Water on the moon… Just wow!
According to NASA, this discovery may ‘hold the key to the history and evolution of the solar system‘ if the water is billions of years old. Potential sources include molecular clouds, solar winds, comets, or even somehow activity within the moon itself. There’s already discussion about the potential for development of a lunar space station. Phil’s got the details.
During the final month composing The Science of Kissing, it can be challenging to maintain a sense of the manuscript’s ‘big picture‘ while getting lost editing a single paragraph at a time. Fortunately, The Daily Dish has provided the distance and perspective I need–perhaps even a glimpse of the ‘first kiss’ ever–with this view of NGC 6302, a butterfly-shaped nebula surrounding a dying star. It’s just 3,800 light-years away in the Scorpius constellation:
Looks like a kiss to me too… Thanks Andrew!
Over at National Geographic, a scene around HD 172555 where scientists think a celestial collision took place a few thousand years ago!
Find more space photos here and check out the newly discovered gigantic suicidal planet…
Cool news from space I’ve been meaning to post…
WASP-17, a newly discovered planet about 1,000 light-years away, orbits in the reverse direction as the star it revolves around! This is BIG news in science because every other world we’ve observed does the opposite. Most likely, a near collision with another planet early on led to its strange orbit. The discovery was made by graduate students David Anderson at Keele University and Amaury Triaud of the Geneva Observatory with the UK’s Wide Area Search for Planets (WASP) project. WASP-17 is also estimated to be two times the size–but half the mass–of Jupiter meaning this becomes the largest known planet in the universe.
I just did a Huffington Post piece keyed straight to the news of the day–the Apollo 11 anniversary. It’s entitled “The American Science Deficit–And What to Do About It.” Here’s an excerpt:
Today, on the 40 year anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing, we will hear a great deal about NASA’s woes, the nation’s declining interest in space exploration, and much else. It is crucial, though, to set such observations in the context of a far broader disengagement with science that has occurred in this country since the late 1950s and early 1960s.
Launched by President Kennedy, the Apollo program was just the most prominent example of America’s dramatic investment of science in the wake of the 1957 Soviet launch of Sputnik. The first Earth-orbiting satellite, beeping at us from above, inspired stark competitiveness fears in the nation: Were we falling behind in technology? Would the Soviets fire on us from the skies, and if they tried, could we stop them?
In response, the U.S. Congress jacked up the budget of the recently formed National Science Foundation to $ 134 million, an increase of nearly $ 100 million in just one year. And that was just the beginning–NSF’s budget continued to explode in subsequent years, so that by 1962-1963 it had reached $ 12.2 billion. [This statement is mistaken: the 1962-1963 figure represents the total federal government R&D expenditure.] Meanwhile, Congress created NASA and passed the National Defense Education Act, providing generous funding to encourage American students to pursue careers in science and engineering.
And still, that’s just the beginning of the response to Sputnik. At the same time, President Eisenhower pulled science into the White House by creating the office of the president’s science adviser and the President’s Science Advisory Committee; even as the National Science Foundation drew upon the nation’s elite researchers in an attempt to remake the high school science education curriculum. Science journalism also boomed, as a generation of enthusiasts wrote about each daily step of the thrilling space race.
In sum, the policies and cultural changes unleashed in the wake of Sputnik shaped the course of American science for decades–and made us world leaders. But then, something went very wrong. Science budgets stopped rising and began to fall. Educational investment also declined. Science became ensnared with politics, first the foe of the religious right, and then something to be spiked at will by the Bush administration.
You can read the full piece here….
We’ve thoroughly read, and now plan to respond in detail to PZ Myers’ review of our book.
But first, some throat clearing. It may seem odd for authors to respond so extensively to their critics. In the olden days, such exchanges happened very slowly, if at all, through letters to the editor, and usually they weren’t very long. But this is the Internet age, and there are very different circumstances here:
The People Want It. Hordes of commenters are demanding that we respond to PZ.
PZ Asked For It. Myers did not write a balanced review, an indifferent review, or even a negative review. Rather, he misrepresented our book, got its arguments wrong, assaulted its authors (”their hypocritical and ignorant paean to mealy-mouthedness”), and finally ended by concluding that our labor of over a year is “utterly useless.”
We may not be capable of objectivity judging our own work. But we’re also receiving many supportive emails from people who like the book, are seeing it spark constructive dialogue about solutions on places like Chad Orzel’s blog or RealClimate.org, and are witnessing the careful weighing of its arguments’ strengths and weaknesses at places like Neurotopia. How could a book that is prompting thought and dialogue be “utterly useless”? Myers may disagree with our book in many respects, but debate itself is useful, is it not?
We Wrote a Contempt-Free Book. Myers’ charges come from someone who is directly criticized in the book, and who admits that his opinion “is colored by the palpable contempt [its authors] hold for me.” But there’s no “contempt” here–just entirely fair criticism of Myers based on his freely chosen actions.
But we’ll get to that.
In answering Myers, we will proceed in 10 points, spread across 3 posts to control their length. We will first summarize them here, and then elaborate in the next three posts until we’re done:
1. Getting Personal? Myers claims that our book contains “very direct and personal attacks on me and on Pharyngula, atheists in general, and anyone who fails to offer religion its proper modicum of respect.” We do not agree that we have launched any personal attacks.
2. Pluto. Myers doesn’t appear to understand our argument here, as we will show.
3. What the Book Actually Says. Starting with Chapter 1, Myers gives little if any sense of the book’s real contents and argument.
4. Carl Sagan. This is virtually the only thing Myers seems to agree with us on. But he doesn’t grasp the nature of Sagan’s uniqueness, or why Richard Dawkins is no Carl Sagan.
5. American Anti-Science. Myers claims the book “entirely neglects the anti-scientific forces.” This is false.
6. Root Causes. Myers claims the book “demands we avoid addressing the structural roots” of the problem of science in society. That’s false.
7. Science in the Entertainment Industry. By taking a single sentence about Richard Dawkins vastly out of context, Myers misrepresents our chapter on this subject.
8. Solutions. Myers claims our book “offers no new solutions.” This is false.
9. Bigotry. Myers flings this baseless, inflammatory charge at us.
10. The Problem with PZ Myers. Curiously, Myers doesn’t even address our criticisms of…him. But they’re serious and fair, and we will end by elaborating upon why, in the wake of the communion wafer desecration, we decided we had to speak out about them.
That’s how we’ll proceed, and we’ll begin with the first post in a few hours. The entirety of what we’ve written will carry over into tomorrow–but never fear, it is already drafted, and you will see it all soon enough.
While we welcome comment here, we ask that you do not pre-judge our rebuttals on the points above until they have actually been posted.
The first post is now up and can be found here.
There was a lot of press on this today, and I myself contributed–I talked at length to Alan Boyle of MSNBC, Pete Spotts of the Christian Science Monitor, and Dan Vergano of USA Today. The reason, of course, is that we have a book out about the disconnect between science and the American public even as Pew adds considerable new data that helps us further delineate the nature of the problem.
You can read the full stories above, but I’ll just add a few snippets showing what my interviews added to them. (more…)
Herschel–the largest far-infrared telescope launched into space–has captured it’s first image and Phil’s got the details!
Known as the Whirlpool Galaxy, M51 is practically our neighbor at just 25 million light years away.
I can’t help but wonder if just maybe, someone there may be looking back at us…
Much interesting stuff came up last night at the launch of the Franklin Institute Galileo symposium–but for now I’ll just highlight one central matter that dominated much of the discussion.
In attempting to make the famous scientist relevant to us today, Ruth Schwartz Cowan, the Janice and Julian Bers Professor of the History & Sociology of Science at the University of Pennsylvania, argued strongly that Galileo was a “pragmatist.” As a man without independent wealth, who lived in a society where the Church had absolute “juridical power” over his and everyone else’s life, Galileo had no choice but to cozy up to patronage and to papal authority. In the book that got him condemned, the 1632 Dialogo, Cowan explained that Galileo was under order not to advocate the position that the actually Earth moves–so he instead wrote an “on the one hand/on the other hand” treatment of the issue, to meet the letter of the law and leave it to the reader to decide.
But this raises a very stark question–if Galileo was such a pragmatist, then how did he get himself into so much trouble?
Chris has already posted the table of contents and introductory passages from Unscientific America. Here’s a glimpse at what comes next:
strong enough to have “cleared the neighborhood around its orbit” of other significant objects and debris; and so forth.
People were aghast. Not only did they recoil at having to unlearn a childhood science lesson, and perhaps the chief thing they remembered about astronomy. On some fundamental level their sense of fair play had been violated, their love of the underdog provoked. Why suddenly kick Pluto out of the planet fraternity after letting it stay in for nearly a century, ever since its 1930 discovery? “No do-overs,” wrote one cartoonist.
