Patience a necessity in scientific exploration
by Professor Mark Farmer
Originally published in the Athens Banner-Herald on Wednesday, March 24, 2010
http://onlineathens.com/stories/032410/opi_595363740.shtml

A little less than one year from today, NASA’s Mercury Surface, Space Environment, Geochemistry and Ranging space probe, MESSENGER, is scheduled to settle into orbit around the planet Mercury. Getting there has required careful planning, teamwork and an awful lot of patience.

Most of NASA’s missions have focused outward, away from our sun. The 1970s Viking missions, and more recently, the exploration rovers and the Phoenix sampler, have all sought to explore Mars, our next-nearest neighbor in the solar system. Both Martian rovers, Spirit and Opportunity, have been working hard since January 2004. While the rover Spirit appears to be permanently disabled, both now are resting, trying to get through another tough winter on the chilly plains of Mars where they have far exceeded their 90-day missions.

The deep-space probe missions of the 1970s have looked even farther out. Launched more than 30 years ago, the Voyager spacecraft visited the outer planets Jupiter, Saturn and Neptune. Having passed the outer edge of our solar system, they now are the most distant manmade objects in the universe. Both continue periodically to phone home and inform us about the outer limits.

But getting MESSENGER to Mercury has presented a different sort of challenge. In order to escape Earth’s gravitational tug, the spacecraft had to be accelerated quickly aboard a Delta II rocket. The next thing it had to do was slow down – way down. The gravitational pull of the sun is so great on a tiny spacecraft that if it misses its target, it will get pulled toward the sun and never be heard from again. To slow down, MESSENGER has had to complete a number of “fly-bys” of Mercury in which it loses a little bit of its momentum each time – a trick known as gravitational braking. For nearly six years, MESSENGER has been patiently flying toward this goal.

If all goes according to plan, a year from now, MESSENGER will finish its journey and settle into orbit around the planet closest to the sun. It will begin sending back a wealth of information about Mercury’s surface, atmosphere and perhaps even what lies deep in her core. But MESSENGER’s journey began long before her August 2004 launch. It started in the 1990s, in the minds of scientists like Sean Solomon of the Carnegie Institution of Washington, whose curiosity about the cosmos led him and others to propose the bold plan of exploring this innermost and smallest of planets.

He was joined in this quest by many of the brightest planetary scientists in the world, who devoted their talents to making certain the mission is a success. A great deal of planning goes into such a mission. What sorts of information do we seek, and what instruments will be needed? How much do they weigh? How much fuel will be needed? How do we get the spacecraft safely to its destination? Thousands of man-hours of work go into a NASA mission, and the fruits of these labors may not be realized for years, or even decades, later.

But the rewards can be great, too. What can the other planets tell us about our own past, or even our future? Is life unique to Earth, or is it an emergent property of the universe? As past explorers like Columbus, the Vikings or even the first Native Americans have demonstrated, mankind’s future may lie in exploration and settlement of new worlds far beyond what we can imagine from our own narrow understanding of our comfortable homes.

The essence of science is to try to understand the natural world. Many of us labor in the knowledge that our personal goals of understanding will not be achieved in our lifetimes. In my own area of research – cell biology – we have only just begun to understand the complexity that exists in even the simplest of cells. Each new discovery tells us more about our ignorance than it does our collective wisdom. Yet we are driven to explore, whether at the ever-smaller scale of molecular interactions or at the very edges of space and time itself. We know that these answers do not come easily and that the fruits of our labors may only be enjoyed fully by generations yet unborn.

Yet still we explore. It is human nature to do so. And scientists are very patient people.

• Mark Farmer is a professor of cellular biology at the University of Georgia and a spokesman for Georgia Citizens for Integrity in Science Education.

Forum: ‘Origin’ should bring wonder, not fear
Athens Banner-Herald Published Tuesday, November 24, 2009

In the past 500 years, there have been many great ideas that have affected human society, yet two stand alone.

The first occurred in 1543 with the publication of “On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres” by Nicolaus Copernicus. For many years this book, which challenged the accepted idea that the Earth was the center of the universe, was known mostly to scholars. It wasn’t until 1610, when Italian astronomer Galileo Galilei actively championed the idea of heliocentrism, that the average person began to consider the possibility that Earth, like all the other known planets, circled the sun, and together, our solar system is one of many on the outer edges of a great galaxy known as the Milky Way.

Galileo did so in the most elegant of ways, by having people use his telescope and see for themselves how Jupiter’s moons circled the great planet and then extending the concept to our own humble home.

Yet it would take another 75 years, nearly 150 years after Copernicus, for another great mind, Isaac Newton, to provide the final proof in the form of elegant and complex calculations.

Today represents the 150th anniversary of the publication of Charles Darwin’s “On the Origin of Species.” Darwin’s theory of biological evolution rightly has been called the second of these transformative ideas. In its simplest form, the theory states that all life on Earth is connected by way of common ancestry and that over the millennia, natural selection acting on naturally occurring variation has yielded the wondrous display of biological diversity we see today.

Copernican heliocentrism and Darwinian evolution both met with considerable opposition, largely because they challenged us to reconsider mankind’s place in the universe. To many they represent a threat, for to accept either would be to acknowledge that we’d had it wrong for a very long time. The Earth is not the center of the universe and mankind is not the pinnacle of creation. The ideas were revolutionary, even frightening, and were met with an attitude of disbelief and deep suspicion.

Today, only one of these ideas continues to be rejected. Despite the overwhelming amount of supporting evidence produced by geologists, biologists, and others, a great many of us repeat the mantra that there is no “proof” of evolution.

I dare say that every person reading this essay has come to accept that the Earth orbits the sun, and that this knowledge does not diminish our self-worth. I’m equally certain that few among us, myself included, has ever taken the time to carefully observe the movement of the planets, record the measurements, and apply Newtonian calculus to actually prove this to ourselves. Others, who are more talented than we, have done so many, many times. And we accept their conclusions.

So it is with evolution. To accept Darwin’s idea is to acknowledge that we had it wrong. Yet embracing his theory frees us from the prison of ignorance. Like Copernicus, Darwin allows us to travel in space and time and see well beyond our own narrow perspective. Rather than challenging mankind’s place in the universe, these two ideas liberate and enable us to move on to an ever greater understanding of the universe and our place in it.

Through our genes we are connected to every living thing. Through our chemistry we are connected to the Earth. Through our very atoms we are connected to the stars and the universe.

Big ideas indeed, and ones that challenge us to consider our place in the cosmos. These are ideas that should be embraced, not rejected. Ideas that should fill us with wonder and joy, not fear.

• Mark Farmer of Winterville is a professor of cellular biology at the University of Georgia and a spokesman for Georgia Citizens for Integrity in Science Education.

Last year, over 10,000 clergy members signed a letter supporting the idea that religion and science are compatible ways of viewing the world.

As an offshoot of the effort, the First “Evolution Sunday” was held Feb 12, 2006, Darwin’s birthday, at churches throughout the nation. Some of the sermons have been made available online. On February 11, 2007 the 2nd annual Evolution Sunday will be held.

GCISE hopes that this information can be of use to those trying to reconcile or help friends reconcile their religious beliefs with modern scientific evidence. Despite what the creationists contend, millions of faithful Christians and members of other faiths have no problem accepting the evidence for evolution and do not feel it threatens their beliefs in any way!

Clips from the site:

“The Clergy Letter Project is an endeavor designed to demonstrate
that religion and science can be compatible and to elevate the quality of the debate of this issue.”

“On 12 February 2006 hundreds of Christian churches from all portions of the country and a host of denominations came together to discuss the compatibility of religion and science. For far too long, strident voices, in the name of Christianity, have been claiming that people must choose between religion and modern science. More than 10,000 Christian clergy signed The Clergy Letter demonstrating that this is a false dichotomy. On the 197th anniversary of the birth of Charles Darwin, many of these leaders brought this message to their congregations through sermons and/or discussion groups. Together, participating religious leaders made the statement that religion and science are not adversaries. And, together, they elevated the quality of the national debate on this topic.”

Now a third year nuclear engineering student at Tech, I graduated from Marietta High School in 2003 — I’m really grateful, at this point, that I didn’t live a few miles away, in the Cobb district, because my science education got me to where I am now.

If the Cobb school board wants to make sure that students know that “evolution is a theory, not a fact” and that it should be “approached with an open mind, studied carefully and critically considered” let them. But insist that they also know that gravity is only a theory. Relativity is only a theory (imagine – your commute at faster than light speeds!). Nuclear physics is based on theories – we don’t really know how an atom is shaped and held together, but that theory is strong enough to power some areas of Georgia and most of France, in addition to many other places. If every scientific theory must be prefaced by an explanation that it’s “only a theory”, the whole thing will very quickly be (correctly) labeled as absurd.

Anyway, I just wanted to throw in my two cents. This whole thing has gotten way out of hand and it does nothing to help the students. I hope the school board realizes this soon, and realizes that religion belongs in a religions/sociology course, the home, or the church, not the science classroom.

Emily Colvin

Secretary, Mars Society @ Georgia Tech
Nuclear and Radiological Engineering
Georgia Institute of Technology

[Editor Note: Send letters or questions to questions@georgiascience.org.]