Late last week, scientists at CERN announced they would be turning the Large Hadron Collider back on. The world's largest physics experiment broke down shortly after its first test runs in 2008 and has only been tested once since then. Unfortunately, the LHC will operate at half power for the next two years before being turned off yet again for another year's worth of repairs.
So science lurches forward, smashing together protons in search of elusive particles needed to fill holes in equations and answer some pretty heavy-handed questions. Some expect to find the Higgs boson particle from LHC experimentation, others expect to find that we've been wrong about everything for a long time, this is the beauty of science. The process isn't glamorous, it has taken 15 years and over $9 billion to build the LHC. Nor is it unanimous, but this is how we do science now. The figurative rock-star scientists of our generation are looking inward for their answers, combing through information at the microscopic level for a better understanding of our world.
To some, myself included, this prospect is astounding. To the general public, though, science has zoomed in too far for the information to be practical.
In the State of the Union Address, President Barack Obama talked rather extensively about everything—except science education. Sure, he mentioned that we were going to get our science and math rankings back up with a more poetic version of Bush's abysmal No Child Left Behind, but what do middle school and high school students care about world science rankings? Raising standards will only enforce the status quo that's steeped in economically compensating an abstract definition of success. We need to give American students a pivot point; some sort of touchstone where they can begin to explore what science has to offer and further it in their own way.
What's being left out of this particular equation is inspiration—inspiration we haven't seen since Apollo 11. But the question is: How do we inspire our science program to shoot for the moon, or at least our own modern equivalent?
""We live in a more cynical, skeptical world today,"" said Ron Seely, a science writer for the Wisconsin State Journal and UW-Madison senior lecturer of life science communications. ""It takes a lot to cause mouths to drop and eyes to widen.""
It certainly has become much harder to get people interested in doing science again. The space program is economically fatigued, and many people and politicians are calling for an end to NASA funding. Space exploration has become a political talking point that doesn't carry that same sense of wonderment that it once did.
But there are plenty of lessons to take away from the Apollo program, concepts that should be applied to the now pending Constellation Program, as well as other scientific endeavors. The moon landing taught us that we all had something to contribute to science. It started a conversation and put a bold public face to the sciences as well as the reach of human ambition. That whole feeling has worn off, though, and we're stuck with a rift between those who make science happen and those who benefit from it.
The conversation has become really one-sided, science attracting strictly ""numbers people"" and the humanities attracting ""creative people."" The Wisconsin Institute for Discovery is seeking to blur the lines between the two, and it's about time. Our frontiers have changed since 1969, but the way we go about science really hasn't. We've begun to explore other fields like particle physics, string theory and the ever-impressive field of paleobiology. These are all worthwhile endeavors, each one providing us with interesting answers and even more interesting questions. But none of our modern scientific accomplishments, with the exception of paleobiology, has reached out to the public like the moon landing did.
So, what is our final frontier? Who will be our man on the moon?
""What would really be remarkable would be to find a way to awaken people to the little-appreciated miracles that surround us every day,"" Seely said. ""How to open eyes to all that is strange and stunning about life—that's the real challenge.""
This couldn't be more true—the final frontier is all around us.
Though ""On the Origin of Species"" was published 150 years ago in November 1859, it has provided us with the framework for studying our final frontier—the planet Earth, past and present. With new knowledge and great computational power comes great responsibility. Recent developments in both the sciences and the humanities have made the understanding of the Earth as a series of complex processes entirely possible, the next step is to use them to our advantage.
Our man on the moon will be someone who steps up and rattles the old scientific paradigms so that all of our loose data and theoretical work falls into place. They need to provide us with the inspiration to look within to see that science is a narrative and that we are all a part of it.
Anthony Cefali is a senior majoring in biology and English. Please send all feedback to opinion@dailycardinal.com.
