Science and the Concerned Voter

(NOTE: This was, at one point, a  letter I wrote to my representative. In blogging it I'm cleaning it up a bit and maybe going into more detail since, well, I am not as worried if you decide it's too long and don't read.)

Congressman,

 I am writing to express my concern that, as we look for ways to cut down on spending and increase revenue, scientific endeavors may suffer unjustly. Recently I learned that many programs, such as NASA's James Webb Space Telescope, may suffer drastic cuts in funding.

Even as a researcher, I realize that science, especially fields like astronomy, often seems distantly related to the lives and concerns of ordinary Americans, but I mean to demonstrate here that they are not. In fact, the pursuit of science is one of our most important activities, not just as a nation, but as a species.

First, let us consider the purely economic side of the issue. Investment in science pays off. Consider that I send this to you over the World Wide Web, an infrastructure created by physicists at CERN in Switzerland to share information amongst each other. I ordered a package from Amazon the other day; thanks to RFID tags and other sophisticated measures I can track it in real time as it journeys to me. And how much do we all benefit from the metallurgical and engineering studies that allowed us to build one of the best air-travel networks in the world? I could go on and on about electronics, chemistry, and that wouldn't even touch on the biological sciences, which are important because we are, after all, biological beings.

Obviously fields like material science and engineering have immediate, obvious applications, which is why industry so often backs these. But we must also recognize that science that seems entirely dependent on curiosity nonetheless frequently yields exceptionally important results. Arcane scientific theories and models can and do yield economic benefits, sometimes decades after their discovery, and investigations into the world around us often provide valuable insight into our problems.

-Atomic theory was invented by the Greek Democritus around 300 BC. Only after many centuries did we turn it into modern chemistry. Certainly, others helped along the way, transforming atomism from philosophy to science, but this may be the most triumphant example of science paying off only after long term development.

-Quantum theory describes the very small and very light elements of the world in terms of waves and probabilities. Famously, it involves such odd effects as matter waves, the uncertainty principle, and "spooky action at a distance"--Einstein hated it. It was developed first to explain why hot objects glowed the way they did, to explain why light could sometimes produce a voltage, and why hydrogen emitted and absorbed light at particular frequencies. Today it underlies our most successful theories of the universe and all of the electronics industry.

-General relativity is a complicated theory of gravity whose first application was correctly calculating the orbit of Mercury by imagining that gravity is actually the effect of warped space-time, which allows us to better handle accelerating reference frames. Difficult, complicated, not applicable to everyday life--but the Global Positioning System relies entirely on general relativity and its corrections for the flow of time due to gravity.

-The study of particle physics led to nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) tests to determine chemical composition, which in turn developed into modern medical MRI scans. Particle physics, of course, also gave us--and continues to give us--radiation treatments for cancer, nuclear power plants, and perhaps someday fusion power.

I started talking about the James Webb Space Telescope. Let me continue on the line of astronomy. Astronomers tend to define themselves according to the scale they work on. Some astronomers worry about our solar system, which is critical if we are to continue expanding outward into space, or to keep track of the many potentially hazardous asteroids that speed through the interplanetary void. Others observe other solar systems, trying to understand other planets and why Earth supports life so well. In an age of increasing ecological awareness, it's important that we recognize the observation of other planets helps us understand our own. For example, the greenhouse effect of CO2 is well demonstrated by gazing at Venus, a hot and inhospitable world. Even the study of galactic events like cosmic rays can yield important insights: cosmic rays may spur cloud formation and lightning storms as well as interfere with electronics.

In many ways it might seem ludicrous to spend much money gazing out into the universe. I wish to point out, however, that by looking out into the universe, we are also looking backwards in time (because if an object is far away, the light reaching us now was emitted long ago). This makes the JWST a way to probe the past and the beginnings of the universe. It may not be a purely economic reason, but I would hope you agree that this is a field of study that matters to every human being who wishes to understand the world they find themselves in.

"Every human being", of course, leads me to a more ideological stance. Science is more than an economic tool. To those of us who practice it--and to many interested laypeople--it stands as one of humanity's greatest accomplishments. It is an institution founded on open communication, friendly cooperation, and honest curiosity. Science and its discoveries benefit us all practically, but there is something in science that speaks to our souls. Cutting funding for scientific endeavors doesn't protect America. It doesn't protect us economically or militarily, certainly. Cutting funding for science is cutting funding for the future--for when we imagine the future in our stories and dreams we imagine what new technologies we will be capable of, what new surprises we will have stumbled onto, and what old surprises we will have explained. If any country wants to remain as forward-looking as America wants to remain, we cannot retreat back from our frontiers of knowledge, but rather must press onward boldly and with commitment.

I can't overstate the value of scientific endeavor. In fact, I can't make any statement concerning the worth of any particular experiment before it runs, because that is by definition impossible. If we knew what the results beforehand it wouldn't be science. In science we pursue the questions that have, as yet, no answer. We not know what we will find, but instead live by the words of the Nobel winner Richard Feynman, "I don't know anything, but I do know that everything is interesting if you go into it deeply enough"