theoretical astrophysics community is somewhat estranged from the observational astronomy community.

Intellectual Inertia (May 24, 2006).

We like to hang onto our old ideas. This is as much true in business as in science. But while the free market provides a force to encourage and reward the successful development of new business ideas and punish the continued pursuit of outdated ideas, pressures within the scientific community tend to reinforce a scientist's natural tendency to cling to old theories that come into conflict with new data. As a consequence, changes within the economy are evolutionary, while changes within the sciences are revolutionary.

The Urge to Explain (February 15, 2006).

Phenomena without explanation is as intolerable as a grain of sand in our shoes. When a phenomena is first seen, theorists flood the journals with theories to explain the phenomena. But astrophysics is almost always too complex to be solved on the basis of a handful of observations. Serious theories for a phenomena come after observers have answered some key questions, first of which is where in the universe are the objects creating the phenomena.

Planet Killers (August 24, 2005).

In 1930 the discovery of Pluto was regarded as a great achievement, for the effort to find Pluto was spurred by theoretical predictions of a ninth planet. But Pluto is embarrassingly small, too small to be the predicted ninth planet. Now we are finding more and more Pluto-sized objects beyond the orbit of Neptune. We should take the hint, remove Pluto from the list of planets in the Solar System, and simply consider it as one of the largest planetoids in the Kuiper Belt.

Flukes (July 27, 2005).

Many new results found in astronomy turn out to be statistical flukes. This is not surprising when we consider that scientific discovery has its elements of chance. Perform enough experiments within the community, and inevitably low-probability statistical fluctuations will appear and be published in the scientific literature. This is one reason why we repeat experiments.

The Theory Rush (July 13, 2005).

When the paradigm shifts, the papers fly, for the incentive to publish sketchy theories rapidly is strong. But to understand how this universe works requires tremendous work and many resources. Solid theories are a scarce commodity, and many ideas rapidly sketched in the literature never reach a sophisticated level of development.

The Unethical Advantage (June 22, 2005).

The unethical behavior of scientists made another appearance with the publication of a survey of misconduct in Nature that finds unethical conduct to be common. This study brought to mind one of my own brushes with an unethical scientist. Like the authors of the study, I believe unethical actions short of outright plagiarism and the manufacturing of data are corrosive to science, but until the costs greatly outweigh the benefits of unethical behavior, expect it to remain common.

Fantasy and Aesthetic Science (June 8, 2005).

The popular fantasy literature populates the world with fantastic objects. These objects exists to surprise and delight us with their departure from ordinary life. Science also populates its hidden regions with equally fantastic objects, but for a much different reason: to bring an aesthetic unity to science. Often these objects find their way into the fantasy literature, so that an object born out of a sense of order is used to excite a sense of wonderment in our universe.

A Ph.D. Deficit? (May 18, 2005)

Authors of a recent commentary in The Wall Street Journal argue that the United State is producing too few engineers and physicists with Ph.D.s. But the decline in the number of Americans receiving Ph.D.s in physics and engineering is offset by the number receiving them in the biological sciences, which are currently the most dynamic branches of science. Rather than evidence of economic decline, this is evidence that economic resources are being deployed in the most fruitful areas of technological advancement.