Science Is Awesome!

I’m a little late coming to write this, mostly because I’ve been on vacation.  And to make matters worse, our hotel room didn’t have free wifi.  Really?  No free wifi?  Because your guests have no interest in the internet?  Even my dogs are equipped with free wifi, and they only use it to google “poodle” over and over again.

Anyway, it was while in our hotel room one Monday morning that I heard the latest news on the Mars Curiosity rover.  (It had landed just after midnight, while I was asleep.  I couldn’t manage to stay up for the Olympics, either.  I’m getting old.)

I looked at my daughter and said, “Do you know what happened while you were asleep?”

“What, Daddy?”

“While we were asleep, some people landed a car on Mars.”

"It's the red one.  No, the other red one.  Maybe we should stop and ask for directions."

 

I could tell immediately that she understood what this meant.

“Whoa,” she said.  “Does Mommy know?”

She thinks planets are pretty cool.

I like to think she gets that from me.  I’ve always been a sucker for space exploration.  I was born a decade too late for the moon landing, but I remember watching the first shuttle launch.  I even remember a family vacation to Florida where I watched a shuttle launch in person, from the parking lot of an IHOP.

And yes, I admit, sometimes science can seem boring.  Did you need someone to explain the Higgs Boson particle after the Large Hadron Collider announced they might (or might not) have discovered it? 

Did you manage to not fall asleep? 

The Higgs Boson particle is really important, and its discovery will change our understanding of the entire universe, but explaining WHAT it is and WHY it’s important is frankly dull to anyone without a PhD in quantum physics.

That’s the sad truth of a lot of science.  Very cool, if you understand it; very boring, if you don’t.  It reminds me of Harrison Ford at the beginning of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade explaining that most archeology is done in the library.

Bo-ring!

But every once in a while, science puts on its fedora, and sets off on a badass adventure of exploration and discovery that leaves all of us mere humans totally awe-struck.

And this time, they apparently did it with Batman.

That’s the only reasonable explanation for the bizarre method they came up with for landing the rover. 

Heat shield?  Standard issue. 

Giant parachute? Cool. 

Rocket powered sky crane?  Batman.  Totally Batman.

This is a big comeback for the space program, from retiring the shuttle fleet last year and the announcement that the next manned flight program would be cancelled.  That seemed like an end to NASA doing really cool stuff in the name of science, at least for awhile, and I was disappointed by the decision.  But then, it seemed that NASA’s gamble paid off, as private companies started competing to build rockets for the mostly mundane tasts of sending cargo and, hopefully, in the future, people, up to the International Space Station. 

That left NASA free to do other stuff, like building rocket-powered sky cranes!

By the way, that incredible feat of physics serves as the best answer ever whenever some child looks at the chalkboard during math class and says, “Why do I need to know this?”

Because when Apple launches its iRover, all that trigonometry is going to come in really handy.

Trigonmetry, calculus, quantum mechanics, relativity, all subjects sure to make the average person’s eye lids grow suddenly heavy, all matter because hundreds of years ago, Galileo decided to point his telescope up at the moon, at a time when no one really understood what the moon even really was.  Galileo knew that curiosity was the beginning of discovery, and tireless observation, experimentation, and relating solid facts without personal bias could reveal the truth of the universe.  

And he was tried by the Inquisition for doing it, and forced to never speak of his discoveries again.

It’s sometimes easy to think we haven’t come that far from Galileo, that science is still butting heads with religion.  It's easy to hang our heads in a long collective sigh and wonder if the human race will ever grow up.  But science and religion are two entirely separate things, and only one of them involves rocket-powered sky cranes.  (Unless the Pope is planning to upgrade the pope-mobile...)

As for me, I look forward to taking my daughter outside on a summer night, and turn her head upwards, to the stars.  And maybe we’ll even see a shooting star.  I assume her reaction will be something along the lines of, “Whoa.”  If not, maybe I’m not raising her right after all.  Because if a shooting star doesn’t elicit some amount of wonder, I’m not sure anything will.  And wonder excites imagination, and imagination inspires the future.

"Dad, that's just a flying unicorn, looking for a rainbow.  I've seen that, like, a hundred times..."

 

Maybe my daughter  will grow up to be a scientist, or maybe she won’t.  Whatever she grows up to be, I just hope she’ll live in a world where science will, once in awhile, put on its fedora and leave all of us awestruck, just like it did two Sunday’s ago.

And hopefully, it will do it with a rocket-powered sky crane.  Because that was awesome.