Commentary

Decline of the Technical

I took up ice skating about a year and a half ago. Before that time I had only ice skated a handful of times as a child, and my experience was painful, with my ankles bending badly in broken-down rental ice skates. I was in no hurry to go back to skating, but after my wife bought me a pair of hockey skates for my birthday, I found that I liked skating. Now I skate twice a week, and I've become quite good, good enough to venture onto the ice hockey ring.

I took a series of classes on ice hockey that featured, among other things, stick handling drills conducted by Middle Tennessee State University's hockey coach. Standing for the first class on the Predator's practice rink at Centennial Sports Complex (the Preds are Nashville's NHL franchise) and looking at the obstacle course of red cones marching across the ice, we listened in stunned silence as the coach told us to weave our way through through the cones with the puck and then come to back towards the net. "When you reach this point in front of the net, I want you to make a three-sixty and then shoot at the net." A woman next to me whispered to me "does he really want us to turn all the way around?" Hearing this, the coach skated up, grinning, and said "yes, and without stopping!"

My MTSU coached believe in setting the bar high. As I write the pages for this web site I find myself wondering how high to set the bar for understanding how the universe works. Common wisdom in the astronomy community is that if you show a mathematical equation in a general talk, you will loose your audience. I recall once a Harvard professor telling me that students complained when he wrote down an equation in an arts-and-letters introductory astronomy class.

But can one appreciate how the universe works without understanding some of the mathematical equations that describe the universe? Astronomy and mathematics are siblings that grew to maturity together. The works of Ptolemy on the motion of the planets have a structure that resembles Euclid's Elements. Newton invented calculus to solve the problem of planetary motion in terms of his theory of gravity, and many advances in calculus came from understanding how one planet gravitationally perturbs another planet's orbit. One cannot understand astronomy without some help from mathematics.

I imagine my audience as similar to myself, as readers who are not afraid of a challenge, who are technically sophisticated, or are on their way to technical sophistication, and who find that a subject is easier to understand when a good equations stands in for a hundred words. For us, there are few sources of information that are sufficiently challenging. A wide expanse has opened between the general interest literature, which assumes total ignorance about a subject, and the technical literature, which is understandable only by professionals in the subject.

Once technology magazines such as Popular Electronics had articles complete with electrical schematics on how to build radios, amplifiers, and other electronic devices. The book I bought about short-wave radios when a kid in the early 1970s contained schematics and instructions for building a side-band radio. Byte magazine up until the last few years of its existence in the early 1990s carried a regular column on home electronics projects. From the 1950s to the 1980s Martin Gardner wrote a regular Scientific American column, which had a broad following, on mathematical puzzles and problems; he discussed such esoteric subjects as cellular automata and strange attractors. In astronomy, Scientific American's Amateur Telescope Making, which is copyrighted 1937, contains detailed technical discussions of mirror grinding and optics design, including the mathematics of geometrical optical on several pages. This technical sophistication gave these magazines an aura of quality that were absent in the more general magazines. In the 1970s, reading Popular Mechanics was fun, but you were just a spectator; reading Scientific American made you feel a part of the scientific community.

Now one sees bits of jargon in the popular press, but seldom does one see an explanation with enough detail to lead to a true understanding of a subject. Clearly the media businesses don't see a large market for publications that fall between the the esoteric and the prosaic, which is a definite break with the past. This suggests that society has changed in its interaction with science and technology. While television and the schools come readily to mind as agents for this change, I think that the changes within science and technology themselves are responsible for the division we now see between the professional scientist and the public at large. Over the past century science and technology have changed from avocations practiced part time by individuals working in home workshops that produced society-changing advances to professions practiced by university, government, and corporate teams of Ph.Ds that produce results invisible in a highly-technical society.

My grandmother as a child road to school in a buggy. She would leave the horse tied-up in the school's barn while she attended class. By the time she reached high school, the school has a motorized school bus that brought the farm children to class. In my lifetime, car styles have changed, as have airliner styles, but only one truly new thing has entered my life with an impact similar to the impact the car had on my grandmother, and that is the computer. But after two decades of development, this device has become embedded into other devices, so that now, when we see a cell phone, we see a telephone, not a wireless supercomputer. The changes that these new devices bring is incremental rather than revolutionary. Science and technology have faded into the background to near invisibility, and with it, perhaps, a broad desire within society to understand these things.

But is there still a niche for a publication that treats its readers as part of the scientific enterprise? I believe there is, and I believe such publications must exist as long as university and government funding of pure science?science with no technological applications?continues, because if the broader workings of the universe cannot be understood by the part of society drawn to their study, there is no justification for funding these enterprises with public money (From a moral standpoint, I regard university money as public money, not as private money).

So where in the broad landscape should this publication be situated? I aspire to write these pages at three different level: a general level, a novice level, and a professional level. While mathematics is kept to a minimum in the general level pages, one need mathematics if one is to understand how the universe works, so some mathematics appears in them. I hope those readers who feel intimidated by this will give it a try. The bar isn't as high as you may think. After all, I was able to turn around on ice skates while handling a puck and while moving after only a couple of tries.