One of the really cool things about living near Boulder, Colorado, is all of the science that happens there.  Boulder is a COLLEGE TOWN.  I put this in capital letters because the effect of the campus on the area has been substantial; in fact it has in many ways defined the area. The campus and the “Boulder Lifestyle” along the Front Range has attracted many institutions and companies to the Boulder area. Boulder is sort of the Berkeley of Colorado.

Boulder was hit hard by the hippy movement in the 1960’s and has never fully recovered. Today you can still spot old hippies wearing tie-dye and grey pony tails, gimping out of their BMW’s and into their expensive condo’s.  I’ll never forget when the Danskin craze hit Boulder in the late 1970’s.  My god …. I was nearly blinded.

Boulder has a NIST (National Institue of Standards and Technology) facility, formerly the National Bureau of Standards, which broadcasts time signals from the atomic clock on radio station WWV.

Within spitting distance of NIST is NCAR– National Center for Atmospheric Research. A small bit of the Woody Allen movie “Sleeper” was filmed on the Mesa Laboratory site.  In addition to watching the earth’s atmosphere, they also monitor the sun.

NOAA also has a facility in Boulder.  I’m not sure exactly what the mission of NOAA is relative to NCAR, but I do know that they are concerned with the interaction of the oceans with the climate.

The University of Colorado at Boulder hosts JILA, the Joint Institute for Laboratory Astrophysics, as well as LASP, the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics.  The upshot is that a lot of folks go to CU Boulder to study space science. I went to a few colloquia where Carl Sagan gave talks about various space probes. It was sublime.

Well, I really didn’t mean to write a valentine to Boulder, but there is a lot of cool stuff happening there.  Anyway, I recall as a part time student at CU in the late 1970’s going into some departmental office in Duane Physics and plopping down at a table to look at print copies of the Palomar Sky Survey.

These prints were negative prints of the sky, where the stars and galaxies were black against a white background. And what an amazing thing they record!  My gawd.  Galaxies and clusters of galaxies of all descriptions. Spirals and barred spirals and irregulars. These weren’t just “things”, they were “places”!  When you take the time to examine a deep sky survey, the thing that hits you is the large number of galaxies that are out there.  In fact, it is mind boggling.

It is impossible to view these images and not give it some metaphysical processing.  The notion that this big universe was fabricated by some cranky, jealous diety to host a nudist garden of eden on planet earth so that a pair of hairless bipeds can spend their time heaping praise upon him is simply what it appears to be. It is just absurd.  

The biblical story of creation is what you might expect from a people whose known universe was geographically limited to a circle of a few hundred miles radius.  The human brain is well adapted to note contrasts and dichotomy.  Light and dark. Warm and cold. Pain and pleasure. Left and right. North and south. Up and down.  We are enchanted by extrema and boundary conditions.  It seems to me that the archetypes of good and evil are a default dichotomy that human consciousness (or neurology)  spontaneously organizes when looking at the external world. 

The conclusion that the world must have been “created” is the result of a self imposed limitation in scope. The notion of cosmic creation by an anthropomorphic diety as opposed to an evolutionary process of nature is what you might expect of a culture that does not embrace the process of rational analysis and falsifiable conclusions.  Religion relies on the sacred, which is to say claims that are transcendent and beyond worldly analysis.  Religion has already made it’s conclusions and religious scholarship seems to consist of justifications of the conclusions.

Science is built on clay feet. A new tide of data arrives and the foundations are washed away to allow for new structures of understanding. Part of the great intellectual adventure of life is to decide where you stand. On the ready-made pillar of religion or barefoot on the beach of science.

Note: This is a distillation of my thoughts on religious matters. I’m sure that not a single concept or even blank space between the words above is an original thought, given the long and tired history of the topic.

I’m on of those freaks who worked for a few years before entering college. I made poor choices in utero with regard to the family I was born into and consequently have had to do everything the hard way. A few weeks before I started my freshman year in college I completed my pilots license (single engine, land).  The goal was to get a flying slot in USAF and then move into a flying career with the airlines.  My nearsightedness killed that dream deader than a rat.  Who wants to be in USAF if you can’t fly jets?  Crimony. So I went into chemistry by accident. Some would say that it has been a major accident.

Flying is an amazingly fun thing to do. In fact it is odd that more people don’t try it.  It is an adrenaline rush to taxi an aircraft onto a runway, point the nose down the centerline, and push the throttle to the firewall and fly off the ground. To have such raw, barely-contained power mashing you against the seat is a real thrill.  Once you lift off the realization dawns on you that the only way you’re going to survive this is by the skillful application of your wits.  Getting the aircraft configured for landing and rolling onto final approach and coasting down the glide slope to a touchdown on the numbers is true poetry.  It is an intellectual and emotional stimulation with which few things compare.

The fuel that piston driven aircraft use has a higher octane rating than that used by automobile engines.  The longer the stroke of the piston, the more power the engine can deliver to the propeller. But the longer the stroke, the greater the compression and the greater the need for higher octane. Consequently aromatic additives are put in Avgas to decrease the tendency for predetonation. One of those additives is is xylene.

One of the rituals of flying is the preflight walkaround of the aircraft.  You inspect the flight control surfaces, the leading edges of the prop for cracks or chips, the wing for tell-tale wrinkles, bugs in the pitot tube, and you drain a bit of the fuel from a low point in the fuel line.  You drain a fuel sample because you are looking for water droplets. Water in the fuel could lead to a loss of power during the flight, which is regarded as bad. 

During the fuel inspection, you get a whiff of the aromatic tang of avgas. It is the smell of adventure. The faint smell of avgas is in the cockpit as you strap the airplane to your backside and begin the engine start checklist. It is there during the taxi roll to the run-up pad where you try to convince yourself that the engine is operating nominally. Only after this when the task of takeoff is imminent do you ignore this smell and concentrate on the act of takeoff.

The other day I ran a reaction in the lab using xylenes. Without even realizing it I got a whiff of xylenes and my mind drifted off into the realm of flight.  For a moment I could smell the scent and hear the sound of an airplane clawing full throttle for altitude. I could rememeber trimming the airplane for cruise and dialing in the VORTAC frequencies for navigation.  I remember the dreamy sensation while cruising at 10,500 feet, listening to the Morse code of the VORTAC on the radio intruding into my consciousness over the comforting drone of the engine.  I recalled the words of my instructor- “Attitude, altitude, crosscheck…” and “keep your head on a swivel”. 

Then I realized that the solution in my sep funnel had emulsified so I set it down for a while and became lost in the memory of flight.

For the last few months I’ve been taken with what is becoming an unwieldy fascination.  It’s called radio astronomy. Turns out to be something that amateurs can actually take up.  There are a few websites devoted to the subject.  It’s not like antique cars or photography for which there are hordes of devotees and whole industries supplying equipment.  Oh no.  This field requires some freakish overlaps of interest- e.g., RF electronics and astronomy.

For some years now I have been a volunteer at a local observatory. It is a very nice facility and it is operated by some gifted folk. We have a custom setup featuring an 18 inch Cassegrain in an automated dome.  Because of other obligations my participation waxes and wanes like the phases of Venus.  We volunteers give star talks to visitors who arrive in great squirming masses for a glimpse of the cosmos.  We give star talks because we often have to wait for the sky to darken or for the clouds to pass. When the sky opens up, we take a dozen visitors up into the dome and skate around the celestial sphere for the eye candy.

Being a chemist and not an astronomer, I have to avoid delving too deeply into the science during a star talk because, again, I’m not an astronomer.  But this business of being a chemist (an atom scientist) in an observatory has forced me to think about what it is that we’re really trying to do in introducing the public to astronomy. 

It is very easy to present astronomy as the science of telescopes and constellations.  After all, we navigate the skies by referencing the constellations and we look at the interesting objects through an impressively large, yet nimble, optical device.  People leave after an evening of viewing being greatly impressed with the telescope and the observatory.  You can’t help it.  It’s cool stuff.

But the telescopes and all the assorted apparatus are really not the focus of the activity. Astronomy is really about the stuff that is across the vast distance in deep space. How much stuff is out there? What is the stuff doing? And, what kind of stuff is it? They’re George Carlin questions. These are really the central questions of astronomy but we largely pass by the details of the stuff in favor of the show business aspect- the whizbang stuff that you need to keep everyones attention for 45 minutes.  But, the goal is to capture the fancy of K-12 students, so juicing up the show with some mind blowing stuff is OK.  It is fascinating to note that it is the adults that have the hardest time keeping on track.

Whizbang astronomy is necessary to keep the public coming in because most visitors do not have a physics background. To really appreciate the subtleties it helps to have some book learnin’.  Public outreach is not about true learning.  True learning requires struggle and most people are not inclined to struggle with a physics concept for very long. Public outreach is about info-tainment.  

This isn’t a condemnation or criticism. It just stems from the nature of population interest distributions and the bell curve.  I’d fall asleep at a car show or a botany conference.

So, the goal is to evaluate a modest radio telescope capability.  There are several parts of the spectrum that offer signals to detect that are within the realm of possibility for a hacker like myself.  One band is from 20 to 24 MHz. The other is the H(I) line at 1420 MHz, or 21 cm. The sun and Jupiter are active in the 20 MHz range. There is a program sponsored by NASA devoted to solar and Jovian radio observation called Radio Jove.  For a few hundred dollars it is possible to assemble a radio telescope- a receiver and a dipole antennna- to listen to 20 MHz signals eminating from Jupiter and Io.  Picking up 21 cm radiation will likely require a 3 meter dish in order to get enough decibels of signal gain going into the detector. Anyway, this antenna technology is part of my learning curve.

Introducing folks to radio astronomy will serve as a kind of counterpoint and will require that people venture away from the narrow optical band. It requires that we think about the observation of signals that have no visual counterpart and what clues it may afford regarding the condition of matter.

This post is about NASA. Yes, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.  I have been watching NASA-TV for a few months and have experienced a kind of crippling inverse rapture.  NASA-TV is video pageantry designed to spread the gospel of rocketry and aerospace and I guess that is fine.  But it is mostly whizbang content that lacks a bit of substance.

Well, duh.  Of course.  They’re in the launch business, dummy.

I’m actually not going negative on NASA.  I believe in what the agency is doing and I’m pleased to pay taxes to support it.  But if you listen to what NASA people say, much of what they do is related to supporting the “science package”.  This is because space scientists need rocketeers to hurtle things out of the gravity well for them.

But this NASA venue never seems to pony up the science itself.  I have yet to see NASA-generated programming that offers much of the actual scientific grits and gravy.  Obviously, every morsel is written up in journal articles and fashioned into PowerPoint presentations to be scrutinized by squinting fuss-budgets (you know, “scientists”) in colloquia everywhere.  If you want to see the actual scientific results then you have to plop down at a university library with a journal and read the article or pay to download copy.  That’s fine, but this only serves the specialists.

It may be due to the nature of the funding. A PI comes in with a big wad of cash from a grant and basically NASA just provides the launch and control services.  NASA has no particular claim over the data or its disposition. Perhaps someone can set me straight on this.

Irrespective of how NASA works, here is what I’m frustrated with. Seeing the drama of the launch, the machinations of getting a probe to it’s destination, and then receiving the pretty pictures as the only reward. It puts me into insulin shock.  NASA is good at programming this kind of content- the Hope and Crosby road trip angle. But what are the results? What measurements were taken and what did we learn? NASA teases us with the show business end of space exploration but comes up short in communicating the scientific results.

So, here is what I’d like to see.  I would like to see a few researchers, with the support of NASA, periodically present their results to the public on NASA TV. I’d like to see the data and their conclusions and uncertainties- warts and all.  The public needs to see this.  Endless footage of exuberant space reseachers gushing at the potential benefits for mankind have worn thin.  It is time for these folks to tell us exactly what they are finding.

But some suggest that maybe raw science is too advanced for the public audience.  I’ve heard this sentiment before and can only argue that it is not NASA’s job to decide if we’re smart enough to understand the results from this research.  If the launch is important enough to spend $300 million on, then lets see what we learned.

The message we give people is that space science is the science of telescopes and rockets. This equipment is inportant, but it is not the focus of the activity. We launch these packages so we can study the stuff that is out there. How much stuff is there, what is the stuff doing and, what is that stuff anyway?  Let’s hear more about the stuff.

The public needs to see how data is collected and how it is reduced to some kind of conclusion.  Much of NASA TV consists of video feed from the ISS.  It is often mind numbing in it’s tedium, watching astronauts floating in front of a work station twiddling this or that. To hell with that.  Let’s see some data.  Let’s hear the scientists interpret their results.  Let’s all experience the buzz of enlightenment as a new concept washes over our consciousness. That is the true excitement of science.