Harvard University Press Blog

A Wonderful Story of Spacetime

In Ripples in Spacetime: Einstein, Gravitational Waves, and the Future of Astronomy, internationally-acclaimed science writer Govert Schilling takes us through a century of scientific adventures to one of the biggest discoveries of history: the September 2015 detection of gravitational waves by the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO). Gravitational waves are produced by some of the most large-scale objects and cataclysmic events in the universe, associated with supermassive black holes, pulsars, colliding galaxies, and the Big Bang itself. There’s already a great deal known about how gravitational waves are produced—efforts to detect them have been ongoing since the 1960s—and further detections made with ever more sensitive equipment will provide astronomers with a completely new way of studying the violent universe, perhaps helping physicists finally solve a number of persistent uncertainties about spacetime.

Schilling looks back to the development of the theoretical and technical aspects of gravitational wave detection and also forward to those expectations for the future, all while conveying the persistence, excitement, and scientific significance of the hunt. As British Astronomer Royal Martin Rees notes in his Foreword to the book, Schilling “tells of boisterous controversies, setbacks, and amazing technical achievements by scientists and engineers who struggled for decades to achieve fantastic precision. He relates how they emerged triumphant, revealing clues to the bedrock nature of space and time. It is a wonderful story, engagingly and rivetingly told.”

In the video below, Schilling introduces Ripples in Spacetime.

Humans and Nature, Hopelessly Entangled

Henry David Thoreau, born two hundred years ago today, is known for his stay on Walden Pond but at heart was really one for rivers. So argues Robert Thorson in The Boatman: Henry David Thoreau’s River Years, which shows just how deeply Thoreau’s thinking and writing were connected to paddling and sailing. Thorson’s presentation of Thoreau as a data-driven environmental scientist also gives us a Thoreau for the Anthropocene, an outdoorsman deeply attuned to the ways in which mankind was reshaping the natural world. Perhaps surprisingly, from today’s vantage, Thoreau regarded that reshaping not as pure debasement, but as the unavoidable entwining of human actions with natural processes, a snarl that heightened conditions for his beloved boating, among many other effects. In the passage below, adapted from The Boatman’s Conclusion, Thorson gives us a Thoreau determined to both appreciate the benefits and diminish the detriment of that hopeless entangling.

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Concord’s makeover began when English colonials arrived to create a religiously based communal village on the banks of this lush river meadow. Historian Brian Donahue proved that theirs was a largely sustainable agrarian culture. Yet within a decade they were trying to reengineer their “Great River” landscape by ditching its bedrock outlet. When that failed for lack of technology, they explored the possibility of diverting floodwaters eastward through the meadows of Thoreau’s birthplace, over the watershed divide, and into the Shawsheen Valley. Their pioneering efforts inaugurated more than two centuries of human “improvements” driven by an exponentially rising American population and improved technologies. Maximum development—agricultural land conversions and industrial hydropower development—occurred in Thoreau’s generation. By the time of his death, virtually every square inch of the land had been transformed in some way: rock to quarry, river to canal, brook to millstream, wood to fuel, land to pasture, and field to cropland. The entire valley had become a network of dams, canals, turnpikes, railroads, factories, town streets, and country roads.

John Barry, in his history of American river engineering, describes the cultural zeitgeist of Thoreau’s century: “This was the century of iron and steel, certainty and progress, and the belief that physical laws as solid and rigid as iron and steel governed nature, possibly even man’s nature, and that man had only to discover these laws to truly rule the world. It was the century of Euclidean geometry, linear logic, magnificent accomplishments, and brilliant mechanics. It was the century of the engineer.”

Local monuments to that century were the Billerica dam, the Middlesex Canal, the Fitchburg Railroad, and the Union Turnpike. Each was a battle won in a war against nature launched by General George Washington’s Revolutionary Army. Since the dawn of antiquity, rivers, even more so than coasts, have been the primary battlefields in this war. The U.S. Geological Survey, acting through the U.S. National Research Council, summarized the situation in 2007: “Deforestation, industrialization, urbanization, floodplain cultivation, dams and levee construction, and channelization have altered dramatically natural flow regimes.” Thoreau, by the end of his life, had encountered all of these disruptions and disconnections in his own field studies.

One Line to Rule the World

Spring has arrived, and with it, daylight saving time. As the clocks go forward an hour in the UK, as they did earlier this month in the US, we’re taking a look at how Greenwich became the home of time. A new book by Geographer Royal for Scotland, Professor Charles Withers, asks the question, how did the prime meridian, a singular world-ruling feature, come to be sited in southeast London? Why was it chosen over Washington, Paris, or Beijing? The passage below, excerpted from the prologue of Zero Degrees: Geographies of the Prime Meridian, explains how the choice of Greenwich to mark 0° longitude would go on to solve complex problems of global measurement that had engaged geographers, astronomers, and mariners since ancient times.

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In November 1883, a sixty-seven-year-old English sailor addressed a letter to the world’s geographical societies. There are, he began, “some things that belong to all mankind.” What William Parker Snow had in mind was nothing less than a single prime meridian, a global base point or line to be used by all nations. From such an agreed point of terrestrial measurement, he reasoned, navigators and geographers could plot their voyages and align their maps, and perhaps astronomers could even chart the heavens, all using a standard point of earthly reference. One prime meridian for the world and only one, stressed Parker Snow, would be of “vast benefit to Science and Humanity.”

His appeal for a uniform base of measurement was rooted in personal experience. Born in 1817 in Poole, England, William Parker Snow was a sailor, an author, a sometime Patagonian colonist, a historian of the American Civil War, and, important to his own self-image, a veteran of Arctic exploration. He was also reputed to be psychic and lived, as one contemporary remarked, “on the edge of the Fourth Dimension.” Parker Snow’s supposed otherworldly powers, revealed in a dream in January 1850, convinced him (but few others) of the location of the ill-fated Franklin expedition that was lost in the Arctic in 1847–1848. As a young man, Parker Snow had himself nearly perished at sea during a storm when his vessel had a close encounter with another ship that had derived its mid-ocean position and course from an initial meridian different from his own.

Deepwater Horizon's Parable of Risk

The big-budget Hollywood take on the 2010 explosion of the offshore drilling rig known as Deepwater Horizon opens today. Directed by Peter Berg and featuring Mark Wahlberg, the film arrives as a star-driven disaster movie, suspensefully depicting events that included the deaths of eleven men, the destruction of a half-billion-dollar drilling platform, and the worst human-made ecological disaster in Gulf Coast history.

As is frequently the case with big productions, where the film ended up isn’t where it was always headed, and initial director J. C. Chandor had a different vision for the story before being replaced over “creative differences” with the studio. Chandor’s plan was apparently to tell the story from the perspective of “everyone that was on the rig,” with an ensemble cast of over one hundred people. It’s worth noting that, according to a new analysis of the disaster by two senior systems engineers, Chandor’s version was on the right track.

Earl Boebert and James Blossom use a systems model to investigate what happened at the Macondo well, focusing on the complex interactions of technology, people, and procedures. From their book, Deepwater Horizon: A Systems Analysis of the Macondo Disaster:

A system is a collection of components developed more or less independently—plus the people who operate them. Two things make it a system: it has an intended purpose, and it exhibits what systems engineers call emergent properties. An emergent property is something that arises from the interaction between components rather than from the behavior of a single one. Emergent properties are things like safety, security, and reliability. They are typically important and hard to quantify.

Emergent properties suggest the possibility of emergent events: events that result from a combination of decisions, actions, and attributes of a system’s components, rather than from a single act or from the failure of a single piece of equipment. The Horizon disaster was the very model of an emergent event.

A systems analysis resists the tendency to focus on a single cause, an urge so common, and so misleading, that it has a name: “root cause seduction.” That seduction, write Boebert and Blossom, “is typically at the heart of efforts to assign blame or liability rather than prevent future accidents.”

Grief, Mourning, and the Politics of Memorialization

Jay D. Aronson’s Who Owns the Dead? tells the story of the recovery, identification, and memorialization of those killed in the September 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center in New York City. The assault came at just the moment in history when large-scale DNA identification efforts were becoming possible, and innovations in biotechnology and forensic science led NYC’s Chief Medical Examiner to pledge the identification and return of all human remains discovered in the wreckage of Ground Zero. This massive and monumentally difficult task—the largest and most costly forensic investigation in history—was undertaken not just for the victims’ families, but also for a range of social, cultural, and political reasons that have contributed to fifteen years of contention and debate both within the community of families and between families and officials responsible for finding, identifying, and memorializing the dead.

In interweaving the forensic identification effort with the vexed planning for the 9/11 Memorial and Museum, Aronson demonstrates America’s struggle with the fraught composite of private and public grief that’s regularly visited upon other parts of the world. His book’s closing thoughts are below.

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On the evening before the National September 11 Memorial and Museum formally opened to the public, donors and corporate supporters were fêted with a cocktail party to recognize their contributions to making the museum possible. For relatives who had labored tirelessly to ensure the creation of a museum that honored the memory of their loved ones, the party was a culmination of more than a decade of advocacy and planning. For relatives who opposed the museum plans and had worked so hard to bring victims’ remains above ground, the party was an outrage. The event added to their sense that the people who planned and financed the memorial and museum were more concerned about their own legacies than the feelings of those who lost family and friends on September 11. The dead, it seemed to some, belonged first and foremost to the powerful.

The insult of having victims’ remains stored in the basement of the museum, and the perception that those remains were being used to entice tourists to pay for entrance, was too much to bear. For Rosemary Cain, mother of firefighter George Cain, museum officials were “grave robbers” using the remains of World Trade Center victims for “greed and ego,” not to uplift the nation or provide solace to those in mourning. For Jim Riches, the presence of remains in the repository would keep him away. “I’ll never set foot in that museum,” he insisted, “until those remains are out of there and above grade on a plaza in a respectful place where it’s open to all the public to go for free.”

Thus, in the end, the situation appears to be stuck in a web of competing interests and viewpoints. One can imagine many different outcomes, but there is no simple solution to the storage of the remains of World Trade Center victims that will satisfy every one. Sites similar to the National 9/11 Memorial and Museum—Srebrenica, Auschwitz, Gettysburg, Hiroshima—did not have to weigh the need to memorialize against the need to redevelop and revitalize the surroundings in the stark terms that confronted the stakeholders at the World Trade Center site. While dissenting families offered alternative locations for the storage of remains, the city dismissed them as being impractical.

Ultimately, the dispute about the storage of remains points to the fact that the new scientific identification techniques being developed in the context of the September 11 attacks and other mass fatality events are a double-edged sword. They promise, at least in theory, to eliminate the possibility of identifiable remains being left unidentified. But the same advances in identification techniques mean that remains must be cared for and kept present, both physically and in the minds of surviving relatives and society at large, until they can be identified. In her letter to 9/11 families regarding the transfer of remains to the repository, acting chief medical examiner Barbara A. Sampson, who took over from Charles Hirsch when he retired at the end of 2014, reiterated the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner (OCME)’s commitment to “do whatever it takes for as long as it takes to identify all those who lost their lives.” Thus, the remains of the World Trade Center attacks can never fully be laid to rest and become part of “the past.”

Vermont’s Healing Spaces

In Healing Spaces: The Science of Place and Well-Being, Dr. Esther Sternberg brought neuroscience, immunology, and architecture together to look closely at how one’s immediate physical surroundings can affect mood, the immune system, neural functioning, and general health. Drawing equally on the history of medicine and on emerging knowledge, Sternberg sought to demonstrate the complex relationships between health and environment. The findings presented in the book have broad application, but the central concern for healing made hospitals and other healthcare institutions the main focus of the book’s prescriptions.

And now comes word that the hospitals of Vermont have taken a step towards filling them. Inspired by Healing Spaces, the Susan Sebastian Foundation has completed the multi-year project of installing original works of art in each of the state’s roughly 400 inpatient hospital rooms. Sternberg, who didn’t learn of the project until it was near completion, confessed feeling deeply moved by the story. “When you write a book,” she said, “you never know the impact it will have, and to see my words made into reality on this scale is tremendously fulfilling.”

Tremendously fulfilling, indeed.

Nuclear Iran

As has been noted, the fierce debate over a potential nuclear agreement with Iran—which reached a fever pitch this week with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s speech to the United States Congress—amounts to an argument over nuclear fission being deliberated in an arena dominated by politics, not by knowledge of physics. Such knowledge is essential, though, both for assessing Iran’s current nuclear capacity to the extent we can, and for gauging the likelihood that Iran’s actual intentions align with those stated.

Theoretical physicist Jeremy Bernstein, known for his accessible science writing in the New Yorker and elsewhere, wrote Nuclear Iran last year to fill the need for a brief but complete discussion of the Iranian nuclear program from its inception to the present. The book offers lay readers a history of the sort of centrifuges used to produce the weapons-grade uranium needed for bombs, a discussion of the completely different technology required to produce plutonium and to use it in a nuclear weapon, and a blending of the technical and human aspects along the way. The piece below, adapted from the postscript to Nuclear Iran, compacts that science into a concise presentation of the state of Iran’s nuclear program and the potential for any agreement to contain it.

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The negotiations with Iran about its nuclear program are in process as I write this. The outcome is uncertain. But I would like to try to make the issues clear. To do this I will consider two limiting cases, neither one of which has any chance of being adopted but which serve as a useful foil for the discussion.

• Case 1: Iran agrees to give up its entire nuclear program. 
• Case 2: Iran does not agree to give up any of its program but does agree to enhanced inspections.

To discuss Case 1 we need to specify what Iran’s nuclear program is. I begin with reactors. To characterize a reactor, it is useful to specify three elements:

1. The power output
2. The fuel
3. The moderator

I begin with the power output. This is usually measured in watts—a unit of energy produced per second. The practical units for reactors are millions of watts (megawatts) and billions of watts (gigawatts). If the reactor is used to produce electricity, then two kinds of power produced are distinguished—thermal power and electrical power. The thermal power is the actual power that is produced in the fission process. This is generally converted into heat, which may boil water, making steam, which in turn runs the turbines that produce electricity. About two-thirds of the thermal energy is lost for various reasons in this process, hence the watts electric are about a third of the watts thermal.

Embryos and the Diverging Meanings of Life

In Embryos under the Microscope: The Diverging Meanings of Life, biologist Jane Maienschein gives us a thoughtful and historically contextualized look at embryos so as to better inform conversations that are too often clouded by politics. Scientific knowledge can and should affect our policy and social decisions, she argues, even when the science alone does not tell us what those decisions should be. In the conversation below, Maienschein outlines some of what we now know of embyros, and stresses the importance of allowing that knowledge to supplant conflicting assumptions about the workings and meanings of life.

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Q. Since before Aristotle cut open a developing chicken’s egg, scientists and theologians have theorized about embryos they couldn’t see. How does speculation about “invisible embryos” continue to shape contemporary thinking?

Most people have never seen an actual embryo, nor seen one develop from a fertilized egg cell. For them, embryos are largely “invisible” and imagined. Many people imagine a tiny person somehow there inside a woman who has just gotten pregnant, for example, and they imagine it as just growing larger over time. Yet in humans, the fertilized egg becomes an embryo and is called that until it is 8 weeks old; an embryo is not yet formed as a fully formed individual. Only after 8 weeks is it called a fetus, because it has the basic structure, the most important organs, and the very beginnings of the functioning of the human organism. Without knowing these developmental stages, and without actually seeing—through models or under a microscope—we are left to imagine what the invisible embryo looks like and how it behaves.

Q. What do the major advances in embryology over the course of the 20th century suggest about the trajectory of future science?

The case of embryo research shows how science is surprising and exciting in so many ways. Old assumptions give way to new knowledge, which leads to new insights and discoveries. The path is not always linear, and sometimes researchers get stuck in a way of thinking that takes a while to rethink. For example, most 20th-century researchers thought that once a cell becomes differentiated in a certain way, it will be fixed or determined in that way forever. We have learned that it is not that simple and that de-differentiation and re-differentiation is possible—with great potential for regenerative medicine. What history shows is the importance of becoming aware of underlying assumptions and rethinking them.

(SPOILER ALERT) You Are Not An Ape!

Why did human evolution diverge from that of our closest primate relatives? What can studying apes tell us about early human social structures? What actually makes us different? In the richly illustrated and referenced Apes and Human Evolution, University of Chicago Professor of Anthropology and Evolutionary Biology Russell Tuttle synthesizes virtually all we know about such questions to produce an authoritative history of the evolution of us. Below, Tuttle outlines some of the major topics addressed in the book, which he’ll be presenting at Chicago’s Seminary Co-Op Bookstore on March 20th.

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In Apes and Human Evolution, I argue that since the 19th-century evolution revolution, theories of human evolution have been biased by folk beliefs about the meaning of individual, sexual and group differences in appearance and customs and by world events, like warfare, and personal experiences of theorists. As apes became subjects of detailed study their behavior served variously to reinforce or refute notions of close similarity between them and us.

Over the past 45 years scientists who trained in programs devoid of anthropology have developed models that emphasize increasingly close affinity between African apes and humans. Some of them claim that chimpanzees are actually people (Homo troglodytes and Homo paniscus) or that people are somewhat more cultured chimpanzees (Pan sapiens). Such claims, abetted by popular books and other media, exemplify poor evolutionary anthropology and are offensive toward the very communities and heads of state to whom we must appeal for scientifically informed preservation of apes and their habitats.

Although the old argument about which nonhuman primates are closer to humans has settled on the apes, many puzzles remain regarding the extent to which we can draw on them as models for specific aspects of our variable genomes, morphology and behavior. Rare major and many minor fossil discoveries underpin phylogenic models of primate evolution over a span of geologic time greater than sixty-five million years, but small samples of fragmentary specimens and very patchy spatiotemporal representation usually limit their informational value. Our Linnaean family, the Hominidae, contained a notable number and variety of species that is difficult to organize into phylogenic lineages, only one of which terminated in modern Homo sapiens.

Where Language Comes From

Where did language come from? The question’s not as old as you may think, and the answer’s not as clear. There are all sorts of theories as to how and why humans developed language and the cognitive capacities that enable its use, and thus far there’s been little to recommend any one postulate over the others. The publication of More than Nature Needs, though, represents a breakthrough that author Derek Bickerton details below.

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This year is the ninetieth anniversary of the Linguistic Society of America (LSA), the country’s largest association of professional linguists. The event was, naturally, celebrated at the Society’s annual meeting on January 2-5 in Minneapolis with a commemorative symposium. Two issues were significantly absent: how language evolved, and where (if anywhere!) linguistics was going.

Granted, few linguists seemed even aware of language evolution until 1990, when Steven Pinker and Paul Bloom’s seminal paper Natural Language and Natural Selection and my book Language and Species were published. But since then, dozens of books and hundreds of articles on the topic have appeared. However, a substantial majority of them still come from writers in other disciplines, and perhaps that’s the problem. Thinking how language could have evolved entails dealing with data from several other sciences, and from its birth linguistics, balanced uneasily between science and humanities, has always been a somewhat cloistered discipline.

The Linguistic Society of Paris got things off to a bad start in 1866 by banning discussions of language origins from its proceedings. Since then, things have been worsened by the way schools and universities teach linguistics. In America a large majority of linguistics courses are limited to graduate students. Consequently while most college-educated persons have had significant exposure to physics or biology, linguistics remains terra incognita to all but a few. To the layman, a linguist means merely someone proficient in several languages; people at cocktail parties have no notion that to ask a linguist “How many languages do you speak?” is like asking a garage mechanic “How many cars do you own?”

For devotees of the Delphic injunction “Know thyself” (to be read, of course, as “Know what it means to be human” rather than “Know what it means to be Fred or Freda Smith”), these facts are tragic. A large part—maybe even the most crucial part—of being human is having language. Without it, how could we have science or religion, laws or codes of morality? Yet most books and articles on human evolution hardly mention language. Similarly, most books and articles on the evolution of language make no attempt to integrate it in the story of human evolution. As a result, we know more about the origins of the solar system or even the cosmos than we do about how we got language and all our other cognitive capacities. There are theories around, of course. But for most issues in science, there’s one theory that most people accept—the Nebular Hypothesis for the solar system, the Big Bang for the cosmos. For human language and cognition, theories are legion, and they’re all over the map, and it’s hard to see what would make any one of them preferable to others.