HEADLINE: Someday the Sun Will Go Out and the World Will End (but Don't Tell Anyone)
BYLINE: By DENNIS OVERBYE
BODY:
I've always been proud of my irrelevance.
When I raised my hand to speak at our weekly meetings here in the
science department, my colleagues could be sure they would hear
something weird about time travel or adventures in the fifth dimension.
Something to take them far from the daily grind. Enough to taunt the
mind, but not enough to attract the attention of bloggers, editors,
politicians and others who keep track of important world affairs.
So imagine my surprise to find the origin of the universe suddenly at
the white hot center of national politics. Last week my colleague
Andrew Revkin reported that a 24-year-old NASA political appointee with
no scientific background, George C. Deutsch, had told a designer
working on a NASA Web project that the Big Bang was ''not proven fact;
it is opinion,'' and thus the word ''theory'' should be used with every
mention of Big Bang.
It was not NASA's
place, he said in an e-mail message, to make a declaration about the
origin of the universe ''that discounts intelligent design by a
creator.''
In a different example of
spinning science news last month, NASA headquarters removed a reference
to the future death of the sun from a press release about the discovery
of comet dust around a distant star known as a white dwarf. A white
dwarf, a shrunken dense cinder about the size of earth, is how our own
sun is fated to spend eternity, astronomers say, about five billion
years from now, once it has burned its fuel.
''We are seeing the ghost of a star that was once a lot like our sun,''
said Marc Kuchner of the Goddard Space Flight Center. In a statement
that was edited out of the final news release he went on to say, ''I
cringed when I saw the data because it probably reflects the grim but
very distant future of our own planets and solar system.''
An e-mail message from Erica Hupp at NASA headquarters to the authors
of the original release at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena,
Calif., said, ''NASA is not in the habit of frightening the public with
doom and gloom scenarios.''
Never mind that the death of the sun has been a staple of astronomy textbooks for 50 years.
Dean Acosta, NASA's deputy assistant administrator for public affairs,
said the editing of Dr. Kuchner's comments was part of the normal
''give and take'' involved in producing a press release. ''There was
not one political person involved at all,'' he said.
Personally, I can't get enough of gloom- and-doom scenarios. I'm
enchanted by the recent discovery, buttressed by observations from
NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, that an antigravitational force known as
dark energy might suck all galaxies out of the observable universe in a
few hundred billion years and even rip apart atoms and space. But I
never dreamed that I might be frightening the adults.
What's next? Will future presidential candidates debate the ontological
status of Schrodinger's cat? That's the cat that, according to the
uncertainty principle of quantum physics, is both alive and dead until
we observe it.
Apparently science does matter.
Dreading the prospect that they too may be dragged into the culture
wars, astronomers have watched from the sidelines in recent years as
creationists in Kansas and Pennsylvania challenged the teaching of
evolution in classrooms. Never mind that the Big Bang has been
officially accepted by the Roman Catholic Church for half a century.
The notion of a 14-billion-year-old cosmos doesn't fit if you believe
the Bible says the world is 6,000 years old.
And indeed there have been sporadic outbreaks, as evidenced by the
bumper stickers and signs you see in some parts of the country: ''Big
Bang? You've got to be kidding -- God.''
When the Kansas school board removed evolution from the science curriculum back in 1999, they also removed the Big Bang.
In a way, the critics have a point. The Big Bang is indeed only a
theory, albeit a theory that covers the history of creation as
seamlessly as could be expected from the first fraction of a second of
time until today. To call an idea ''a theory'' is to accord it high
status in the world of science. To pass the bar, a theory must make
testable predictions -- that stars eventually blow out or that your
computer will boot up.
Sometimes those
predictions can be, well, a little disconcerting. When you're talking
about the birth or death of the universe, a little denial goes a long
way.
That science news is sometimes
managed as carefully as political news may not come as a surprise to
most adults. After all, the agencies that pay for most scientific
research in this country have billion-dollar budgets that they have to
justify to the White House and the Congress. It helps to have newspaper
clippings attesting to your advancement of the president's vision.
It's enough to make you feel sorry for NASA, whose very charter
mandates high visibility for both its triumphs and its flops, but which
has officers recently requiring headquarters approval before consenting
to interviews with the likes of me.
The
recent peek behind the curtains of this bureaucracy has been both
depressing and exciting. So they are paying attention after all.
They should be paying attention, but I'm not looking forward to having
to include more politicians and bureaucrats in my rounds of the
ever-expanding, multi-dimensional universe (or universes).
I'll do it, but, lacking the gene for street smarts, I fear being
played like a two-bit banjo. I'm even happy to go star-gazing with Dick
Cheney, if duty so calls, but only if he agrees to disarm and I can
wear a helmet.
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