Category: Science

Reactionary Progressives

In a scene straight from the nineteenth century, some leftist intellectuals declared a “settimana anticlericale” in protest of Pope Benedict’s proposed visit to La Sapienza university. Seemingly unaware of any anachronism, the proponents of this “anticlerical week” resorted to tired agitprop tactics, trotting out the same rhetoric against ecclesiastical tyranny that is so woefully out of touch with the benign papacy of Benedict XVI.

As the extreme left has been reduced to fabricating controversy in order to justify their anti-Catholic prejudice, the putative cause of outrage in this instance is an earlier comment by the Pope, dredged up from years earlier, to the effect that the Galileo trial was “reasonable and just.” These men of science, mostly physicists, who claim to advocate critical thinking, neglected to note that then-Cardinal Ratzinger was quoting an agnostic philosopher, the Austrian Paul Feyerband, in the context of examining several different philosopher’s perspectives on Galileo. The erudite Ratzinger is capable of far more sophisticated treatment of differing opinions than these self-appointed apostles of enlightenment, who react with knee-jerk advocacy, and laughably still espouse a “warfare hypothesis” interpretation of the Galileo trial that all serious historians have long abandoned.

The Enlightenment exhausted its philosophical possibilities decades ago, as evidenced by the strange paradox of eminent scientists immersed in nineteenth-century materialist philosophy, anticlericalism, and a puerile understanding of history as a conflict between “religion” and “science,” as though these were discrete, exclusive entities. How ironic that this ignorance should manifest itself in a university founded by a pope seven hundred years ago, when the Church was the sole institution that took any interest in fostering science. Aside from preserving practically everything we know of our classical heritage, and supporting most scholarly endeavors in Europe through the seventeenth century, the Church did nothing for science. The leftist faculty and students at La Sapienza could hardly be more decrepit if they called themselves Marxists and wore unkempt beards, as they are still fighting battles of a hundred years ago, apparently unaware of how the Church has long since risen above them. I have always found it curious how the term “reactionary” is reserved for conservative elements, when it is abundantly clear that much of the thinking on the far left is purely a reaction out of knee-jerk antipathy toward ecclesiastical institutions. The Enlightenment was supposed to raise mankind to adulthood, but instead it has yielded a culture that is thoroughly adolescent.

The Future of Manned Space Flight

The most recent mission of the space shuttle Endeavour has drawn attention once again to the fundamental deficiencies of the shuttle program. Although the damage to Endeavor’s tiles was not a threat to the safety of the crew, it served as a reminder of the problematic basic design of having the orbiter mounted alongside its solid rocket boosters and external fuel tank. Whether the debris striking Endeavour shortly after launch was foam or ice, it clearly came from the mounting bracket, and would not have struck the shuttle had it been possible to mount it atop the boosters and tank, as was the case in the Mercury and Apollo programs. The last shuttle missions will fly in 2010, and hopefully the successor vehicle will correct this basic design flaw, returning to the more successful earlier model, rather than banking on the supposed reusability of the orbiter.

In truth, the space shuttle as it exists is not properly reusable, as many of its parts need to be replaced or rebuilt after each mission, and there are extensive safety inspections needed to find fractures or other failures. NASA’s model of tolerating stress failures of individual parts, so long as they do not fracture sufficiently to cause the loss of a vehicle, and replacing them after each mission, was exposed by Richard Feynman in the wake of the Challenger disaster. At the time, there was an alarming propensity among NASA administrators to overstate the safety factor and grossly underestimate the probability of failure, which we now know from experience to be at least 1 in 100, consistent with the prediction of engineers in the 1980s. A culture of secrecy and concern for public relations prevented realistic assessments of risk, and prevented certain facts about the Challenger disaster from reaching the public. NASA prevented state authorities from performing autopsies on the astronauts, and downplayed evidence that the astronauts likely were alive and conscious during their free fall before impacting the ocean’s surface.

Among Feynman’s findings regarding NASA’s attitude toward safety was the irrational practice of regarding a situation (such as certain structural damage) as safe if missions have been successfully flown in that condition, regardless of any probabilistic assessment of failure. This posture resulted in the Columbia disaster, as NASA engineers mistook the success of previous missions as an indication that there was no intrinsic danger to the model of having the shuttle alongside its rocket boosters. Worse still, although the impact of foam against the shuttle tiles was recognized during the mission, the shuttle was authorized for re-entry, denying the possibility that there was a threat to the vehicle.

Now that the dangers of the space shuttle are more fully and publicly understood, it is increasingly cumbersome and expensive to assure mission safety. The space shuttle is also burdened with antiquated electronics and computer technology, so that its reusability has become a liability. A new manned space vehicle needs to be developed, more along the lines of the earlier successful American programs, and the currently successful Russian model.

The development of a new space vehicle, as part of NASA’s new objective of returning to the moon and landing astronauts on Mars, will undoubtedly limit its ability to fund other endeavors. Already, basic scientific research unrelated to manned spaceflight has seen reduced funding by NASA, even though important questions in astrophysics and particle physics can be explored with unmanned vehicles that are much more cost effective. Manned space flight increases the cost of research well over a hundredfold, and it provides no data that unmanned probes cannot provide, save for the effects of space flight on humans. Such a circular justification should not be the basis for an enormous investment. Even if scientific research on humans in space is necessary, this can be achieved on the International Space Station, which is also in danger of losing NASA funding. Considering that NASA advocated destroying Mir in favor of a new station that would not be in exclusively foreign control, it is understandable that European partners strenuously object to its plans to scuttle the ISS as soon as 2016, only six years after completion. The enormous cost and complexity of the ISS make comparisons to the space shuttle program inevitable, and given NASA’s recent track record, it is unclear whether they are institutionally capable of leaner, more efficient design for the moon and Mars programs.

It’s Official: Pluto Is Not A Planet

Finally, the International Astronomical Union has produced a definition of a planet, and Pluto does not qualify. This demotion of the “ninth planet” has been long overdue, and will make possible a more coherent description of our solar system.

Predictably, many have protested this decision, based on sentimentality or nationalist bias (since its discoverer was an American), as well as criticisms of the ambiguous and arbitrary nature of the definition. None of these criticisms can escape the fact that there is no consistent physical description of a planet that could include Pluto without also including several other existing asteroids, as well as potentially dozens of other trans-Neptunian objects yet to be discovered. Pluto has met the same fate as Ceres did in the nineteenth century. Originally thought to be one of a kind, it has been found to be smaller than initially thought, and but one of many objects in an asteroid belt.

Of course, in one sense it is certainly arbitrary to make a distinction between a planet and an asteroid, since both may have similar composition and orbital behavior. Nonetheless, the distinction that a planet dominates its orbital neighborhood suggests a further stage of development and greater prominence in a solar system. It is no argument to complain that with this new definition we may not know the true status of an object until we have explored the area around it. Many objects are necessarily classified ambiguously or erroneously due to lack of information upon discovery.

When we consider that there are only eight planets, we find many striking similarities among them that are not shared by other objects, such as Pluto. All have metallic cores, and all orbit the sun in the same direction, in the same plane as the sun’s rotation within a few degrees, in ellipses with low eccentricities that all have the same perihelion-aphelion orientation. The fact that the planets have such striking orbital similarities suggests that they formed around the same time as the solar system. We have four terrestrial planets, followed by a rocky asteroid belt, then four gas giants, followed by an icy asteroid belt. The asteroid belts are probably leftovers from planetary formation. Lastly, the comets, with their extremely eccentric orbits, are possibly stray interstellar objects caught by the sun’s gravity. At any event, this model is much more conducive to examining the problem of planetary formation than one that makes no distinction between the elegantly aligned eight planets and the chaotic asteroid objects that failed to attain this harmonious state.