petri dish

hollow heads? science, fantasy, and what's as plain as the earth beneath our feet

Newton's Principia Mathematica is rarely remembered today for having sparked speculation that we all go about our days traveling across the shell of what is a hollowed out planet --  but the devoted Edmond Halley improvised just such a theory in 1691 from the Principia as he pondered the mysteries of why the earth's magnetic field changes and the nature of such phenomena as the northern auroras.

Normally, in our surveys of the scientific revolution, we speak of a grand astronomical sweep from Copernicus through Brahe, Kepler, Galileo, and Descartes that culminates in Newton's restoration of the broken Aristotelian/Ptolemaic cosmos by mathematically divining the universal laws of nature. Halley himself poetically proclaimed the same, and gets recognition for wrestling the Principia out from Newton's study and into publication before the world -- and is noted as well for his own heavenly insights into the nature of comets, recognizing their elliptical periodicity and precisely identifying the cyclical nature of the one that now bears his name. If you're here on earth in 2061 you can see it come round once again . . . about 1000 years after its 1066 appearance, which was recorded in the Bayeux Tapestry, an eleventh century blog. But I digress.

Hollow earth speculation doesn't typically come up when teaching the scientific revolution, even if Halley in his venerable old age points us in this sober portrait not to look above for evidence of his achievements but to look below our feet, perhaps believing at age 80 that it wouldn't hurt to remind attentive minds of some unfinished business that could be taken on. . . not that what he had in mind was students in a 21st-century class in science and popular culture as his epigoni. As I plan for next fall's scipop class (now in improved, hybrid form!), I've been thinking a lot about the ambiguity that attaches itself to nearly every historical and contemporary episode we've grappled with in that class. The official version of the history of science carries with it the aura of progress over time. Science in the vernacular fits awkwardly within that sober frame, and instead tends to be presumed to display degeneration over time: witness the hollow earth, from Halley's hallowed hands to Saturday morning kid's teevee.  

In becoming acquainted with Halley beyond his normal orbit -- in his speculation on the interior physics of our terrestrial planet, and its possible habitation by hollow earth beings -- we followed along with the scheherazadean legacy of hollow-earth thinking as related by David Standish in his book The Hollow Earth. In contrast to the stern geometric proofs of the Principia, Halley's inner-space speculation appears as an eccentric footnote, but whether that's due more to 20th-century perspectives that encountered hollow earthism-primarily in the light of pulp fiction -- making Halley seem a bit too much like an early Edgar Rice Burroughs -- than to his arguments themselves is a fair question. But perhaps Halley can be indulged his hollow earth eccentricities, given his seventeenth-century context and his intrepid pursuit of the realities of magnetism, which was such a mysterious entity. As one present-day commentator suggests: "Today, of course, one can rather easily see the flaws with a hollow Earth theory, but no one can rightfully blame someone living in the seventeenth century for believing such nonsense, especially if it explained certain mysteries." Thus, with just a bit of well-placed condescension what might look like Halleyan nonsense remains respectable -- if a bit on the free-wheeling side of respectable -- and therefore a forefather of the scientific revolution can maintain his rational bona fides. Even still, I'm not betting any serious money on it turning up much in historical surveys of the scientific revolution.

Tales of a hollow earth persist through the next centuries in varying proportions of fact to fictionality (and despite little scientific support). Halley's idea of a race of rational beings populating the hollow space of the interior planet resonated with widely-current ideas up through the nineteenth century about God's omnipotence, in which it was presumed that planets that circle a sun must support sentient life, as does our Earth: God does nothing without purpose, and it is clear, therefore, that God would have placed life on other planets so that they would be inhabited in the same way as is our own -- "the plurality of worlds" hypothesis. (This idea can be seen in works that tackle scientific subjects such as The Christian Philosopher of 1721 by American Cotton Mather, the influential Puritan divine -- and Fellow of the Royal Society.) Mather's popularization of ideas about scripture and science were read well into the next generations, and is a likely source for sparking John Cleves Symmes, Jr.'s fascination with hollow earth theory. Symmes, a former U.S. army officer and frontier trader, began turning out circulars on behalf of hollow earthism in 1818 (with one sent direct to U.S. Secretary of State John Quincy Adams), and spread the good news that the interior could be entered into via holes at the poles. He kept up a vigorous schedule of public talks across the young republic until his death in 1829. The mantle (so to speak ;-) for proselytizing the theory and drumming up support for polar exploration had fallen more and more to an acolyte of Symmes's, J.N. Reynolds, a gifted public lecturer, as was sketched in 1826 by a newspaperman in New York city:

A gentleman of this city, who, never having heard the theory of the concentric spheres properly explained, had always viewed it as the wild chimera of a half-disordered imagination, lately attended one of Reynolds' lectures. He went, as he himself confessed, in hopes of hearing something sufficiently absurd to give good exercise to his risibles; but soon felt more inclined to listen than to laugh, and by the time the discourse was finished, became a thorough believer in what he had lately derided. Such sudden conversions, perhaps, are not the most permanent; but they are sufficient to prove that the above theory is more worthy of investigation than ridicule. (Quoted in Aaron Sachs, The Humboldt Current: Nineteenth-Century Exploration and the Roots of American Environmentalism, p. 125).

Reynolds would come to downplay the hollow earth / polar connection while becoming fired with even greater zeal for exploring the Antarctic regions as ends unto themselves, and he was so successful in selling the possibilities, that he convinced the Congress to fund an exploratory expedition to the regions of the southern polar seas, which set sail in 1838. Sachs sees Reynolds as a powerful embodiment of American Humboldtianism, and argues that it was Reynolds, "perhaps more than any other writer in the first half of the nineteenth century, [who] taught America the cosmopolitan value of seeing the world" (p. 21). But Reynolds's ideas  would reverberate transatlantically as well, if somewhat circuitously -- picked up at home by Edgar Allen Poe in some of his tales, and then translations of Poe's fiction into French caught the eye of Jules Verne, who would write Journey to the Center of the Earth in 1864, adding a popular new conduit for hollow earth lore: with it as a foundation of the new (or, to us, classic) genre of science fiction.

Puritan approval, Congressionally-funded voyages, one of the first works of modern science fiction -- the culturally-woven threads of the webs that gird the hollow earth lie not neatly laid out like longitude and latitude, but look something rather disorienting instead, a crazy-quilt line of Brownian motion. Once you get into the middle of this all, how do you determine "what's the bottom line"? Standish, takes a cool-kid kind of stance, introducing his book by stating nonchalantly:

There have been many books recently about important ideas or commodities that have changed the world. This one, I am happy to say, traces the cultural history of an idea that was wrong and changed nothing -- but which has nevertheless had an ongoing appeal (in his Hollow Earth: The Long and Curious History of Imagining Strange Lands, Fantastical Creatures, Advanced Civilizations, and Marvelous Machines Below the Earth's Surface, p. 13).

The cultural history of scientific ideas that were wrong and changed nothing: in my darker moments, this characterization does seem indeed to capture the historical hamster-wheel that marks my scholarly preoccupations with science and popular culture. And yet. . .

The hollow-earth history actually led me back to a novel I'd forgotten about, which had first appeared anonymously, in installments, in the Cincinnati Commercial newspaper in 1880, and was published about a decade later in book form as Mizora (when the author was revealed to be Mary E. Bradley Lane, about whom little is known). In Mizora, Lane fashions an alternate female-only reality that exists inside the Earth (discovered by adventuring through the northern pole) in which science and technology have done away with the biological need for men for procreation, and which supports a utopian society. In some ways, the hollow earth setting can be seen as just another variation on the ancient dodge of fictional utopian islands, the point being the existence of some other unknown place beyond our sight where an author's idealized world can flourish. Worlds had been turned upside down before by social critics, and a world turned inside out was perhaps nothing much different. And yet. . .

I suspect that imaginings about alternative realities were quickened in the last centuries as the strangeness of the terraqueous globe on which we live began to be better-known and to come under livelier scrutiny. The fact that geology holds a less glamorous place in the hierarchy of the sciences in our own time obscures the fascination that pondering the mysteries of the planet which supports our own existence held in ages past. The vigorous trafficking in hollow-earth speculation in the 19th-century might well provide fertile ground for historians to capture glimpses of the ways in which new visions of an active terraqueous globe fascinated a wide range of people, who then turned their curiosity to imagining what sorts of changed environments would support changed forms of human beings, or of the ways in which ancient subterranean life and contemporary terran life might be connected. That is, hollow-earth tales and their ilk may well represent a kind of hidden history of science, where non-specialists play with a protean set of evolutionary-like ideas in public, impinging on the official story in unrecognized ways. Such stories little-resemble the kind of hoary historical set-pieces about evolutionary debate that populate casual remembrance, such as the anecdote about Thomas Huxley and Bishop Samuel Wilberforce monkeying around about who was on Darwin's team and why or why not. What did evolution from the people look like? Maybe some of the answers are right beneath our feet.

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For more: To delve back into the seventeenth-century debate on the plurality of worlds hypothesis, see Bernard de Fontenelle's charming introduction, Conversations on the Plurality of Worlds from 1686, or satisfy your curiosity about what's known scientifically today about the earth's magnetosphere. For a quick explanation of the plurality of worlds hypothesis, see an essay from the Norton Anthology of English Literature. For a short explication of Halley and the hollow earth, see Patricia Fara, "Edmond Halley's last portrait," Notes Rec. R. Soc., 2006, 60:199-201. Professor Duane Griffin in the Geography Dept. at Bucknell has plumbed the scientific aspects of the hollow earth tales: see his "What Curiosity in the Structure: The Hollow Earth in Science" and "Hollow and Habitable Within: Symmes's Theory of Earth's Internal Structure and Polar Geography." Victorian science fiction as forgotten by historians of science is deftly described by Paul Fayter in "Strange New Worlds of Space and Time: Late Victorian Science and Science Fiction," in Victorian Science in Context, ed. Bernard Lightman. And yes, the Nazis had their own hollow-earth fantasies; that's a bridge too far for this post.

Images: The Halley portrait is from http://www.biographie.net/Edmond-Halley; the Bayeaux tapestry snip is from the wikipedia article on Halley's comet http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Tapestry_of_bayeux10.jpg; the Burroughs Tarzan hollow earth cover was from David Standish's book for posting here: http://archive.coasttocoastam.com/gen/page1558.html?theme=light; the Christian Philosopher title page is from the Open Library http://openlibrary.org/books/OL13520105M/The_Christian_philosopher; the last one is by William Reed, a latter-day Symmesian from 1906, posted at John Lienhard's Engines of Ingenuity site at http://www.uh.edu/engines/epi2180.htm.

Note: Many of the links were updated and modified on September 4, 2018 | The entry was originally posted on June 12, 2011.

 

wondering about wonder

As a new mother, one of the things I found odd about baby books and such was an overwhelming emphasis on farm animals. Now, I’ve got nothing against farm animals, but it did strike me as interesting that our youngest humans are fed a steady diet of rural domesticated animal life as their introduction to nature.

Having grown up near the ocean, I began tracking down picture books that featured the sea, and not only was it a relief to venture beyond e-i-e-i-o with my pre-schooler but it was interesting that the ocean books themselves seemed to have a different, savvier edge to them rather than evoking the placid warm fuzziness of the pastoral nursery. For example, Eric Carle's Mister Seahorse comes with a story at odds with the relentless emphasis on mommies that you find in baby world (abetted by all those baby farm animals and stories about their mommies), featuring those species of sea creatures where it is the male who takes care of the eggs – a baroque group that ranges from Mr. Stickleback to Mr. Kurtus to Mr. Pipe to Mr. Bullhead . . . strange creatures doing the unexpected, naturally. In Stella, Star of the Sea by Marie-Louise Gay, an endlessly inventive older sister answers the million questions her little brother (reluctant to wade into the big loud ocean) puts to her, not with scientific accuracy, but certainly with exuberance, explaining how starfish are stars who fell in love with the sea, for example. And that reminded me of something else about children’s books about nature and children's interest in the why and wherefore of how the world works: for me, at least, it wasn’t the "fact" books that caught my attention, but books that captured great and intriguing questions, evoking a sense of wonder, remaining with me even today.

I’m not completely out to lunch on this – well, or at least I’m in the good company of noted physicist and author Chet Raymo, who made a similar point in his essay "Dr. Seuss and Dr. Einstein: Children’s Books and Scientific Imagination." Raymo notes that "we live in an age of information. We are inundated by it. Too much information can swamp the boat of wonder, especially for a child. Which is why it is important that information be conveyed to children in a way that enhances the wonder of the world. . . If a child is led to believe that science is a bunch of facts, then science will not inform the child’s life, nor will science enhance the child’s cultural and imaginative landscape." In my own childhood my curiosity about how the world works was powered by fantastic books like The Phantom Tollbooth (with its explanations of infinity and the daily recurrence of the dawn that I can picture even still) and the time-traveling mystery of A Wrinkle in Time and a lavishly illustrated Giant Golden Book of Elves and Fairies (by Jane Werner and illustrated by Garth Williams). It still has a pull for other sixties kids as well – if you can find a used copy from the 1950s/60s, it will run you upwards of $100, depending on the condition. Luckily, there are 21st century reprints!)

A children’s picture book can weave a creative pattern that pulls you into the heart of nature in ways that leave an imprint on your psyche that few classroom science books will later on. One of my secret impulses, when someone asks me for a suggestion for a biography of Charles Darwin that might be a good introductory text for them, is to suggest they try Peter Sis’ brilliant picture book, The Tree of Life: Charles Darwin, aimed at grade-schoolers. I rarely give in to the impulse, however, presuming they’ll think I’m nuts, and instead suggest one of the impressive recent biographies that properly-credentialed historians of science have recently published. But if what they are really wanting to do is to brush back the shadows of time to try and capture the tangled bank within which Darwin lived, then in my heart of hearts, I think that Sis might be the better starting point
(and bewitch them, even as he did me, despite my being a professional science historian). Sis captures so much of the fascination of Darwin’s life and times in pages that open up like intricate Chinese boxes, full of one surprise after another, with a collage of words and pictures that draw on maps, diagrams, portraits, Darwin’s writings and a myriad of other details big and small contributing to an artistic analysis of the naturalist’s intellectual and social ecology, of his private and public habitats, that is hard to forget. 

In 1956, Rachel Carson wrote an essay for Woman’s Home Companion, entitled "Help Your Child to Wonder" (an expanded version of the essay can be easily found in several adult-focused editions that were published after her death). It begins not with a pastoral scene, but of a description of two humans, one older and experienced, one still new to walking and talking, facing the ocean on a tempestuous night, where, "out there, just at the edge of where-we-couldn’t-see, big waves were thundering in, dimly seen white shapes that boomed and shouted and threw great handfuls of froth at us." You don't get much farther away from e-i-e-i-o than that.

I don't think it is necessarily true that somehow children are more attuned to wonder than adults, but I suspect that wonder is a powerful emotion that only manifests itself when the person doing the thinking and feeling is immersed in a world where space and time has an ample, expansive dimension to it. If that's true, then in a world of 24/7 in which multitasking is honed to a high art and where walking by oneself without being immersed in an electronic bell jar is becoming a thing of the past, wonder doesn’t stand a chance of putting in an appearance as a daily matter . . . unless maybe, sometimes, in the pages of a children's book, in the space and time that binds together the reader and the read-to.

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For more: Madeleine L'Engle's acceptance speech, "The Expanding Universe," for the Newbery Medal awarded in 1963 for A Wrinkle in Time; Eric Carle's bulletin board idea exchange for parents and teachers using his books; Charles Dickens's mordant take on the meeting of fact-based science and children's fancifulness, in Chapter 2 of Hard Times (1854); and historian Caroline Walker Bynum's presidential address -- entitled "Wonder" -- to the American Historical Association in 1996.

Images: Cover illustration of Eric Carle's Mister Seahorse (Philomel, 2004) and Madeleine L'Engle, A Wrinkle in Time (Delacorte Press, 1991) -- illustration by Peter Sis and a page from The Tree of Life at nyla's pinboard.

Note: Links updated on 8.19.2018 / Published on 2.6.2006

does the 'doomsday clock' keep the right time?

[originally published in 2007]

One of the most famous images from the dawn of the nuclear era is back in the news: it is no longer seven minutes to midnight, but five, according to the board of directors of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, who announced that they were moving the hands of their famed "Doomsday Clock" closer to Armageddon. The "Doomsday Clock" first made its appearance on the cover of the Bulletin in June of 1947, a kind of visual shorthand that expressed the anxiety of many nuclear scientists about the arms race that had made the world a more dangerous place through scientific progress.

In the last 60 years the hands of the timepiece now have been moved back and forth a total of eighteen times -- the extremes of the timeline have been when the hands of the clock stood at two minutes to midnight in 1953, after the Soviet Union had followed the United States in successfully testing a new level of nuclear weaponry, the hydrogen bomb; at the other end, in 1991, the hands then slipped below the fatal last quarter, when they retreated to seventeen minutes to the final hour, due to the end of the Cold War and movement toward disarmament through the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty.

It's always news when the Bulletin changes the clock's timing, but there was an additional news hook in this 2007 decision: the increasing threat to world survival was pegged as coming not only from nuclear events, but from such phenomena as global warming. As reported in the Chicago Tribune -- "Doomsday Clock to Start New Era" (Jeremy Manier, 1.17.07) --

. . . when the Chicago-based Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists unveils the first change to the Doomsday Clock in four years, the risk of a nuclear holocaust will be just one among many threats that nudge the position of the clock's portentous minute hand. The keepers of the clock have expanded its purview to include the threat of global warming, the genetic engineering of diseases and other "threats to global survival."

It may be a stretch to put nuclear weapons and climate change in the same category, but that's one way the organization is trying to keep its 60-year-old clock relevant at a time when bioterrorism and radical groups can threaten the largest nations.

Indeed, this novel aspect of the nuclear experts reaching beyond the mushroom cloud to anoint climate change as a comparable danger, was duly noted and clearly highlighted by most outlets, as in this Canadian Broadcasting Corporation news story ("The Doomsday Clock Advances Two Minutes" 1.17.07):

Add a new crop of countries dazzled by nuclear technology to other global threats such as climate change and environmental degradation and the result, according to the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, is almost toxic.

"We stand at the brink of a second nuclear age," the board said in a statement.

The move from seven to five minutes from midnight was decided upon after scientists reviewed the current nuclear situation in combination with expected climate change, marking the first time the Doomsday Clock has ever reflected a separate world threat in addition to the bomb.

Even if, as Chicago Sun-Times columnist Neil Steinberg remarked, "The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists' Doomsday Clock has to be one of the most successful magazine public relations gimmicks of all time, right up there with Time's Person of the Year and the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue" (1.17.07), the roll-out of the 2007 model was newer, bigger, and better, apocalyptically-speaking. Even still-newsworthy icons need a brush-up, it seems, whether design-wise, or content-wise, to garner sufficient attention. An added kick was gained by bypassing the traditional site for Doomsday announcements: as noted by the Chicago Tribune, "in an added bid to influence policymakers and draw an international audience, the Bulletin is moving this year's announcement from its customary place in Chicago to a dual event held in London and Washington."

The bi-lateral press events did indeed seem to generate substantial coverage in the English language world, but even with all the "doomsday clock enters a new era" emphases, it seemed to me as if the stories would have fit relatively easily within the past world of a bygone time. Yes, the emphasis on climate science was new, but the key educational lesson seemed to fit comfortably within the venerable scientific organizational chart that places nuclear physics at the top, with what physicists have to say counting for more than the words of scientists from other disciplines -- there was a literal sense in which physicists were speaking for their other colleagues, graciously deigning to share their authority and the stage (metaphorically at least).

I found most fascinating the pictures of theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking from the London event, where photographers sought to couple Hawking the icon with the Bulletin's icon. Climate science may have been the newsworthy angle, but physics as arbiter was definitely a controlling visual metaphor. The photo at the left is one version, with the clock floating above somewhat like a heavenly image of doom; at the right is a different take, which very nearly manages to juxtapose the two, tightly framing the machine-bound thinker and the message that we have but five minutes of future to go before time expires and our brief history along with it. The third photograph, which accompanied an online bbc news article ("Climate Resets the 'Doomsday Clock' " by Molly Bentley, 1.17.07) manages to get the shot that everyone must have been after, whether conscious of it or not: the physicist's face and the timepiece's face, melded together in a doubly powerful dose of symbolism, his head held at nearly the same angle of incidence (so to speak) as the minute hand as it closes the gap counting down to the zero hour, literally overshadowing the scientific mind in the foreground.

Rather like nuclear physicist announcements of decades past, men appeared to dominate the photographic spotlight, whether through pictures of Hawking from London or by pulling old file photos featuring a male hand on the clock (for example, to the left; from Alaska Report, using a Reuters file image). In Washington, Bulletin Executive Editor and political scientist Kennette Benedict was also part of the stage presence, along with Ambassador Thomas Pickering and physicist Lawrence Krauss. These pictures tended to feature her rather awkwardly, as with this one that peers at her off in the distance fussing with unveiling the new time, with the men looking on as she finishes with the stagecraft. It looks somewhat like every tedious office meeting with middle management that you've ever had to sit through as they fuss with the flow charts. It just doesn't have the same authoritative impact as the others, diffusing the visual warning that the end of the world is nigh.

But the black-and-white analog 1950s feel to this news event also stems from the endless reiteration of the "doomsday" theme. Now the idea of doomsday has a long lineage -- one of my favorite examinations of the cultural resonance of this theme is Daniel Wojcik's The End of the World as We Know It: Faith, Fatalism, and Apocalypse in America (which includes discussions of secular apocalyptic themes in the nuclear era as well), and of course the idea of doomsday stretches back millennia -- but in the years after World War II, the growing awareness of the unprecedented destructive power created through atomic science -- especially with the H-bomb -- gave the doomsday scenario a new grasp on life (so to speak). As Wojcik argues:

The concept of a meaningless apocalypse brought about by human or natural causes is a relatively recent phenomenon, differing dramatically from religious apocalyptic cosmologies. Instead of faith in a redemptive new realm to be established after the present world is annihilated, secular doomsday visions are usually characterized by a sense of pessimism, absurdity, and nihilism. (p. 97)

The Doomsday Clock was an apt image for scientists to reach for in a Doomsday world circa 1947 / 1953 in which scientists saw it as their responsibility to blast the populace (and the policy-makers) out of what they saw as a complacent response of willful ignorance in the face of daily emergency; to the extent that scientists still address the public in such stark and urgent terms when informing them of scientific opinion on matters such as nuclear proliferation or global warming, then the Doomsday Clock certainly remains a relevant symbol. But if the Doomsday Clock is an accurate visual shorthand for the longer, more complex scientific arguments that undergird it, this does not necessarily mean it is (or was?) an effective communication device, in terms, at least, of engaging the public in a meaningful discussion of risk assessment, scientific expertise, political realities, and democratic decision-making.

A few years back I opened a discussion with the students in my history of modern science course about the continuing relevance of nuclear issues as a political matter by taking them through the timeline of the Doomsday Clock, and asking them to draw a picture of their own clock, and then write about what they thought the time should be and why. I was surprised to learn that many students resented what they saw as the manipulative nature of physicists choosing the last 15 minutes before midnight as their starting point. Many of them argued for placing the hands at 9:00 or 10:00 or 11:00 -- not because they were insisting that nuclear weapons were of little importance, but because they believed that their own starting points placed more faith in the power of human beings to maneuver within difficult straits. It might still be night, but we had been pushing back against the darkness and we were not at the last gasps before a total loss of control, of options, of hope. They were looking to be empowered, not diminished, as a motivation toward action.

In the eyes of the Bulletin scientists, no doubt my students would seem naive in rejecting the "minutes to midnight" framework. The Bulletin has an incredible amount of international political experience at their fingertips and intellectual mindpower at their disposal -- as the Bulletin's press release notes, the decision of the "BAS Board of Directors was made in consultation with the Bulletin’s Board of Sponsors, which includes 18 Nobel Laureates." It is true that there were no Nobel Laureates on my class roll that year. But I believe that these students were articulating an important reality, one that places the thinking of their generation at odds with the cold war mechanics out of which the "Doomsday Clock" is constructed, and where the "two cultures" norm holds sway [the expression itself a cold war era contribution by C.P. Snow]: brilliant scientific minds needing to get the attention of inattentive or lesser minds (such as those with a shaky grasp of the second law of thermodynamics as Snow suggested) by prophesying immediate doom. In a recent article, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists called their symbol "The People's Clock." After listening to my students, I don't think I would agree.

In his book Mad, Bad and Dangerous? The Scientist and the Cinema, author Christopher Frayling contends that:

Up until quite recently, real-life senior scientists have tended to present themselves like bewigged judges in court -- remote, out of touch, unconsultative, much given to pontificating and immune from criticism. And senior scientists have wondered why the public does not follow them every step of the way! Now there is much more consultation and much more emphasis on communications skills, but these tend to be confined to set-piece platforms or media debates in which the rhetoric of horror films -- on both sides -- takes over from serious discussion. 'Seeing into the mind of God' or 'destroying the planet' or 'my statistics are better than your statistics' or dismissive comments about lay people in the name of public understanding of science, tend to be the resulting headlines. (p. 226)

It is easier to re-animate old patterns of discourse, rather than to try, in a later phrase of Frayling's, to "break the flow" and find new forms of engagement. But if the public is truly to be a partner in a scientific conversation about pressing issues, then new strategies of discursive detente need to be deployed. In fact it may be time -- it may be past time -- to do so.
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For more: The Jan/Feb 2007 issue of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists has a very nice two-page layout on the history of the clock (even if I take exception with the title of the article), including a reminiscence from the artist, Martyl, who first created the image. There's an interesting historical artifact from Time Magazine online: a 1964 article entitled "Turning Back the Clock," which states that since "now there is less concern about Armageddon and less shock value to the power of the atom, the clock is ticking mostly for the Bulletin. Its funds low, the magazine is once more passing the hat." And speaking of whether or not the clock is outdated, Dood Abides at Unconfirmed Sources plays with the file photo of the Doomsday Clock to present, a new, shiny digital version for the 21st century :-) For more of Stephen Hawking's dire pronouncements about the fate of the human race, see "Prophet of Doomsday: Stephen Hawking, Eco-Warrior" by Geoffrey Lean in the Independent, 1.27.07. For an interesting undergraduate conversation by students from different majors about the "two cultures" idea, see this panel discussion, "The Two Cultures: Students Speak their Minds," from the University of Colorado.

Images: The very first image is from the homepage of the Bulletin, at http://www.thebulletin.org/; the original 1947 cover is from the Los Alamos National Laboratory Research Library, online at http://library.lanl.gov/libinfo/news/images/BulletinAS-cover.jpg. The first Hawking image is from the Telegraph ("Hawking: Doomsday Clock Closer to Midnight" 1.18.07) at http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2007/01/17/nclock117.xml; the second Hawking image is from the CBC article at http://www.cbc.ca/news/background/nuclearweapons/doomsday-clock.html; and the third image from the BBC is at http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/6270871.stm. The file photo shown on the Alaska Report is at http://www.alaskareport.com/reu77351.htm while the trio photo from the DC press conference was carried on an msnbc.com article "Doomsday Clock Moves Closer to Midnight" http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/16670369/.

everyday humanities vs. humanities a la russe

[Originally posted at my DayofDH 2014 blog; part 2 coming up here next week.]

One of the aspects for me of a day of reporting on and reflecting about digital humanities while doing digital humanities is to feel more intensely what it means to be switching back and forth between different worlds, over and over again, multiple times a day. It means trying to find my footing when plunging forward into working with digital tools that are still way too sophisticated and over my head in terms of their inner logic, and then later getting requests from colleagues to help them with technical issues that have long since become basic to me but seem baffling to them. It means having to rethink everything I know about university teaching in order to prepare for next semester's classes while working in settings where the professors who trained the professors who trained me and my colleagues could step into most classrooms and pick up where they left off without skipping a beat. It means having to travel back and forth from the open online world where all sorts of people are thinking out loud together to the closed physical settings of campus worklife which run by the rules of the old boys' network of 1950s America.

One of the hardest spaces to negotiate, though, is explaining why it is that I think that "digital humanities" is the vernacular that those with specialized knowledge> in the humanities need to learn to speak. (That there is a digital common tongue seems clear -- a low-brow world of selfies, lol cats, trolls, and students facebooking in class, perhaps?) But the "digital humanities" seems forbiddingly extra-specialized, imported as it is from the realms of computer science. Sporting arcane identifiers such as Ngrams, ArcGIS, Gephi and TAPoR, such tools seem intended to transform the "humanities" into the "mechanicalities" by mining text and programming data visualizations and who knows what else. No vernacularity there, only the in-group mystification that comes from speaking in 1s and 0s.

I guess what I am trying to get relates to the idea that increasingly, “common,” “local,” “everyday” knowledge is mediated by digital means, creating a digital vernacular that has different characteristics in its many-to-many communication dynamics, rather than the few-to-many directional realities of television, radio, movies, and print -- and the university -- (giving rise to a phenomenon that journalist Jay Rosen termed "the people formerly known as the audience" in 2006). Among other characteristics, the digital vernacular is a space in which people expect to be able to be active participants if they so choose. Digital tools of all kinds allow them to create, experiment, extend, improvise, share, and explore.

I think that playing with the digital humanities toolkit, especially in its ability to accommodate spontaneity and bring a sense of surprise and discovery to humanities scholarship through the hypothesis-generating possibilities it provides, comes close to speaking in the digital vernacular. Encouraging peer-to-peer learning, it can upend our ideas of who properly can be our peers, and provide the means for setting off on explorations together with non-specialists. Where the traditional model of learned specialist lecturing to novices who are just passing through our Gen Ed courses may have made vernacular peerage difficult to imagine, the tools in the digital humanities "toy chest" may shorten that distance and bring new possibilities into view.

From this perspective, it's not that digital humanities tools are pointlessly epicyclic, as many humanities scholars still suspect -- encouraging Rube Goldbergian ventures at odds with the powerful simplicity of the professionally-trained mind encountering a fragment of the human record and bringing forth knowledge as a result -- but rather that they can open up collaborative opportunities to work at scholarship with members of the wider public.

Why would we want to do this? Deep down, it just seems to me that this is our remit as educators: to make the humanities as widely available as possible, not simply for others to consume but so that they can make fuller use of the creative possibilities they contain. For much of the span of modern professionalization, we scholars have assumed that these creative possibilities belonged to us, really, because of the long, exacting apprenticeships we were required to undergo. The agreement was: we would spend our lives in study on behalf of society and we would dedicate our scholarship to advancing the frontiers of knowledge; in turn, society would support us financially. Sitting at the High Table of knowledge, our apprenticeships had given us the ability to negotiate the intricacies of humanities a la Russe with ease; everyday thinkers, however, likely found the elaborate tableware and its placement baffling. But it was enough that they helped to pick up the check.

There is a lot to say about why that formulation is not very helpful in this era. But for today, one part of the answer that keeps knocking around in my mind is that it is too much about us, and not enough about others. What if digital humanities gives us the ability to rewrite that compact between academia and society, in such a way that we recognize that part of our job is not simply to do humanities research on behalf of others, but to enhance the opportunities of others, in various ways, to be humanities researchers themselves? One of these days, I am going to be able to explain this...or maybe the point is just to get on with trying to make it happen

Images: Formal dining service layout from Carmen Rodriguez via a CreativeCommons Attribution  2.0 Generic license and the Rube Goldberg image via Wikimedia Commons.

the space race and the dark side of the moon: saying good-bye to roger boisjoly

In class last week we were talking about what it means to live our lives in an age of science by looking at everyday ways in which assumptions about science and technology become part of the "common sense" background to "what everyone knows." It's this background against which new information and events are absorbed, deflected, or judged. We looked at the famous "Duck and Cover" educational video from 1951 (featuring an animated "Bert the turtle") that taught baby boomer kids what to do in case an atomic bomb exploded nearby, and viewed a recent smartphone ad that deftly illustrated a theory of technological determinism in 30 seconds. And we also looked at myths from the Challenger disaster that linger on 25 years later (related post here). 

All three of these artifacts are instances of manipulating the perceptions of those on the receiving end, but the sky-high costs of the conventional wisdom relating to the Challenger disaster is one that reverberates most portentously. This was brought home to me once again in the news that Roger Boisjoly, one of the Morton Thiokol engineers who had argued against launching Challenger, had died last January. I had met Mr. Boisjoly in July of 2000, when I brought him out to OU to speak to our NSF REU on Human-Technology Interaction, as part of the Ethics Workshops I designed for the engineering, computer science, and social science undergrads with whom we were working. Mr. Boisjoly's story was well-known to me as someone teaching topics in science and technology studies. But his work on the Shuttle as an engineer intersected with my regular-person life as well, and was also a factor in why the ethical aspects of the space program (engineering and otherwise) was something that I spent time exploring. 

Growing up in southern California in the 1960s, we kids came by a "not a big deal" attitude toward the space program because it was embedded in the regional culture. We were used to playing outside and watching vapor trails cut across the blue expanse above us, and hearing window-rattling sonic booms that suddenly split the air, as test pilots hurtled far above the ground somewhere off in the distance. NASA missions would splash down in the Pacific ("our" ocean), and when the space shuttle program was being tested and then deployed, landings often occurred at Edwards Air Force Base. Of course one could play at space at Disneyland, with Rocket to the Moon (although most of us kids loved Tomorrowland best for Autopia, where we could finally take the wheel and cruise the open road: independently conquering terrestrial space at high speed was what we really wanted to do).  And swooping and soaring and radiating "Googie" (space age) architecture was everywhere, in the coffee shops where we had breakfast on vacation, at the gas stations where our parents fueled up, and at the places where we went to for fun like bowling alleys and movie theaters. Theatrical architecture entertwined with the space program in a more somber form as well: within swimming distance off the shore at Long Beach were artificial islands (which were actually oil rig sites,  elaborately concealed behind structures that looked like hotels with waterfalls and palm trees and colored lighting at night), which commemorated the deaths of the Apollo 1 astronauts -- Gus Grissom, Edward Chaffee and Ed White -- who had been killed when a fire broke out in the command module during a launch pad test in 1967.

Most of us had relatives and/or neighbors who worked in the aerospace industry at places like Rockwell, JPL, and TRW (one-third of the nation's aerospace engineers worked in southern California by the 1980s, and the industry employed a total of a half-million people). In my family it was my grandfather on my mother's side, Robert B. Barnes, an antsy high school dropout from small-town Ohio who was gifted at working with machines (he was a race car driver in the 1920s). He ended up in LA, becoming an employee at Menasco in Burbank in 1940. That's a picture of him from Menasco's annual report in 1946, which featured his story of rising from a lathe operator (.95/hr pre-war) to a position as an "experimental machinist" (1.90/hr), and about how he had been rewarded by "a committee made up of his fellow workers and management representatives" for a "suggestion he submitted for improving the handling of one of the parts of a landing gear." It was Menasco, in fact, that would later be the company that designed the landing gear that made it possible for the Shuttle to touch down on the ground upon re-entry. A small part of my grandfather's mind and hands had gone into the eventual developments that allowed each Shuttle journey to regain physical contact with home.

 Aerospace engineering was not simply about rockets to the moon, of course; we knew as well that such efforts were directly entangled with the much larger defense industry -- after all, that was what had made southern California's economic sonic boom possible during World War II. Tied into the cold war arms race, the duck-and-cover drills we practiced in elementary school were also part of the space program: missile technology could deliver thermonuclear weapons to our doorstep as well as power spaceships to escape the earth's gravitational pull. If somehow this fact escaped notice, Harvard-trained mathematician and singer-songwriter Tom Lehrer broke it down for everyone on the 1965 song, "Wernher von Braun" from his album That Was the Year that Was: "'Once the rockets are up / Who care's where they come down? / That's not my department', says Wernher von Braun" (Lehrer was a staple on Dr. Demento's locally-produced KMET radio show, which began in 1971 and was a Sunday evening ritual). Selling the moon through feel-good media p.r. didn't obscure the fact that the ride to get there was propelled by "establishment" logic that also fueled an increasingly unpopular war in Indochina -- and anger at the establishment was increasingly on display at such historic events as the 1970 student riots in Isla Vista at UC Santa Barbara.

What was it like to be an engineer during such turbulent decades, when pressures converged from multiple sources, and with such high stakes in play? How had the engineering profession, the political, defense, and media establishments, and American society adapted in the aftermath?

Was Challenger tied to Apollo 1 and could it happen again? It was questions like these in addition to Challenger itself that we put to Mr. Boisjoly, who answered as many as we could manage to ask, with patience and candor and an intense desire to convey to the students how hard it is to maintain personal integrity within organizations in which accountability is diffused and complexity impairs clarity. In the end, just as it was necessary for such high-risk endeavors as the space program to engineer redundant safeguards into critical hardware and software components, so did we need redundant social practices that ensured that ethical decision-making would not encounter catastrophic failures. It was in working this through in conversation with Mr. Boisjoly that it became clearer to me that the Challenger failures were not due to proximate causes alone (what was or was not said or done in the night before the launch, or even in the years of working on the o-rings), but they had deeper roots that stretched back to the emergent years of the cold war itself. In the end, we were all implicated in Challenger's failed mission.

In overseeing his visit and meeting with Mr. Boisjoly in those few days he was here at OU, there was no escaping the overwhelming sadness that he carried with him. He spoke softly for such a large man, and carried himself in a way that displaced as little space as possible. It was hard not to feel that each time he went over his presentations about the Challenger events that he was re-living them, the pain and anguish and frustration and anger right there: about the horrifying outcome, about what he saw as the betrayal of his management colleagues to insist that the criteria be shifted to the contractors proving it was unsafe to fly rather than the onus being on management to prove that it was safe to fly, and about how he could no longer work as an engineer after he was seen as being a traitor to his colleagues for bringing files to light that had been kept from investigators (whistle-blowing). He said, however, that reaching out to the next generation was the best way of having the world make sense again.

Mr. Boisjoly was in occasional contact by email, and a few years later I was thinking of finding a way to bring him back to campus, but then the Columbia disaster occurred in 2003. I knew I could barely imagine what that must have been like for him; although he had been dubious about whether NASA had truly absorbed the lessons of Challenger, there was always the possibility that the costs that had been paid by all involved would result in such an event never happening again. And now that possible future was lost forever. I wanted to write to him, but I never found the right words, and was too worried about intruding and causing harm. Perhaps what I've written here is some small substitute for what I should have been able to manage then. I hope that now that Mr. Boisjoly has "slipped the surly bonds of earth" that he is at last at peace.