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Subject: What's New for Aug 09, 1996
WHAT'S NEW by Robert L. Park Friday, 9 Aug 96 Washington, DC
1. MARS: PRESIDENT DECLARES SEARCH FOR LIFE TO BE A MAJOR GOAL!
Dan Goldin's final words at the NASA news conference Wednesday
were: "We will do whatever we have to do [to validate the claim]
but we will be driven solely by scientific considerations." Not
everyone seemed to understand the full significance of Goldin's
statement. Taxpayers for Common Sense, for example, warned the
public to "Calm down and watch your wallet." In fact, the Mars
priority has the potential to save the taxpayers billions. The
primary scientific consideration is to avoid contaminating Mars
with Earth organisms. As one prominent biologist put it, "NASA
must either figure out a way to autoclave astronauts, or explore
Mars with robots." Robotic exploration is at least ten times
cheaper than doing it with people. Moreover, robotic exploration
eliminates the rationale for building a $90B space station.
2. BOOK REVIEW: "THE END OF SCIENCE" BY JOHN HORGAN. COULD IT BE?
It hardly seems like the "twilight of the scientific age," but
Horgan keeps score by discoveries that force us to rethink how
the universe works, such as the Copernican system, or Darwinian
evolution, or quantum mechanics. Life on Mars might do. Sooner
or later it will stop, he argues, perhaps when we figure it all
out, or we hit the limits of human intellectual capacity, or more
likely when the cost of going further is more than society is
willing to bear. As evidence that the end is near he points to
current theories, such as superstrings, that are unlikely ever to
be validated. His approach is to collect the views of Earth's
crankiest, most opinionated scientists. He ends with the feel-
good silliness of Frank Tipler, who derived the existence of God
(WN 7 Oct 94). Tipler is a metaphor. This, Horgan seems to be
saying, is where science is headed. Without empiricism to keep
score, one theory is as good as another. Has science manned the
battlements against the postmodern heresy that there is no
objective truth, only to find postmodernism inside the wall?
3. SCIENCE JOURNALISM: AP STORY WINS PRIZE FOR THE WORST ANALOGY.
The dateline was Salt Lake City, but that's not what made Ray
Jones's invention sound wacky. It was the description: "Similar
in spirit to dowsing rods used to search for water." You had to
read almost to the end of the 30 column-inch story to discover
that the "radiological surveyor" is not another "Quadro Tracker"
(WN 26 Jan 96). As bones fossilize they concentrate any uranium
from the surrounding soil. Jones showed that a lead collimator
attached to a sensitive gamma detector screens out enough of the
background radiation to scan for dinosaur bones near the surface.
4. IMPROVING SCIENCE JOURNALISM: 1997 APS MASS MEDIA FELLOWSHIPS.
Students with a physics degree can apply for two ten-week summer
fellowships to work as reporters, researchers or production
assistants in media organizations nationwide. Write opa@aps.org.
THE AMERICAN PHYSICAL SOCIETY (Note: Opinions are the author's
and are not necessarily shared by the APS, but they should be.)