Science and Society

I’ve been off attending yet another meeting the past couple of days. This one’s focused on science and its role in society. There are about 1,500 of us gathered in Boston to talk about issues in science communication and the ways that scientists, science writers and communicators, museum professionals, and others can communicate the complexities of science through the various forms of media that our society is used to seeing, hearing, and reading. One of the keynote speakers the first night was former vice-president Al Gore, who is probably one of the most intellectually diverse people I’ve heard speak in quite a while. As you might expect, he did talk about global warming, but it’s a subject he’s thoroughly researched, unlike some of the so-called “experts” out there who have politically motivated reasons to promote a one-sided (read: the current administration’s) view of the complex issues facing our environment. Mr. Gore gave a fascinating talk, was funny, human, and engaging. I wish we’d seen that side of him when he ran for president; we might not now be facing some of the dire issues we’re having to deal with in today’s toxic political environment.

I made it a point to meet with him afterwards to chat some more about some of the issues in science communication that he brought up; issues that I hadn’t really thought about since my days in graduate school when I studied the same subjects from an academic viewpoint. So, it was a little like going back to a grad school seminar with an engaging professor to discuss it all with. Talking with Mr. Gore was a great pleasure and I’m glad I had the chance to do so.

But, Al Gore was only one of many good speakers we’ve heard since the meeting began. There have been presentations on gaming to teach science, outreach from various public television web pages, issues in medical communication, blogging, vodcasting, the future of print media, and many, many others.

It has been refreshing to meet with science folk from all over the US—indeed, some have come from Canada, Mexico, Sweden and other countries. The overriding issues are really about how we as scientists and science communicators can do a better job of bringing science to the table in social and cultural situations. The “hallway” conversations are as interesting and informative as the scheduled speakers and panelists, and it’s been a privilege to attend.

The Not-Quite Circle Dance

Planets go around a star.
Their treks are journeys near and far
The paths are often neatly wound
on loops elliptical instead of round.

What makes these orbits not quite round?
The pull of gravity, it was found,
battles against an object’s need
to cruise through space at constant speed.
So, a planet’s path is a tightrope dance—
a deliberate trip, not happenstance.

Round and round, they go around…
But now we know, they’re not quite round

© 2007 Carolyn Collins Petersen
This poem about the orbits of planets was inspired by a talk I heard yesterday at Science and Society about how poetry can be inspired by science. The poet, Catherine Hughes, grew up in a family of scientists and found that much of her poetry was infused with themes about science. She made the case that writing about science in poetry can be an interesting, and perhaps even fulfilling, exercise.

So, I decided to give it a try. It’s kind of fun to take a scientific idea and work it into poetry. It doesn’t have to be perfect poetry”that’s not the point. Give it a try.

Building a Planet

I wish I could remember who said that planets are the ashes of stars; it’s not quite as lovely as “We are all starstuff,” but it’s certainly encapsulates the process that has to occur in order to get the raw materials for planets. You start out with a cloud of dust and gas in interstellar space; some of that dust and gas is from earlier generation of stars. Some of the materials start to stick together, and then more of them. Eventually, if enough of them stick together (and I’m greatly simplifying the process), you get a world.

Once a planet is formed (ignore the fact that I’ve skipped over a few millions of years of accretion), the process isn’t done just because the planetesimals are done banging together.

Nope, world-building continues, just in different directions and by different processes. On early Earth, there was a surface to be tended to. It got bashed in by incoming bits of stuff left over from the accretion days. In fact, everything with a hard surface in the inner solar system was cratered by incoming bits of interplanetary debris. There’s very little evidence of that bombardment (which geologists call the “late, heavy bombardment”) that you can see openly on Earth’s surface today (unless you know what you’re looking for), but you can see more obvious evidence for it in the cratered surfaces of Mercury and the Moon (for example).

Kilauea Caldera and Halema`uma`u Crater on the Big Island of Hawai'i, courtesy of the USGS Volcano Observatory.

Of more interest to us here on contemporary Earth are the processes of tectonism and volcanism, particularly volcanism. There are volcanoes scattered around the Earth’s surface (both on the continents and under the ocean waves), and they do a good job of building up Earth’s surface.

You can visit a place in Hawai’i where the Earth is created new each day. Lava pours out of this volcano, and under the ocean surface a few miles off the coast of the Big Island, another island is being built, entirely through the hard work of another volcano. I’ve hiked over the most active of Hawai’i's volcanoes and it is a sobering reminder of the creative (and destructive) forces at work in the planet-building and maintenance game. And, of course, there are other volcanoes on Earth which do a great job of re-paving the surfaces of planets and moons (think Io, at Jupiter, or the ice volcanoes of Triton and other icy moons in the outer solar system).

I mentioned tectonism up there… it’s a short term for a complex set of actions in our Earth’s crust (and on other “hard body” planets and moons, too). Essentially on Earth, the crust is divided into chunks called “plates” and those plates are in motion. You and I are riding along on a plate right now. There are dozens of plates in the Earth’s crust. In some of the places where they meet we see volcanoes formed as rock is heated by the friction of two plates rubbing together. In other places one plate dives under another. In other places,they spread apart, like giant conveyor belts carrying the continents away from each other.

Seafloor spreading at boundary of two plates. For more about plate motions, read here

Tectonics are also “blamed” for things like earthquakes, which also reshape the surface of the land. Tectonics builds mountains by shoving huge slabs of Earth’s surface up into peaks. What takes them down? Another surfaces-shaping force called “erosion” (or, what planetary scientists like to call “weathering”). Flowing water, blowing winds, the action of sand on a surface—all these erode the surface on Earth. So do sulfuric acid droplets (so-called “acid rain.”). And, you can see evidence of these forces on other planets. Take a look at Mars sometime and see what erosion, tectonics, and volcanism have done to its desolate surface. Or, check out some of the moons of Jupiter or Saturn. Tectonism and volcanism at work there, too.

When it comes to building planets, as you can see, the work doesn’t stop when the accretion and bombardment do.