The debate will likely rage as long as there’s a faith-based camp to square off against the evidence-based camp.
With that in mind, and the weekend looming, we’re inclined to go with the Claymation camp, in the form of Time Chicken, Nick Black’s 6‑minute stop-motion meditation, above.
Described by its creator as a “philosophical-action-fantasy into the world of science, religion, knowledge and creation,” Time Chicken benefits from an appropriately bombastic original score performed by the Prague Symphony Orchestra and the seeming-eyewitness testimony of its admittedly clay-based, all-poultry cast.
Kudos to the filmmaker, too, for eschewing the uncredited dubbing that made fellow claymator Nick (Park)’s Chicken Run a crossover hit, trusting instead in the (unsubtitled) original language of his subjects.
Readers, watch this hilarious little film and weigh in. Which came first? The chicken? Or the egg?
Last summer, astronomer Michael Summer wrote that, despite a relatively low profile, NASA and its international partners have been “living Carl Sagan’s dream for space exploration.” Summers’ catalogue of discoveries and groundbreaking experiments—such as Scott Kelly’s yearlong stay aboard the International Space Station—speaks for itself. But for those focused on more earthbound concerns, or those less emotionally moved by science, it may take a certain eloquence to communicate the value of space in words. “Perhaps,” writes Summers, “we should have had a poet as a member of every space mission to better capture the intense thrill of discovery.”
Sagan was the closest we’ve come. Though he never went into space himself, he worked closely on NASA missions since the 1950s and communicated better than anyone, in deeply poetic terms, the beauty and wonder of the cosmos. Likely you’re familiar with his “pale blue dot” soliloquy, but consider this quote from his 1968 lectures, Planetary Exploration:
There is a place with four suns in the sky — red, white, blue, and yellow; two of them are so close together that they touch, and star-stuff flows between them. I know of a world with a million moons. I know of a sun the size of the Earth — and made of diamond. There are atomic nuclei a few miles across which rotate thirty times a second. There are tiny grains between the stars, with the size and atomic composition of bacteria. There are stars leaving the Milky Way, and immense gas clouds falling into it. There are turbulent plasmas writhing with X- and gamma-rays and mighty stellar explosions. There are, perhaps, places which are outside our universe. The universe is vast and awesome, and for the first time we are becoming a part of it.
Sagan’s lyrical prose alone captured the imagination of millions. But what has most often made us to fall in love with, and fund, the space program, is photography. No mission has ever had a resident poet, but every one, manned and unmanned, has had multiple high-tech photographers.
NASA has long had “a trove of images, audio, and video the general public wanted to see,” writes Eric Berger at Ars Technica. “After all, this was the agency that had sent people to the Moon, taken photos of every planet in the Solar System, and launched the Hubble Space Telescope.”
Until the advent of the Internet, only a few select, and unforgettable, images made their way to the public. Since the 1990s, the agency has published hundreds of photos and videos online, but these efforts have been fragmentary and not particularly user-friendly. That changed this month with the release of a huge photo archive—140,000 pictures, videos, and audio files, to be exact—that aggregates materials from the agency’s centers all across the country and the world, and makes them searchable. The visual poetry on display is staggering, as is the amount of technical information for the more technically inclined.
Since Summers lauded NASA’s accomplishments, the fraught politics of science funding have become deeply concerning for scientists and the public, provoking what will likely be a well-attended march for science tomorrow. Where does NASA stand in all of this? You may be surprised to learn that the president has signed a bill authorizing considerable funding for the agency. You may be unsurprised to learn how that funding is to be allocated. Earth science and education are out. A mission to Mars is in.
As I perused the stunning NASA photo archive, picking my jaw up from the floor several times, I found in some cases that my view began to shift, especially while looking at photos from the Mars rover missions, and reading the captions, which casually refer to every rocky outcropping, mountain, crater, and valley by name as though they were tourist destinations on a map of New Mexico. In addition to Sagan’s Cosmos, I also began to think of the colonization epics of Ray Bradbury and Kim Stanley Robinson—the corporate greed, the apocalyptic wars, the history repeating itself on another planet….
It’s easy to blame the current anti-science lobby for shifting the focus to planets other than our own. There is no justification for the mutually assured destruction of climate science denialism or nuclear escalation. But in addition to mapping and naming galaxies, black holes, and nebulae, we’ve seen an intense focus on the Red Planet for many years. It seems inevitable, as it did to the most far-sighted of science fiction writers, that we would make our way there one way or another.
We would do well to recover the sense of awe and wonder outer space used to inspire in us—sublime feelings that can motivate us not only to explore the seemingly limitless resources of space but to conserve and preserve our own on Earth. Hopefully you can find your own slice of the sublime in this massive photo archive.
As the co-founders of Impactstory describe it, Unpaywall is “an extension for Chrome and Firefox that links you to free full-text as you browse research articles. Hit a paywall? No problem: click the green tab and read it free!”
Their FAQ gets into the mechanics a little more, but here’s the gist of how it works: “When you view a paywalled research article, Unpaywall automatically looks for a copy in our index of over 10 million free, legal fulltext PDFs. If we find one, click the green tab to read the article.”
While many science publishers put a paywall in front of scientific articles, it’s often the case that these articles have been published elsewhere in an open format. “More and more funders and universities are requiring authors to upload copies of their papers to [open] repositories. This has created a deep resource of legal open access papers…” And that’s what Unpaywall draws on.
This seems like quite a boon for researchers, journalists, students and policymakers. You can download the Unpaywall extension for Chrome and Firefox, or learn more about the new service at the Unpaywall website.
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What do we live in: the only universe that exists, or an elaborate computer simulation of a universe? The question would have fascinated Isaac Asimov, and that presumably counts as one of the reasons the Isaac Asimov Memorial Debate took it as its subject last year. Though the so-called “simulation hypothesis” has, in various forms, crossed the minds of thinkers for millennia, it’s enjoyed a particular moment in the zeitgeist in recent years, not least because Elon Musk has publicly stated his view that, in all probability, we do indeed live in a simulation. And, if you can’t trust the guy who hit it big with Tesla and PayPal on the nature of reality, who can you?
Well, you might also consider listening to the perspectives of New York University philosopher David Chalmers, MIT cosmologist Max Tegmark, and three theoretical physicists, James Gates of the University of Maryland, Lisa Randall of Harvard, and Zohreh Davoudi of MIT.
They, with moderation by Neil DeGrasse Tyson, dig into the simulation hypothesis for two hours, approaching from all different angles its origin, its plausibility, and its implications. Davoudi, who has done serious research on the question, brings her work to bear; Randall, who finds little reason to credit the notion that we live in a simulation in the first place, has more of an interest in why others find it so compelling all of a sudden.
Whether you believe it, reject it, or simply enjoy entertaining the idea, you can’t help but feel a strong reaction of one kind or another to the simulation hypothesis, and Tyson contributes his usual humor to knock the discussion back down to Earth whenever it threatens to become too abstract. But how should we respond to the possibility of living in computed reality in the here and now (or “here” and now,” if you prefer)? The Matrixproposed a kind of simulation-hypothesis world whose heroes break out, but we may ultimately have no more ability to see the hardware running our world than Mario can see the hardware running his. “If you’re not sure whether you’re actually simulated or not,” says Tegmark, “my advice to you is to go out there and live really interesting lives and do unexpected things so the simulators don’t get bored and shut you down.” In these unreal times, you could certainly do worse.
Appearing at Oxford’s Sheldonian Theater in 2013, evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins fielded a question that’s now being asked unnervingly often in our anti-Enlightenment age.
Audience member: “The question is about the nature of scientific evidence. You both said, and I think most people here would agree with you, that we’re justified in holding a belief if there is evidence for it, or there are logical arguments we can find that support it. But it seems like this in itself is a belief, which would require some form of evidence. If so, I’m wondering what you think would count as evidence in favour of that and, if not, how do we justify choosing that heuristic without appealing to the same standard that we are trying to justify?”
Dawkins: “How do we justify, as it were, that science would give us the truth? It works. Planes fly, cars drive, computers compute. If you base medicine on science, you cure people; if you base the design of planes on science, they fly; if you base the design of rockets on science, they reach the moon. It works … bitches.”
A fascinating 20th century literary strain, “documentary poetics,” melds journalistic accounts, photography, official texts and memos, politics, and scientific and technical writing with lyrical and literary language. Perhaps best exemplified by Muriel Rukeyser, the category also includes, at certain times, James Agee, Langston Hughes, Richard Wright, Zora Neale Hurston, and—currently—Claudia Rankine and “powerhouse” new poet Solmaz Sharif. It does not include Edgar Allan Poe, famously alcoholic 19th century master of the macabre and “father of the detective story.”
But you’ll forgive me for thinking, excitedly, that it just might, when I learned Poe had published a text called The Conchologist’s First Book (1839), a condensation, rearrangement, and “remixing,” as Rebecca Onion writes atSlate, of “an existing… beautiful and expensive” science textbook, Thomas Wyatt’s Manual of Conchology, including the original plates and a “new preface and introduction.”
My mind reeled: what wondrous horrors might the morose, romantic Poe have contributed to such an enterprise, his best-selling work, it turns out, in his lifetime. (For which Poe was paid $50 and, typically, received no royalties). What kind of experimental madness might these covers contain?
As I might have assumed from the book’s total obscurity, Poe’s writerly contributions to the project were meager. For all his genius as a storyteller, he could be a long-winded bore as an essayist. It seems he thought this aspect of his voice was best suited to the original writing he did for Conchologist’s First. His biographers, notes University of Houston professor emeritus John H. Lienhard, all “mutter an embarrassed apology for Poe’s shady side-track—then hurry back to talk about The Raven.” Onion quotes one biographer Jeffrey Meyers, who writes, “Poe’s boring pedantic and hair-splitting Preface was absolutely guaranteed to torment and discourage even the most passionately interested schoolboy.”
As for its “shadiness,” the book also elicits embarrassment from Poe devotees because, as esteemed biologist and historian of science Stephen J. Gould wrote in his exculpatory essay “Poe’s Greatest Hit,” it was “basically a scam,” though “not so badly done” as most allege. The naturalist Wyatt, a friend of Poe’s, had begged his publisher to release an abridged student edition of his original lavish and pricey $8 textbook, which had not sold well. When the publisher balked, Wyatt contracted Poe to lend his name and considerable editorial skill to a more-or-less bootleg “CliffsNotes” version to be sold for $1.50. To make matters worse, Poe and Wyatt were both accused of plagiarism, having “lifted chunks of their book from an English naturalist, Thomas Brown,” Lienhard points out.
Gould defended Poe as a rewriter of others’ work. “Yes, Poe plagiarized,” as Lienhard summarizes the argument. He presented Brown’s, and Wyatt’s, work as his own, but, “fluent in French, [he] went back to read Georges Cuvier, the great French naturalist” and made his own translations. He wrote his own introductory material, and he reorganized Wyatt’s book in such a way as to provide “genuinely useful insight into biological taxonomy.” Poe’s edition—with its “formidable subtitle,” A System of Testaceous Malacology, arranged Expressly for the Use of Schools—actually proved a hit with students, and likely not only because it sold cheap. It was the only publication in Poe’s lifetime to make it to a second edition.
Maybe humanist readers approach the work with biases firmly in place, expecting a genre that’s dry by its very nature to contain all the literary brilliance and entertaining intrigue of “The Tell-Tale Heart.” Lienhard suggests as much, describing irritation at how his “literary friends” ignore the scientific work of writers like Thoreau, Thomas Paine, Goethe, and poet Oliver Goldsmith. “Poe’s excursion into natural philosophy,” he writes, “was an embarrassment to people who are embarrassed by science in the first place.” Maybe.
Both Gould and Lienhard shrug off the less-than-scrupulous circumstances of the book’s creation, the latter citing a “cynical remark” by playwright Wilson Mizner: “If you steal from one author, it’s plagiarism. If you steal from many, it’s research.” At least he doesn’t go as far as Mark Twain, who once wrote in defense of Helen Keller, after she was charged with literary borrowing, “the kernel, the soul—let us go further and say the substance, the bulk, the actual and valuable material of all human utterance—is plagiarism.”
Richard Feynman knew his stuff. Had he not, he probably wouldn’t have won the Nobel Prize in Physics, let alone his various other prestigious scientific awards. But his reputation for learning all his life long with a special depth and rigor survives him, and in a sense accounts for his fame — of a degree that ensures his stern yet playful face will gaze out from dorm-room posters for generations to come — even more than does his “real” work. Many students of physics still, understandably, want to be like Feynman, but everyone else, even those of us with no interest in physics whatsoever, could also do well to learn from him: not from what he thought about, but from how he thought about it.
On his Study Hacks Blog, computer science professor Cal Newport explains what he calls “the Feynman notebook technique,” whereby “dedicating a notebook to a new learning task” can provide “concrete cues” to help mitigate the difficulty of starting out toward the mastery of a subject.
Feynman did it himself at least since his graduate-school days at Princeton when, according to biographer James Gleick, he once prepared for his oral examinations by opening a fresh notebook titled “NOTEBOOK OF THINGS I DON’T KNOW ABOUT.” In it “he reorganized his knowledge. He worked for weeks at disassembling each branch of physics, oiling the parts, and putting them back together, looking all the while for the raw edges and inconsistencies. He tried to find the essential kernels of each subject.”
“At first, the notebook pages are empty,” writes Newport, “but as they fill with careful notes, your knowledge also grows. The drive to fill more pages keeps your motivation stoked.” In other, more general terms: “Translate your growing knowledge of something hard into a concrete form and you’re more likely to keep investing the mental energy needed to keep learning.” But how sure can you feel of your newly acquired knowledge if you don’t regularly test it? Feynman had to go face-to-face with the elders of the Princeton physics department, but if you don’t benefit from that kind of institutional threat, you might consider putting into practice another Feynman technique: “teaching” what you’ve learned to someone else.
In addition to being a great scientist, explains study-skills vlogger Thomas Frank, Feynman “was also a great teacher and a great explainer,” owing to his ability to “boil down incredibly complex concepts and put them in simple language that other people could understand.” Only when Feynman could do that did he know he truly understood a concept himself — be it a concept in physics, safecracking, or bongo-playing. As Frank explains, “if you’re shaky on a concept and you want to quickly improve your understanding,” try your hand at producing a Feynmanesque simple explanation, which will “test your understanding and challenge your assumptions.” Just make sure to bear in mind one of Feynman’s most quotable quotes: “The first principle is that you must not fool yourself — and you are the easiest person to fool.” And if you find that you have indeed fooled yourself, head right back to the drawing board — or rather, to the notebook.
Since our website took flight a decade ago, we’ve kept you apprised of the free offerings made available by NASA–everything from collections of photography and space sounds, to software, ebooks, and posters. But there’s one item we missed last summer (blame it on the heat!). And that’s NASA PubSpace, an online archive that gives you free access to science journal articles funded by the space agency. Previously, these articles were hidden behind paywalls. Now, “all NASA-funded authors and co-authors … will be required to deposit copies of their peer-reviewed scientific publications and associated data into” NASA PubSpace.
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