petri dish

hollow heads? science, fantasy, and what's as plain as the earth beneath our feet

Newton's Principia Mathematica is rarely remembered today for having sparked speculation that we all go about our days traveling across the shell of what is a hollowed out planet --  but the devoted Edmond Halley improvised just such a theory in 1691 from the Principia as he pondered the mysteries of why the earth's magnetic field changes and the nature of such phenomena as the northern auroras.

Normally, in our surveys of the scientific revolution, we speak of a grand astronomical sweep from Copernicus through Brahe, Kepler, Galileo, and Descartes that culminates in Newton's restoration of the broken Aristotelian/Ptolemaic cosmos by mathematically divining the universal laws of nature. Halley himself poetically proclaimed the same, and gets recognition for wrestling the Principia out from Newton's study and into publication before the world -- and is noted as well for his own heavenly insights into the nature of comets, recognizing their elliptical periodicity and precisely identifying the cyclical nature of the one that now bears his name. If you're here on earth in 2061 you can see it come round once again . . . about 1000 years after its 1066 appearance, which was recorded in the Bayeux Tapestry, an eleventh century blog. But I digress.

Hollow earth speculation doesn't typically come up when teaching the scientific revolution, even if Halley in his venerable old age points us in this sober portrait not to look above for evidence of his achievements but to look below our feet, perhaps believing at age 80 that it wouldn't hurt to remind attentive minds of some unfinished business that could be taken on. . . not that what he had in mind was students in a 21st-century class in science and popular culture as his epigoni. As I plan for next fall's scipop class (now in improved, hybrid form!), I've been thinking a lot about the ambiguity that attaches itself to nearly every historical and contemporary episode we've grappled with in that class. The official version of the history of science carries with it the aura of progress over time. Science in the vernacular fits awkwardly within that sober frame, and instead tends to be presumed to display degeneration over time: witness the hollow earth, from Halley's hallowed hands to Saturday morning kid's teevee.  

In becoming acquainted with Halley beyond his normal orbit -- in his speculation on the interior physics of our terrestrial planet, and its possible habitation by hollow earth beings -- we followed along with the scheherazadean legacy of hollow-earth thinking as related by David Standish in his book The Hollow Earth. In contrast to the stern geometric proofs of the Principia, Halley's inner-space speculation appears as an eccentric footnote, but whether that's due more to 20th-century perspectives that encountered hollow earthism-primarily in the light of pulp fiction -- making Halley seem a bit too much like an early Edgar Rice Burroughs -- than to his arguments themselves is a fair question. But perhaps Halley can be indulged his hollow earth eccentricities, given his seventeenth-century context and his intrepid pursuit of the realities of magnetism, which was such a mysterious entity. As one present-day commentator suggests: "Today, of course, one can rather easily see the flaws with a hollow Earth theory, but no one can rightfully blame someone living in the seventeenth century for believing such nonsense, especially if it explained certain mysteries." Thus, with just a bit of well-placed condescension what might look like Halleyan nonsense remains respectable -- if a bit on the free-wheeling side of respectable -- and therefore a forefather of the scientific revolution can maintain his rational bona fides. Even still, I'm not betting any serious money on it turning up much in historical surveys of the scientific revolution.

Tales of a hollow earth persist through the next centuries in varying proportions of fact to fictionality (and despite little scientific support). Halley's idea of a race of rational beings populating the hollow space of the interior planet resonated with widely-current ideas up through the nineteenth century about God's omnipotence, in which it was presumed that planets that circle a sun must support sentient life, as does our Earth: God does nothing without purpose, and it is clear, therefore, that God would have placed life on other planets so that they would be inhabited in the same way as is our own -- "the plurality of worlds" hypothesis. (This idea can be seen in works that tackle scientific subjects such as The Christian Philosopher of 1721 by American Cotton Mather, the influential Puritan divine -- and Fellow of the Royal Society.) Mather's popularization of ideas about scripture and science were read well into the next generations, and is a likely source for sparking John Cleves Symmes, Jr.'s fascination with hollow earth theory. Symmes, a former U.S. army officer and frontier trader, began turning out circulars on behalf of hollow earthism in 1818 (with one sent direct to U.S. Secretary of State John Quincy Adams), and spread the good news that the interior could be entered into via holes at the poles. He kept up a vigorous schedule of public talks across the young republic until his death in 1829. The mantle (so to speak ;-) for proselytizing the theory and drumming up support for polar exploration had fallen more and more to an acolyte of Symmes's, J.N. Reynolds, a gifted public lecturer, as was sketched in 1826 by a newspaperman in New York city:

A gentleman of this city, who, never having heard the theory of the concentric spheres properly explained, had always viewed it as the wild chimera of a half-disordered imagination, lately attended one of Reynolds' lectures. He went, as he himself confessed, in hopes of hearing something sufficiently absurd to give good exercise to his risibles; but soon felt more inclined to listen than to laugh, and by the time the discourse was finished, became a thorough believer in what he had lately derided. Such sudden conversions, perhaps, are not the most permanent; but they are sufficient to prove that the above theory is more worthy of investigation than ridicule. (Quoted in Aaron Sachs, The Humboldt Current: Nineteenth-Century Exploration and the Roots of American Environmentalism, p. 125).

Reynolds would come to downplay the hollow earth / polar connection while becoming fired with even greater zeal for exploring the Antarctic regions as ends unto themselves, and he was so successful in selling the possibilities, that he convinced the Congress to fund an exploratory expedition to the regions of the southern polar seas, which set sail in 1838. Sachs sees Reynolds as a powerful embodiment of American Humboldtianism, and argues that it was Reynolds, "perhaps more than any other writer in the first half of the nineteenth century, [who] taught America the cosmopolitan value of seeing the world" (p. 21). But Reynolds's ideas  would reverberate transatlantically as well, if somewhat circuitously -- picked up at home by Edgar Allen Poe in some of his tales, and then translations of Poe's fiction into French caught the eye of Jules Verne, who would write Journey to the Center of the Earth in 1864, adding a popular new conduit for hollow earth lore: with it as a foundation of the new (or, to us, classic) genre of science fiction.

Puritan approval, Congressionally-funded voyages, one of the first works of modern science fiction -- the culturally-woven threads of the webs that gird the hollow earth lie not neatly laid out like longitude and latitude, but look something rather disorienting instead, a crazy-quilt line of Brownian motion. Once you get into the middle of this all, how do you determine "what's the bottom line"? Standish, takes a cool-kid kind of stance, introducing his book by stating nonchalantly:

There have been many books recently about important ideas or commodities that have changed the world. This one, I am happy to say, traces the cultural history of an idea that was wrong and changed nothing -- but which has nevertheless had an ongoing appeal (in his Hollow Earth: The Long and Curious History of Imagining Strange Lands, Fantastical Creatures, Advanced Civilizations, and Marvelous Machines Below the Earth's Surface, p. 13).

The cultural history of scientific ideas that were wrong and changed nothing: in my darker moments, this characterization does seem indeed to capture the historical hamster-wheel that marks my scholarly preoccupations with science and popular culture. And yet. . .

The hollow-earth history actually led me back to a novel I'd forgotten about, which had first appeared anonymously, in installments, in the Cincinnati Commercial newspaper in 1880, and was published about a decade later in book form as Mizora (when the author was revealed to be Mary E. Bradley Lane, about whom little is known). In Mizora, Lane fashions an alternate female-only reality that exists inside the Earth (discovered by adventuring through the northern pole) in which science and technology have done away with the biological need for men for procreation, and which supports a utopian society. In some ways, the hollow earth setting can be seen as just another variation on the ancient dodge of fictional utopian islands, the point being the existence of some other unknown place beyond our sight where an author's idealized world can flourish. Worlds had been turned upside down before by social critics, and a world turned inside out was perhaps nothing much different. And yet. . .

I suspect that imaginings about alternative realities were quickened in the last centuries as the strangeness of the terraqueous globe on which we live began to be better-known and to come under livelier scrutiny. The fact that geology holds a less glamorous place in the hierarchy of the sciences in our own time obscures the fascination that pondering the mysteries of the planet which supports our own existence held in ages past. The vigorous trafficking in hollow-earth speculation in the 19th-century might well provide fertile ground for historians to capture glimpses of the ways in which new visions of an active terraqueous globe fascinated a wide range of people, who then turned their curiosity to imagining what sorts of changed environments would support changed forms of human beings, or of the ways in which ancient subterranean life and contemporary terran life might be connected. That is, hollow-earth tales and their ilk may well represent a kind of hidden history of science, where non-specialists play with a protean set of evolutionary-like ideas in public, impinging on the official story in unrecognized ways. Such stories little-resemble the kind of hoary historical set-pieces about evolutionary debate that populate casual remembrance, such as the anecdote about Thomas Huxley and Bishop Samuel Wilberforce monkeying around about who was on Darwin's team and why or why not. What did evolution from the people look like? Maybe some of the answers are right beneath our feet.

--------------------------------------------------

For more: To delve back into the seventeenth-century debate on the plurality of worlds hypothesis, see Bernard de Fontenelle's charming introduction, Conversations on the Plurality of Worlds from 1686, or satisfy your curiosity about what's known scientifically today about the earth's magnetosphere. For a quick explanation of the plurality of worlds hypothesis, see an essay from the Norton Anthology of English Literature. For a short explication of Halley and the hollow earth, see Patricia Fara, "Edmond Halley's last portrait," Notes Rec. R. Soc., 2006, 60:199-201. Professor Duane Griffin in the Geography Dept. at Bucknell has plumbed the scientific aspects of the hollow earth tales: see his "What Curiosity in the Structure: The Hollow Earth in Science" and "Hollow and Habitable Within: Symmes's Theory of Earth's Internal Structure and Polar Geography." Victorian science fiction as forgotten by historians of science is deftly described by Paul Fayter in "Strange New Worlds of Space and Time: Late Victorian Science and Science Fiction," in Victorian Science in Context, ed. Bernard Lightman. And yes, the Nazis had their own hollow-earth fantasies; that's a bridge too far for this post.

Images: The Halley portrait is from http://www.biographie.net/Edmond-Halley; the Bayeaux tapestry snip is from the wikipedia article on Halley's comet http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Tapestry_of_bayeux10.jpg; the Burroughs Tarzan hollow earth cover was from David Standish's book for posting here: http://archive.coasttocoastam.com/gen/page1558.html?theme=light; the Christian Philosopher title page is from the Open Library http://openlibrary.org/books/OL13520105M/The_Christian_philosopher; the last one is by William Reed, a latter-day Symmesian from 1906, posted at John Lienhard's Engines of Ingenuity site at http://www.uh.edu/engines/epi2180.htm.

Note: Many of the links were updated and modified on September 4, 2018 | The entry was originally posted on June 12, 2011.

 

does the 'doomsday clock' keep the right time?

[originally published in 2007]

One of the most famous images from the dawn of the nuclear era is back in the news: it is no longer seven minutes to midnight, but five, according to the board of directors of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, who announced that they were moving the hands of their famed "Doomsday Clock" closer to Armageddon. The "Doomsday Clock" first made its appearance on the cover of the Bulletin in June of 1947, a kind of visual shorthand that expressed the anxiety of many nuclear scientists about the arms race that had made the world a more dangerous place through scientific progress.

In the last 60 years the hands of the timepiece now have been moved back and forth a total of eighteen times -- the extremes of the timeline have been when the hands of the clock stood at two minutes to midnight in 1953, after the Soviet Union had followed the United States in successfully testing a new level of nuclear weaponry, the hydrogen bomb; at the other end, in 1991, the hands then slipped below the fatal last quarter, when they retreated to seventeen minutes to the final hour, due to the end of the Cold War and movement toward disarmament through the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty.

It's always news when the Bulletin changes the clock's timing, but there was an additional news hook in this 2007 decision: the increasing threat to world survival was pegged as coming not only from nuclear events, but from such phenomena as global warming. As reported in the Chicago Tribune -- "Doomsday Clock to Start New Era" (Jeremy Manier, 1.17.07) --

. . . when the Chicago-based Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists unveils the first change to the Doomsday Clock in four years, the risk of a nuclear holocaust will be just one among many threats that nudge the position of the clock's portentous minute hand. The keepers of the clock have expanded its purview to include the threat of global warming, the genetic engineering of diseases and other "threats to global survival."

It may be a stretch to put nuclear weapons and climate change in the same category, but that's one way the organization is trying to keep its 60-year-old clock relevant at a time when bioterrorism and radical groups can threaten the largest nations.

Indeed, this novel aspect of the nuclear experts reaching beyond the mushroom cloud to anoint climate change as a comparable danger, was duly noted and clearly highlighted by most outlets, as in this Canadian Broadcasting Corporation news story ("The Doomsday Clock Advances Two Minutes" 1.17.07):

Add a new crop of countries dazzled by nuclear technology to other global threats such as climate change and environmental degradation and the result, according to the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, is almost toxic.

"We stand at the brink of a second nuclear age," the board said in a statement.

The move from seven to five minutes from midnight was decided upon after scientists reviewed the current nuclear situation in combination with expected climate change, marking the first time the Doomsday Clock has ever reflected a separate world threat in addition to the bomb.

Even if, as Chicago Sun-Times columnist Neil Steinberg remarked, "The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists' Doomsday Clock has to be one of the most successful magazine public relations gimmicks of all time, right up there with Time's Person of the Year and the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue" (1.17.07), the roll-out of the 2007 model was newer, bigger, and better, apocalyptically-speaking. Even still-newsworthy icons need a brush-up, it seems, whether design-wise, or content-wise, to garner sufficient attention. An added kick was gained by bypassing the traditional site for Doomsday announcements: as noted by the Chicago Tribune, "in an added bid to influence policymakers and draw an international audience, the Bulletin is moving this year's announcement from its customary place in Chicago to a dual event held in London and Washington."

The bi-lateral press events did indeed seem to generate substantial coverage in the English language world, but even with all the "doomsday clock enters a new era" emphases, it seemed to me as if the stories would have fit relatively easily within the past world of a bygone time. Yes, the emphasis on climate science was new, but the key educational lesson seemed to fit comfortably within the venerable scientific organizational chart that places nuclear physics at the top, with what physicists have to say counting for more than the words of scientists from other disciplines -- there was a literal sense in which physicists were speaking for their other colleagues, graciously deigning to share their authority and the stage (metaphorically at least).

I found most fascinating the pictures of theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking from the London event, where photographers sought to couple Hawking the icon with the Bulletin's icon. Climate science may have been the newsworthy angle, but physics as arbiter was definitely a controlling visual metaphor. The photo at the left is one version, with the clock floating above somewhat like a heavenly image of doom; at the right is a different take, which very nearly manages to juxtapose the two, tightly framing the machine-bound thinker and the message that we have but five minutes of future to go before time expires and our brief history along with it. The third photograph, which accompanied an online bbc news article ("Climate Resets the 'Doomsday Clock' " by Molly Bentley, 1.17.07) manages to get the shot that everyone must have been after, whether conscious of it or not: the physicist's face and the timepiece's face, melded together in a doubly powerful dose of symbolism, his head held at nearly the same angle of incidence (so to speak) as the minute hand as it closes the gap counting down to the zero hour, literally overshadowing the scientific mind in the foreground.

Rather like nuclear physicist announcements of decades past, men appeared to dominate the photographic spotlight, whether through pictures of Hawking from London or by pulling old file photos featuring a male hand on the clock (for example, to the left; from Alaska Report, using a Reuters file image). In Washington, Bulletin Executive Editor and political scientist Kennette Benedict was also part of the stage presence, along with Ambassador Thomas Pickering and physicist Lawrence Krauss. These pictures tended to feature her rather awkwardly, as with this one that peers at her off in the distance fussing with unveiling the new time, with the men looking on as she finishes with the stagecraft. It looks somewhat like every tedious office meeting with middle management that you've ever had to sit through as they fuss with the flow charts. It just doesn't have the same authoritative impact as the others, diffusing the visual warning that the end of the world is nigh.

But the black-and-white analog 1950s feel to this news event also stems from the endless reiteration of the "doomsday" theme. Now the idea of doomsday has a long lineage -- one of my favorite examinations of the cultural resonance of this theme is Daniel Wojcik's The End of the World as We Know It: Faith, Fatalism, and Apocalypse in America (which includes discussions of secular apocalyptic themes in the nuclear era as well), and of course the idea of doomsday stretches back millennia -- but in the years after World War II, the growing awareness of the unprecedented destructive power created through atomic science -- especially with the H-bomb -- gave the doomsday scenario a new grasp on life (so to speak). As Wojcik argues:

The concept of a meaningless apocalypse brought about by human or natural causes is a relatively recent phenomenon, differing dramatically from religious apocalyptic cosmologies. Instead of faith in a redemptive new realm to be established after the present world is annihilated, secular doomsday visions are usually characterized by a sense of pessimism, absurdity, and nihilism. (p. 97)

The Doomsday Clock was an apt image for scientists to reach for in a Doomsday world circa 1947 / 1953 in which scientists saw it as their responsibility to blast the populace (and the policy-makers) out of what they saw as a complacent response of willful ignorance in the face of daily emergency; to the extent that scientists still address the public in such stark and urgent terms when informing them of scientific opinion on matters such as nuclear proliferation or global warming, then the Doomsday Clock certainly remains a relevant symbol. But if the Doomsday Clock is an accurate visual shorthand for the longer, more complex scientific arguments that undergird it, this does not necessarily mean it is (or was?) an effective communication device, in terms, at least, of engaging the public in a meaningful discussion of risk assessment, scientific expertise, political realities, and democratic decision-making.

A few years back I opened a discussion with the students in my history of modern science course about the continuing relevance of nuclear issues as a political matter by taking them through the timeline of the Doomsday Clock, and asking them to draw a picture of their own clock, and then write about what they thought the time should be and why. I was surprised to learn that many students resented what they saw as the manipulative nature of physicists choosing the last 15 minutes before midnight as their starting point. Many of them argued for placing the hands at 9:00 or 10:00 or 11:00 -- not because they were insisting that nuclear weapons were of little importance, but because they believed that their own starting points placed more faith in the power of human beings to maneuver within difficult straits. It might still be night, but we had been pushing back against the darkness and we were not at the last gasps before a total loss of control, of options, of hope. They were looking to be empowered, not diminished, as a motivation toward action.

In the eyes of the Bulletin scientists, no doubt my students would seem naive in rejecting the "minutes to midnight" framework. The Bulletin has an incredible amount of international political experience at their fingertips and intellectual mindpower at their disposal -- as the Bulletin's press release notes, the decision of the "BAS Board of Directors was made in consultation with the Bulletin’s Board of Sponsors, which includes 18 Nobel Laureates." It is true that there were no Nobel Laureates on my class roll that year. But I believe that these students were articulating an important reality, one that places the thinking of their generation at odds with the cold war mechanics out of which the "Doomsday Clock" is constructed, and where the "two cultures" norm holds sway [the expression itself a cold war era contribution by C.P. Snow]: brilliant scientific minds needing to get the attention of inattentive or lesser minds (such as those with a shaky grasp of the second law of thermodynamics as Snow suggested) by prophesying immediate doom. In a recent article, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists called their symbol "The People's Clock." After listening to my students, I don't think I would agree.

In his book Mad, Bad and Dangerous? The Scientist and the Cinema, author Christopher Frayling contends that:

Up until quite recently, real-life senior scientists have tended to present themselves like bewigged judges in court -- remote, out of touch, unconsultative, much given to pontificating and immune from criticism. And senior scientists have wondered why the public does not follow them every step of the way! Now there is much more consultation and much more emphasis on communications skills, but these tend to be confined to set-piece platforms or media debates in which the rhetoric of horror films -- on both sides -- takes over from serious discussion. 'Seeing into the mind of God' or 'destroying the planet' or 'my statistics are better than your statistics' or dismissive comments about lay people in the name of public understanding of science, tend to be the resulting headlines. (p. 226)

It is easier to re-animate old patterns of discourse, rather than to try, in a later phrase of Frayling's, to "break the flow" and find new forms of engagement. But if the public is truly to be a partner in a scientific conversation about pressing issues, then new strategies of discursive detente need to be deployed. In fact it may be time -- it may be past time -- to do so.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

For more: The Jan/Feb 2007 issue of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists has a very nice two-page layout on the history of the clock (even if I take exception with the title of the article), including a reminiscence from the artist, Martyl, who first created the image. There's an interesting historical artifact from Time Magazine online: a 1964 article entitled "Turning Back the Clock," which states that since "now there is less concern about Armageddon and less shock value to the power of the atom, the clock is ticking mostly for the Bulletin. Its funds low, the magazine is once more passing the hat." And speaking of whether or not the clock is outdated, Dood Abides at Unconfirmed Sources plays with the file photo of the Doomsday Clock to present, a new, shiny digital version for the 21st century :-) For more of Stephen Hawking's dire pronouncements about the fate of the human race, see "Prophet of Doomsday: Stephen Hawking, Eco-Warrior" by Geoffrey Lean in the Independent, 1.27.07. For an interesting undergraduate conversation by students from different majors about the "two cultures" idea, see this panel discussion, "The Two Cultures: Students Speak their Minds," from the University of Colorado.

Images: The very first image is from the homepage of the Bulletin, at http://www.thebulletin.org/; the original 1947 cover is from the Los Alamos National Laboratory Research Library, online at http://library.lanl.gov/libinfo/news/images/BulletinAS-cover.jpg. The first Hawking image is from the Telegraph ("Hawking: Doomsday Clock Closer to Midnight" 1.18.07) at http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2007/01/17/nclock117.xml; the second Hawking image is from the CBC article at http://www.cbc.ca/news/background/nuclearweapons/doomsday-clock.html; and the third image from the BBC is at http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/6270871.stm. The file photo shown on the Alaska Report is at http://www.alaskareport.com/reu77351.htm while the trio photo from the DC press conference was carried on an msnbc.com article "Doomsday Clock Moves Closer to Midnight" http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/16670369/.

the space race and the dark side of the moon: saying good-bye to roger boisjoly

In class last week we were talking about what it means to live our lives in an age of science by looking at everyday ways in which assumptions about science and technology become part of the "common sense" background to "what everyone knows." It's this background against which new information and events are absorbed, deflected, or judged. We looked at the famous "Duck and Cover" educational video from 1951 (featuring an animated "Bert the turtle") that taught baby boomer kids what to do in case an atomic bomb exploded nearby, and viewed a recent smartphone ad that deftly illustrated a theory of technological determinism in 30 seconds. And we also looked at myths from the Challenger disaster that linger on 25 years later (related post here). 

All three of these artifacts are instances of manipulating the perceptions of those on the receiving end, but the sky-high costs of the conventional wisdom relating to the Challenger disaster is one that reverberates most portentously. This was brought home to me once again in the news that Roger Boisjoly, one of the Morton Thiokol engineers who had argued against launching Challenger, had died last January. I had met Mr. Boisjoly in July of 2000, when I brought him out to OU to speak to our NSF REU on Human-Technology Interaction, as part of the Ethics Workshops I designed for the engineering, computer science, and social science undergrads with whom we were working. Mr. Boisjoly's story was well-known to me as someone teaching topics in science and technology studies. But his work on the Shuttle as an engineer intersected with my regular-person life as well, and was also a factor in why the ethical aspects of the space program (engineering and otherwise) was something that I spent time exploring. 

Growing up in southern California in the 1960s, we kids came by a "not a big deal" attitude toward the space program because it was embedded in the regional culture. We were used to playing outside and watching vapor trails cut across the blue expanse above us, and hearing window-rattling sonic booms that suddenly split the air, as test pilots hurtled far above the ground somewhere off in the distance. NASA missions would splash down in the Pacific ("our" ocean), and when the space shuttle program was being tested and then deployed, landings often occurred at Edwards Air Force Base. Of course one could play at space at Disneyland, with Rocket to the Moon (although most of us kids loved Tomorrowland best for Autopia, where we could finally take the wheel and cruise the open road: independently conquering terrestrial space at high speed was what we really wanted to do).  And swooping and soaring and radiating "Googie" (space age) architecture was everywhere, in the coffee shops where we had breakfast on vacation, at the gas stations where our parents fueled up, and at the places where we went to for fun like bowling alleys and movie theaters. Theatrical architecture entertwined with the space program in a more somber form as well: within swimming distance off the shore at Long Beach were artificial islands (which were actually oil rig sites,  elaborately concealed behind structures that looked like hotels with waterfalls and palm trees and colored lighting at night), which commemorated the deaths of the Apollo 1 astronauts -- Gus Grissom, Edward Chaffee and Ed White -- who had been killed when a fire broke out in the command module during a launch pad test in 1967.

Most of us had relatives and/or neighbors who worked in the aerospace industry at places like Rockwell, JPL, and TRW (one-third of the nation's aerospace engineers worked in southern California by the 1980s, and the industry employed a total of a half-million people). In my family it was my grandfather on my mother's side, Robert B. Barnes, an antsy high school dropout from small-town Ohio who was gifted at working with machines (he was a race car driver in the 1920s). He ended up in LA, becoming an employee at Menasco in Burbank in 1940. That's a picture of him from Menasco's annual report in 1946, which featured his story of rising from a lathe operator (.95/hr pre-war) to a position as an "experimental machinist" (1.90/hr), and about how he had been rewarded by "a committee made up of his fellow workers and management representatives" for a "suggestion he submitted for improving the handling of one of the parts of a landing gear." It was Menasco, in fact, that would later be the company that designed the landing gear that made it possible for the Shuttle to touch down on the ground upon re-entry. A small part of my grandfather's mind and hands had gone into the eventual developments that allowed each Shuttle journey to regain physical contact with home.

 Aerospace engineering was not simply about rockets to the moon, of course; we knew as well that such efforts were directly entangled with the much larger defense industry -- after all, that was what had made southern California's economic sonic boom possible during World War II. Tied into the cold war arms race, the duck-and-cover drills we practiced in elementary school were also part of the space program: missile technology could deliver thermonuclear weapons to our doorstep as well as power spaceships to escape the earth's gravitational pull. If somehow this fact escaped notice, Harvard-trained mathematician and singer-songwriter Tom Lehrer broke it down for everyone on the 1965 song, "Wernher von Braun" from his album That Was the Year that Was: "'Once the rockets are up / Who care's where they come down? / That's not my department', says Wernher von Braun" (Lehrer was a staple on Dr. Demento's locally-produced KMET radio show, which began in 1971 and was a Sunday evening ritual). Selling the moon through feel-good media p.r. didn't obscure the fact that the ride to get there was propelled by "establishment" logic that also fueled an increasingly unpopular war in Indochina -- and anger at the establishment was increasingly on display at such historic events as the 1970 student riots in Isla Vista at UC Santa Barbara.

What was it like to be an engineer during such turbulent decades, when pressures converged from multiple sources, and with such high stakes in play? How had the engineering profession, the political, defense, and media establishments, and American society adapted in the aftermath?

Was Challenger tied to Apollo 1 and could it happen again? It was questions like these in addition to Challenger itself that we put to Mr. Boisjoly, who answered as many as we could manage to ask, with patience and candor and an intense desire to convey to the students how hard it is to maintain personal integrity within organizations in which accountability is diffused and complexity impairs clarity. In the end, just as it was necessary for such high-risk endeavors as the space program to engineer redundant safeguards into critical hardware and software components, so did we need redundant social practices that ensured that ethical decision-making would not encounter catastrophic failures. It was in working this through in conversation with Mr. Boisjoly that it became clearer to me that the Challenger failures were not due to proximate causes alone (what was or was not said or done in the night before the launch, or even in the years of working on the o-rings), but they had deeper roots that stretched back to the emergent years of the cold war itself. In the end, we were all implicated in Challenger's failed mission.

In overseeing his visit and meeting with Mr. Boisjoly in those few days he was here at OU, there was no escaping the overwhelming sadness that he carried with him. He spoke softly for such a large man, and carried himself in a way that displaced as little space as possible. It was hard not to feel that each time he went over his presentations about the Challenger events that he was re-living them, the pain and anguish and frustration and anger right there: about the horrifying outcome, about what he saw as the betrayal of his management colleagues to insist that the criteria be shifted to the contractors proving it was unsafe to fly rather than the onus being on management to prove that it was safe to fly, and about how he could no longer work as an engineer after he was seen as being a traitor to his colleagues for bringing files to light that had been kept from investigators (whistle-blowing). He said, however, that reaching out to the next generation was the best way of having the world make sense again.

Mr. Boisjoly was in occasional contact by email, and a few years later I was thinking of finding a way to bring him back to campus, but then the Columbia disaster occurred in 2003. I knew I could barely imagine what that must have been like for him; although he had been dubious about whether NASA had truly absorbed the lessons of Challenger, there was always the possibility that the costs that had been paid by all involved would result in such an event never happening again. And now that possible future was lost forever. I wanted to write to him, but I never found the right words, and was too worried about intruding and causing harm. Perhaps what I've written here is some small substitute for what I should have been able to manage then. I hope that now that Mr. Boisjoly has "slipped the surly bonds of earth" that he is at last at peace.

a child's-eye view of charles darwin

Last year was the 150th anniversary celebration of the publication of Charles Darwin's Origin of Species (and the 200th anniversary of his birth), with lots of hoopla in the form of academic conferences, museum exhibits, magazine essays, and the like. A little-noticed side phenomenon in academia was a surge in the publication of children's books on Darwin, especially picture books for kids in the 6-12 age range. As an historian of science with a special interest in science and popular culture, including children's literature (and who had recently taught a class on science and biography in which I made sure to include children's science biographies) I was curious about what I'd find by taking a look through some of these recent books, especially as "Darwin" and "controversy" is such an unyielding theme in American popular culture.

But I was interested for a more personal reason as well: in 2008 I'd begun to pull together a "home school" program on evolution for my daughter (who was seven going on eight), because she wasn't satisfied that she understood how life changed over time just by knowing that there were different kinds of pre-historic fossils and that dinosaurs had disappeared at some point -- she wanted to know more about how it  actually worked. (We spend a lot of time in our house on "how things work," mostly when we come across various contemporary artifacts that have been taken apart in order for a certain someone to get a good "grasp" of the innards. It reminds me of what a young James Clerk Maxwell was supposed to have gone around demanding of elders who trafficked in vague and unsatisfactory explanations -- "yes, but what's the particular go of it?") The adventure of putting together what she calls "mommy science" goes into a future blog post, but in this one and the next I want to take up the question of the Darwin picture books as contributions to kids' informal science education.

The most striking dimension of the books is how so many of them are focused on Darwin's voyage as the core for the text and pictures. In some ways this must have been an overdetermined choice: a worldwide voyage has built-in appeal in terms of drama and plenty of room for the "exotic" to be on display as an attention-grabber; Darwin himself left behind an account of the voyage that has been popular since the 19th century, along with notebooks that allow the children's stories therefore to have the literal voice of the scientist inscribed within them for authenticity; and Darwin's role as naturalist on the voyage allows for a presentation that draws on familiar genres such as the nature documentary, animal tales, and picturing the globe as a patchwork of ecological habitats (not to mention resonances to more commercially-oriented fare such as Pirates of the Caribbean and the Rainforest Cafe). As an entry into the marketplace, using the voyage as the focal point for books on Darwin hits the educational/entertainment marketing sweet spot.

What I most appreciated about the voyage books in general were the opportunities for beautiful, sometimes inspired illustrations  -- the merging of science and art makes for a wonderful partnership in presenting both, and allows for each to become something more complex and enticing than each alone. Because I wish there was more attention to the visual imagination in introducing children to science, this aspect of the Darwin cache was a delight. Even a book that had a more cartoon-like/graphic novel tone that didn't generally appeal to me visually still had some striking images that did, such as a vividly blue iguana dominating the title page or an almost psychedelic drawing of "The Tree of Life" in all its wildly branching forms (What Darwin Saw: The Journey that Changed the World, by Rosalyn Schanzer as author and illustrator -- the link to the book includes both images on the website, just scroll down). In general, the books' illustrations tend to the slapstick-y more often than not (with varying levels of pulling it off), but the variety of visual approaches is a treat, from the "ye old wood-engraving" style of Alice McGinty's Darwin (illustrated by Mary Azarian in jewel-like hues) to the mid-tone pastels of the impressionistic What Mr. Darwin Saw (text and pix by Mick Manning and Brita Granstrom) to the mixed-media collages that pop off the page of One Beetle Too Many by Kathryn Lasky, with illustrations by Matthew Trueman. In fact, in my science and biography class, we had a lively discussion of what might happen if the visual freedoms of children's picture book biographies infiltrated the adult book market (for some sense of the possibilities, the stunning and thought-provoking examples of biographies as art in the graphic mode of  G.T Labs' "true science comics" are stand-outs, such as  Suspended in Language: Niels Bohr's Life, Discoveries and the Century He Shaped, and my favorite of the bunch, Fallout: J. Robert Oppenheimer, Leo Szilard, and the Political Science of the Atomic Bomb. And, yes, I've assigned both of these at one time or another as texts in my history of science survey courses.)

But the examples mentioned above don't exhaust the number of entries in the "voyage that changed the world" category. Others were even more elaborate, kitted up as "travel albums," really going to town with the 19th-century naval adventure "life at sea" theme, such as Charles Darwin and the Beagle Adventure by 
A.J. Wood and Clint Twist (with hefty boards and little pockets and envelopes inside with pull-out memoranda, photographs, and such) and Lifelines: Charles Darwin by Alan Gibbons and illustrated by Leo Brown, which uses the conceit of a ship's cabin boy observing the scientist and diarying his observations (the cover features a brilliant blue butterfly "specimen" under a half-globe of plastic surrounded by a compass rose to inaugurate the field collecting vibe.)  And there are still others as well -- and after working my way through maybe one voyage too many, I began to have my doubts about the approach. The multi-layered cleverness of using the voyage as the focus began to seem to have another contributory current as well: with "the voyage" as the overarching frame, the potentially discomfiting aspects of the historical narrative regarding evolution are displaced by the focus on  Darwin before he was an evolutionist -- with the evolutionary "aftermath" rendered literally as a textual aftermath.

Focusing on the voyage seemed to diminish an introduction to evolution in two key ways. First off, the evolutionary ideas that result from the voyage get nowhere near the same interesting treatment in the books as does the voyage itself, being relegated to the final pages (if covered much at all), and thus one curiously gets books on this score that allow you a kind of "safe" look at Darwin, because it is the joy of collecting oddities of nature and experiencing globe-trotting adventures (silly sailor pranks crossing the equator! earthquakes! volcanoes! huge fossil deposits! gauchos on the Pampas!) that are front and center, rather than the evolutionary theories that Darwin and others will develop. And here, the emphasis on the sesquicentennial of the Origin itself encourages a truncated view, as Darwin says next to nothing about human evolution in the Origin, and it is in his later works -- which appear amidst a community of inquiry on evolution -- that you see him take on more controversial ramifications of "Darwinism" (which, of course, in and of itself, does not exhaust approaches to evolution in his own time period). The voyage theme elicits a child-safe book that enfolds evolution into a comforting Victorian patina of wonder at wild nature, with the difficult bits shoe-horned in later.

Secondly, by emphasizing the voyage as an empirical scrapbook setpieces /powerpoint slide presentation as instantiating how Darwin became the "discoverer" of evolution, a somewhat reductionist argument is embedded in the text, but especially in the pictures: that Nature displayed itself to Darwin, he saw and recorded, and evolutionary theory was revealed. (This is especially underwritten by how the visit to the Galapagos becomes the culmination of Darwin's intellectual journey, a kind of quest in which he has been tested and in the process increasingly honed his mind and body into a receptive vessel in which to receive the truth that the hand of Nature -- as we "know" with hindsight -- lays out before him on his pilgrim's progress.)  Thus, evolutionary theory was there "in Nature" all the time, simply hidden from view by the tangled vines of the south American interior, and by the blindness of the scientific community prior to Darwin's voyage, and by the obscurantist haze cast by "Christians" ( . . . and how religion and science is understood in the books tends only to exacerbate misconceptions about their relationship in this time period).

It is true that the books usually note that many years of study and hard work followed Darwin's voyage, and they may even present little capsules about some of the other scientists from the time -- although Alfred Wallace, whose own voyage of discovery as the co-discoverer of evolution by natural selection could make up an interesting parallel in the books, usually only appears as a deus ex machina to get the Origin published, which is especially frustrating since "voyage" is the governing concept for the books and hence to bring in Wallace would seem to offer an intriguing point of comparison. But if you take the books on their own terms in regard to what the bulk of the pages feature and how they build to a crescendo -- and in what gets most intently presented in textual and visual form -- it is the voyage itself that matters most of all, not the later years. It is on his voyage that Darwin encountered nature's truth in its raw, self-evident essence, where the evolutionary facts are in plain view. They may need further consideration, but in the end, the scientific word is written on the rocks.

This isn't a perspective on the history of science with which I'm particularly comfortable, as it draws a veil over the hard work of how scientific knowledge emerges, is debated, and then rendered authoritative in a dynamic interplay along many dimensions. And it does, again, tend to make for a "safe" presentation of Darwin and science, rehabilitating him, perhaps, from invidious perspectives that have convinced many that the word "Darwin" is synonymous with hidden agendas that aim to hijack scientific thought for the purpose of destroying faith in God on dishonest pretenses. A depiction of a robust and engagingly curious young Charles who is almost a blank slate, aside from his fondness for beetles -- indeed, who is an orthodox believer at the start of the voyage -- as an alert conduit for Nature's empirical truth is hard to square with a vision of a sinister and conniving Darwin out to dupe the devout as the devil's chaplain. There's an undertone of scientific apotheosis that I'm not eager to pass along with lessons on evolution if that's what comes along with a child's-eye view of Charles Darwin.

My own reservations aside, I let my daughter rummage through the books and what she seemed to notice most was just the sheer bulk and repetitiveness of representations of Darwin and the voyage, Darwin being a relatively new name for her and his voyage as well: clearly here was something that mattered to adults, if it was repeated over and over for kids! One day, however, I came across an unfinished  image she created in her computer art program, titled "discover with Mr.Darwin." Interestingly, it was not the young Darwin, and it didn't come with a portrayal of ships and adventure, or the wild and exotic. Instead, a disembodied Darwin, his long white bearded face aloft in the sky just under a smiling sun (although with the beard blending into the grassy expanse below), is introducing himself by name to a rather large bluebird in a tree, eye-to-eye, in a perfectly ordinary neighborhood setting.

It seems as if it was another Darwin that she took to heart and made her own, from an alternate set of children's Darwin picture books than those above. These were books that took a different tack, one significant aspect being that they threw off the overwhelming "a boys' Darwin" tone that tended to be embedded within these voyage books, with their affection for nautical hi-jinks and male bonding and the idea of Charles as a salty adventurer. They brought, if you will, a differently gendered Darwin into view, one which was made possible by taking liberties with the historical conventions so dutifully enacted in most of the picture books. And they -- Peter Sis' The Tree of Life, Anne Weaver's The Voyage of the Beetle, and Deborah Hopkinson's The Humblebee Hunter -- deserve a blog post of their own.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

For more: For a short description of an undergrad book exhibit we put together at OU in the History of Science Collections, see The Children's Darwin. For reviews and notes on children's books about Darwin (especially around the recent anniversary-related publishing surge), see: School Library Journal Reviews; Bookslut; Children's Literature; the Dispersal of Darwin blog (the link matches up with a search for "children's books" on the site, so be sure to scroll all the way down to see everything), and the pdf list compiled at Charlie's Playhouse.

prototyping participation over presentation: "the children's darwin" & "undergrads at the collections"

As my academic department considers how to widen our outreach to undergrads with the proposed introduction in 2011 of a major in the history of science, technology, and medicine, I've been trying to work out ways to open up connections on our campus between the world we study and students from any background. I want to downplay bureaucratic brochureware in our online presence in favor of highlighting ways that anyone can enter the conversation about the constellation of ideas, issues, events, people, and consequences that make up hsci/med/tech -- entry points that could end up in direct connections with our department, but that could also foster other, user-directed connections just as easily. In thinking this through I'm working with a web 2.0 ethic in prototyping a set of loosely joined projects with digital components: think of it as roughing in the outlines of a dept. 2.0 identity, which opens up the possibility of changed relationships among those who make a learning community a learning community.

A web 2.0 attitude entails a shift from relying on default communication norms on our dept. website that focus on presentation (of "us" faculty and the dept. we have made -- "our" degrees, "our" research, "our" teaching, "our" priorities -- with pix of students sprinkled throughout, to be sure, to show we are student-friendly) to communication norms that facilitate participation: enabling our departmental digital presence to serve as a conduit for students themselves to experiment with defining what it means to engage in "exploring science : technology : medicine : past to present" in terms of their own experiences, their own connections, and their own pathways -- whether as majors, as minors, as individuals who might take a class or two with us, or just as someone who is curious enough about the area to find us on the internet. (Previous posts in this series can be found here and here.) This digital presence would also enable engagement by students with a wide array of others, both similar to and different than themselves, both on-campus and from beyond our hallowed prairie-ivy walls. How to start?

My primary effort has been aimed at creating an Undergraduate Portal for hsci/med/tech that will have its foothold on our department website, but will effectively be its own "start" page: a launch point for visitors to "do" things, rather than be told things. At the Undergrad Portal -- which will begin being phased in this fall, once our newly designed main website is functional -- the doing can run from obvious housekeeping matters such as finding out what next semester's classes will be or how you can declare a minor, to more expansive activities such as engaging in undergraduate humanities research (particularly by making use of digital resources -- in fact, the topic of digital hsci/med/tech research for undergrads will branch off into a companion website, hosted off the university server, because it is meant to be more than an institution-bound effort). A related, similar offshoot that I began piecing together first is "Undergrads at the Collections," which introduces possibilities for undergrad research using rotating themes, set up both as physical exhibits at OU's History of Science Collections at Bizzell Library and in a digital format via blog entries and supporting pages at the Undergrads at the Collections weblog site. The idea is that each version of the exhibit can stand alone, allowing for different forms of outreach, but that they can also be melded together, as discussed below. Our first exhibit is "The Children's Darwin," a display of children's picture books on the 19th-century naturalist, many of them published in 2009 with the peg of the celebrations marking the 150th anniversary of the publication of Origin of Species on which to hang their own appearance. The books are interesting artifacts for looking at how history of science is portrayed to a culture's youngest members.

The Curators of OU's History of Science Collections are genuinely welcoming of the public and all members of the university community, including students -- see their blog, for example -- but the Collections' space itself is nevertheless somewhat intimidating, what with visitors having to be buzzed in at the front doors, and with the books shelved away in stacks that need to be accessed by staff members, and with the items that are out front in the display cases being rare, fragile, and treated with reverence. On the other hand, the physical version of the Undergrad Exhibit, for which we've been allowed to homestead a small portion of the Collections' public reading room, is purposefully casual: the books aren't so valuable that they need to be housed behind glass, precisely so anyone can walk over, pick them up and literally hold them and browse through them, just as you would at your local library or bookstore. There is comfortable seating and tables that you can use to spend whatever time you'd like -- long or short -- with the books. There's an info sheet describing the exhibit, along with a discussion of how this kind of topic lends itself to research questions that connect up with real world issues, and suggests how the topic -- and offshoots from it -- offers useful starting points for user-generated content, if you will.

By adding a digital version of the exhibit, we can multiply its presence in several ways: by providing the ability for users to offer comments at the blog (our goal is to have an available laptop with the books so that visitors can add comments then and there via wifi) -- comments that live on the open web as contributions that make them more than a mere academic exercise (as with a typical class assignment one turns in to the instructor). Being on the open web, comments and queries from others anywhere at all with an interest in the topic or approach can also weigh in, adding to the interactive possibilities; and a digital version can also help to give members of the general public the same opportunity as the students to see what historical research can look like, demystified -- and comment themselves, if they'd like, and join the conversation, or use it to think with for their own purposes. Digitizing the exhibit also allows us to provide further links to research resources appropriate for undergrads or others interested in starting out on exploring the topic; and with digital versions, each successive exhibit can be layered on to the previous ones in an incremental fashion, creating a multi-dimensional archive that highlights the possibilities of humanities research by students, available to anyone brainstorming instructional projects.

This first display -- "The Children's Darwin" -- along with the next one or two Undergrad Exhibits, are occurring during what might be called the "silent phase" of our "academic department as web 2.0 campaign" -- rather like the early non-publicized period in a fundraising effort that quietly solicits donations so that the goals are already half-way met by the time that the endowment campaign is formally announced to the public. We hope to build up awareness bit by bit as we prototype, display, refine, and improvise on our way to providing working examples of how an interactive presence with undergrads and others can work -- so that when our department gets its window of greater visibility that will come with rolling out the major in a year or so we can already be experimenting in interactive terms, offering participatory possibilities in many forms, rethinking the variability and lability of what "open courseware" can be when the faculty, students, and members of the public create it together.

In dedicating a physical space specifically for undergrads at the Collections -- which is our department's "humanities laboratory" -- we want to literally demonstrate that, yes, you belong here; in choosing books that can be placed out for handling and interactive use, that are meant as starting points that can tell multiple stories simultaneously, depending on the individual pathways one chooses, we want to emphasize that humanities are for everybody; and by offering examples of research topics that demonstrate you don't have to be a faculty member to do history, we hope to make our discipline, and our research home itself, less intimidating to students, creating a space that facilitates the use of all kinds of media as social media. We often have our students visit the Collections and bring out treasures to show them, and some of us have even devised exercises that allow our students to use Collections' volumes as part of our class projects. But it is very rare that students come back on their own, or feel confident that they truly can be part of the research community, no matter how heartily we invite them to do so. Thinking in web 2.0 terms can change this, because our invitations will be more believable, visualizable, and doable, for students from any major. There's no reason not to think that in the near future we can have undergrads curating their own exhibits, sending their own queries and examples out onto the web, cultivating conversations among a diverse array of participants, and being members of a shape-shifting collective that helps us think of history as public history, belonging to all.

So that's some of the rationale as to the "why" of our Undergrad Exhibits prototype, "The Children's Darwin." There'll be a new exhibit for Fall 2010, so more on that to come; but how about the "what" of "The Children's Darwin" itself? You didn't think I could leave that topic before making an observation or two of my own, did you? That's coming!

departmental websites: hacking the academy by living on the open web

I'll admit, as a slogan, "hacking the academy one department website at a time!" doesn't have great prospects as a rallying cry. Websites for academic departments are typically one of the most uninspiring formats that exist on the internet: the components are pretty standardized, from the digitized brochure boilerplate, to the perfunctory faculty listings, cursory course descriptions reproduced from the university catalog, and occasionally some newsletter-type info bites. Visit a sample of departmental homepages and it would be hard to guess that there's a whole world wild web of 2.0 functionalities out there . . .

I've just begun a series of posts on how I've been trying to reconceptualize communication with our department's undergrads under the stimulus of web 2.0 capabilities, using our departmental pages as our jumping-off point. This has caused some head-scratching -- not least because getting our basic revised departmental website up and running has been a nightmare, as in I'm still waiting waiting waiting w a i t i n g on that, so doesn't that prove the folly of trying anything new digital-wise with such a bureaucratic form? A compelling point! -- but mainly because everyone knows that, really, in all honesty, hardly anybody visits a departmental website, and especially not undergrads. Since the departmental website is like a digital deadzone, better to put one's ingenuity into online classroom technology or one's own blog or debating, developing, and divining what the latest techno-cool tools are with others who share an early adopter mindset.

But it's deceptive: even though departmental websites seem to be buried deep inside the layers of a university website's architecture and therefore exist way off the grid in a grayish netherworld, they're not, of course. They live on the open web by virtue of a url just like any other website. And if we can experiment with reconfiguring the lines of communication and participation with our undergrads via a departmental website rethought in 2.0 terms, there's no reason not to extend that line of thinking one step further: to the departmental website as a crossroads between professionals and the public, reconstituting what professional and public means in the process. 

Bringing dynamic elements into a departmental website can be as simple as starting with an rss feed or two that brings the outside world across the university's walls and into the heart of where a community of researchers currently (digitally) resides: at the department's website. If the rss feed speaks in everyday language rather than in a specialized vocabulary, then an interesting juxtaposition is struck immediately in and of itself, as with, say, a science news feed on a science department's site. By its presence, the feed instantiates an ongoing invitation for responses by members of the departmental community to speak to current events, and/or a challenge to individuals to adopt the common tongue in a like manner in communicating via the website about what goes on in research and teaching, and/or a prompt to take an item and use it as focal point to link to other resources that are available to anyone near or far who may find them of use and who come across them via the website.

And it's a relatively simple matter to make that happen, by adding in a blog component that professors can post to that has a comment function and the ability to share posts across multiple social networks -- and if so, the departmental website begins to rejuvenate from the deadzone and the departmental community begins to live out on the open web together, where it is much more likely that interaction with various publics can happen than if professors remain walled in, physically or digitally. [And if it seems to hard to revamp the website, a companion space can be activated via typepad or wordpress, for example.]

And, of course, there is so much that can be done, once you get going and improvisation proves not only possible but the way to move forward and evolve.

The aspect of this that I especially like is how decentralized the department as a local node is in representing a discipline, and how it doesn't depend on a scholarly society representing you or me, but you or me representing what our disciplines do, in concrete terms that communicate in the vernacular, allowing for encounters that recast the circulation of knowledge in different terms than how we normally perform when we hew to the various reward structures of our disciplines (as structured by journal editors, and funding agencies, and an institution's administrators). In being located at the departmental level, it makes it easier to bring in those who have been uninterested in computer-mediated communication -- folks who, perhaps, even have disdain for those who know about the specific bells and whistles that exist in the sphere of social media -- and allow for broader participation within our own local sphere, and thus a greater diversity of voices, and a more robust set of dynamics. It also makes communication and interaction with the public not something that is the "job" of a few hardy/gregarious/adventurous individuals, and instead the responsibility of a collectivity.

In my field of History, historian David Thelen (in The Presence of the Past) challenged his colleagues with the following argument about the cramping of the scholarly mind that can come with professionalization:

"the greatest danger from professionalization – a danger that is great because it is often invisible – is that its self-enclosing thrust has made it harder for us professionals to recognize which of our practices resemble ‘common,’ ‘local,’ or ‘everyday’ knowledge and perspective and which have evolved into jargon that makes sense only to other professionals. If we wish to construct serious dialogues about the past with nonprofessionals – who are, after all, our fellow citizens and human beings – we may need to go back and revalue our first languages, the ones we were taught to leave behind when we entered the professional world. By recognizing patterns in our historymaking practices that we share with others, we can more effectively contribute to the larger historical culture we all inhabit."

I believe that, increasingly, how connections will be forged among others outside our professional circles will be mediated by an ability to speak in the "digital vernacular" of web 2.0. By finding meaningful ways to participate in the digital vernacular, we can "more effectively contribute to the larger culture we all inhabit." Using the departmental website -- which is a ready-made representation of our authority as academics -- and drawing on the practices and philosophy of web 2.0, opens up our world to others, and becomes a space in which we can communicate in new ways and interact in unscripted encounters that can allow us to rethink our pedagogical imperatives and traditions.

By entering into the stream of inquiry when it is constituted by small pieces loosely joined -- and by thinking of the internet's capabilities in interactive and participatory terms with the public as potential partners, rather than as an audience who views a static digital display space in which we set out products -- we take on more modest roles as academics, with the potential to hack new forms of community that change ourselves as well as offer possibilities to others.

So, the departmental website as an online learning environment? I know, perhaps a difficult concept to credit. But I bet there are already innovative examples out there that currently exist, ready for us to play with. I'll be looking.

can (should?) an (under-resourced) academic department speak web 2.0 to undergrads?

Our department is in the middle of big changes -- several years of recalibrating the classes we offer and reconfiguring our course structure, finishing up a proposal during the last year for an undergraduate major in the history of science, technology, and medicine to send to the Regents for approval, and an overhaul of our website in which we've encountered one nerve-wracking stumbling block after another for three years (and we're still waiting!) -- all of which entail questions about how best to do outreach to undergrads from the departmental level. 

Of course, how best to do outreach depends foremost on what your goals are. The default position is that the goal of outreach is to fill up classes (a bottom line administrative imperative that has become ever more critical as we experience the effects of the Great Recession). How enrollment happens tends to be attributed to an inscrutable amalgam among undergrads of word-of-mouth, conventional wisdom about career paths & relevant coursework drawn from personal networks, the passing along of local lore about departments and classes, the effect of teaching evaluations, and institutional cultural quirks that have a stunningly inertial status, accompanied by, from the other end, individual instructors or departments trying to influence enrollment by the archaic strategy of . . . posting flyers (which now seek out the fickle student eye with colored text and images, however, as opposed to the monochromatic versions of the pre-inkjet era!) or announcements on a department website. Although announcements on the department website recognize that a new communication source exists -- the internet -- most students don't visit department websites. So, broadcasting at -- never mind communicating with -- undergrads along these lines is clunky, at best, and irrelevant at worst.

In chairing the Undergrad Program Committee over the last few years part of my job is to tend to such matters, but -- if the stars align properly -- the track we're on to add a major to our department's portfolio (we currently administer a graduate program and an undergraduate minor) has made me think differently about not just the methods but the goals of undergraduate communication. To be sure, we've worked at making the conventional methods more robust --  for example, I designed an online survey for undergrads that touched on lots of different aspects of our proposed major, our current minor and courses, but also asked some basic questions about traditional and online forms of communication, for example, to see where things stood.

Our newer set of tools includes a facebook group page since the social networking site is popular with our students, and I've been encouraging the posting of relevant departmental announcements by faculty on their CMS class pages as well as utilizing an email list we've cobbled together (our institution can't provide us with accurate and timely information on who has taken more than one class in our department, for example, or who is pursuing a minor -- we have to capture this info on the fly as best we can). So, we've made steps forward that target outreach a touch more effectively accompanied by a toe-in-the-water in terms of social media. . .

. . . Except, these aren't steps that really open up shifts in the communication ecology. For that, the issue isn't how to take our one-to-many broadcast methods and make them louder, but to think in terms of what the emergence of web 2.0 offers (think facebook, blogs, flickr, youtube, social bookmarking, wikipedia for starters): many-to-many, interactive, participatory, and collaborative forms of communication. The point isn't the tools themselves (or their sparkly newness) -- let's twitter because it's trendy! -- but the fact that tools exist that make it possible to consider new goals, to think about communication differently, and therefore to imagine changed relationships: of students as partners, not simply as audiences. What I'm after is not just a discussion of what can happen in the classroom, but at a different location: at the digital interface at which the departmental presence and an individual's attention can meet in ways that enhance the possibilities of mutual engagement, conversation, and innovative improvisations among networks of people that didn't exist before. Not new methods in and of themselves -- instead, new goals, therefore new methods.

But is this reflective exercise even realistic? Or necessary? Or desirable? Academic departments aren't especially good at digital experimentation, and here in our department, like so many, we're under-resourced as it is in terms of money, support, and expertise on campus in regard to the majority of our organizational tasks, let alone computer-mediated communication -- and most faculty consider anything web-related to be synonymous with blackholes. Is there really a compelling interest to be served in screwing around with the current model of departmental webpages as print brochures that have migrated online? Given limited amounts of support and time, isn't thinking of departmental outreach in web 2.0 terms something that's a luxury reserved for those with resources to spare, not for those who live in economies of scarcity?

Over a year or so I've worked through the issues that this proposition presents in as many different ways as I know how, and have come to the conclusion, that, yes, it is necessary to think differently about undergrad communication. I think the departmental-website-as-pixellated-brochure concedes too much to tired ways of thinking about teaching, about research, and about the place of the humanities in the public sphere. That's a lot to pin on a mere departmental website, as opposed to focusing on the more dynamic space of individual professors' classrooms, for example. But how institutions present themselves matters. As the authors of the cluetrain manifesto argued in 1999, in theses 15, 34, and 35:

In just a few more years, the current homogenized "voice" of business — the sound of mission statements and brochures — will seem as contrived and artificial as the language of the 18th century French court.

To speak with a human voice, companies must share the concerns of their communities.

But first, they must belong to a community.

This is even more clearly the case in a web 2.0 sort of world. What would happen if we thought anew about the departmental website, re-imagining it as a newcomer's portal, an open learning environment in and of itself whether or not you are even enrolled in one of our classes? That's what I'm going to walk through in the next few blog entries, as I try and reorient myself to the mix of new threads that I've been working on piece by piece in trying to weave new patterns in our local webworld. (Yes, I'm back digitally, and doubling-down on the bet rather than leaving the table.)

(Know of good examples? I'd love to learn more about what others are trying -- links would be great to have!)

Coming up: Why The Children's Darwin?

watching the detectives

In introducing classic images of the scientist in popular culture, we've started with the essential prototypes: the heroic scientist and the mad scientist. The heroic image gets a huge boost at what history came to see as the culmination of the scientific revolution in the model of a quasi-divine Isaac Newton (1642-1727). This image is captured in the poetic sentiments of Edmund Halley, in his description of Newton's mind in 1687: "Nearer the gods no mortal may approach" -- and in Alexander Pope's famous couplet: "Nature and Nature's laws lay hid in night: God said, Let Newton be! and all was light!" (published in this form in 1735). [Or check out Newton's monument in Westminster Abbey.] A worthy assist to this image was carried forward, for example, in the praises sung of Benjamin Franklin's work on electricity as in Benjamin West's famous rendering from 1816, which shows heavenly light breaking up a raging storm as Franklin draws fire from the sky bare-knuckled, surrounded by cherubic assistants. The flip side of the heroic scientist is the mad scientist, whose power stems from base motives or infernal regions, and is familiar through countless renditions of the Frankenstein image. As the nineteenth century progressed, fresh literary forms such as science fiction offered ample display space for presentations of the compromised scientist, as in H.G. Wells's The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896) and The Invisible Man (1897) -- examples that would prove to have a long-lived future in films on through the next century.

We'll pick up sf later in the semester, but our next step will to be to take under consideration the appearance of another variation of scientific man that was brought into being in the nineteenth century, in the emergence of stories of the scientific detective. That's shown in the image at the upper left, which features the famous Sherlock Holmes. The caption reads: "Holmes was working hard over a chemical investigation;" it's from a short story titled "The Naval Treaty" from 1893. In the first Holmes story by Arthur Conan Doyle, "A Study in Scarlet," Dr. Watson is told by a mutual acquaintance:

"Holmes is a little too scientific for my tastes -- it approaches to cold-bloodedness. I could imagine his giving a friend a little pinch of the latest vegetable alkaloid, not out of malevolence, you understand, but simply out of a spirit of inquiry in order to have an accurate idea of the effects." (quoted in E.J. Wagner, The Science of Sherlock Holmes, p. 3.)

Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes tales depend on scientific imagery in a number of different ways. For example: 1) as with the chemical investigation above, he is seen as being a competent scientist himself, applying scientific techniques to crime detection; 2) he is seen as having certain characteristics that call up conventional images of the scientific persona as seen in Romantic era critiques ["a cold-blooded...spirit of inquiry"]; and, 3) his relentlessly logical mind is seen as the literal embodiment of analytic method, as empirical data are cognitively sorted into causal chains of truth, that reveal the ordered reality beneath a surface of disorder, much as a computer program might be portrayed as doing so today. This successful working out of the "calculus of probabilities" [a term first used by Edgar Allen Poe in relation to his scientific detective, C. Auguste Dupin -- see below -- and repeated by A.C. Doyle] is in principle within the reach of anyone willing to reason accurately, but is shown to be beyond the grasp of nearly all within Holmes' orbit -- and that includes us, his readers!

The rise of detective fiction in the nineteenth century -- inaugurated by Poe in 1841, in his introduction of the detective C. Auguste Dupin -- and elaborated by Doyle in his Sherlock Holmes tales --  helps to point us to broader portrayals of the image of science that circulated within popular media, and especially to an emphasis on portraying the scientific mind. As Richard K. Ho notes in a discussion of the rise of the scientific detective,

"The genre of crime fiction had come into its own in the nineteenth century, amidst a time of great intellectual advancement. Thanks to the influences of the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution, advances in science, technology, and rational thought began to find their way into contemporary literature. Victorian writers such as Edgar Allan Poe and Arthur Conan Doyle incorporated these modern ideas into their fictional works, lending the credibility of science to the practical tasks of criminal detection and investigation."

While detectives such as Dupin and Holmes embody scientific characteristics, it is still the case that they occupy a space that is not strictly of the laboratory, and the ways in which they choose to spend their time differs from the normal round of what will come to be seen as the scientific enterprise. They will make an interesting case study for us of how scientific characteristics are mixed together with dimensions that may appear to be at odds with definitions of conventional scientific life, representing perhaps a hybrid creature that integrates scientific values and humanistic values, particularly perhaps in the detective's role as an agent of moral order.

As an opportunity to generate hypotheses of our own, we'll probe the literary creations of Poe and Doyle (Dupin and Holmes) and then compare these nineteenth-century depictions with a more modern-day version of the scientific detective: Lieutenant Columbo of television fame from the 1970s. In looking at the episode "A Stitch in Crime," we'll even get bonus representations of the "evil" scientist and the "good" scientist in addition to our ratiocinating detective as parts of the plot: a three-pack of images of the scientific mind and character, as we start to explore what all this imagery within popular culture may mean, then and now.

-----------------------------------------------------------------
For more: For an intriguing web exhibition about forensic science, see this National Library of Medicine project, "Visible Proofs" -- don't miss the section on "Riding the Forensic Wave," which discusses the circulation of ideas such as the scientific detective in the popular press. For a discussion of how Poe influenced Doyle, see this online article by Drew Thomas. And here's an earlier post on CSI.

Images: Upper left from "Visible Proofs" at http://www.nlm.nih.gov/visibleproofs/galleries/exhibition/wave_image_2.html; Newton, from Westminster Abbey's site [scroll down] at http://www.westminster-abbey.org/history-research/monuments-gravestones/people/12186; and the Invisible Man poster via wikipedia at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:The-Invisible-Man.jpg

a big hello to this year's scipop students!

welcome to the spring 2009 edition of hsci 1133, "science and popular culture"! I'm glad you're enrolled, excited about getting started, and looking forward to exploring aspects of the class further here on the blog as we move along through the semester. Although the things I write about on the blog aren't confined to our class alone, the class is the heartbeat behind its existence, and during spring semester a great deal of what appears here will relate to course content.

Sometimes I'll post about a topic or issue that will be coming up soon on the schedule, and providing a sneak preview -- as you'll see below about dinosaurs as scientific icons. Other times I'll supplement our course materials by seeing what I can turn up on the web, just meandering down different avenues that allow you to do some extra exploration if you'd like -- as when we were looking at the history of conceptualizing the moon two years ago. Other times I may reflect on questions you all have raised in class or in your assignments -- this space gives me a place to work on my thinking about these questions at greater length outside of class (see, professors assign themselves homework, too!) Here's an example from a previous year, when we watched a 1950s television program that addressed evolution and religion. And there will be entries related to topics where there is so much interesting extra information to be found online, that I'll use this as a place to bring some of that together as a point of departure for those who might find particular areas interesting beyond what we've had time for in class or in the reading (for example, anyone up for pondering the relationship of medieval bestiaries and phenomena such as the Loch Ness Monster in the present day? Then you're in luck!). Or sometimes, stuff that is just fun (like history of science and Halloween.)

This week coming up we'll begin discussing the kinds of symbolic images that appear within popular culture relating to science -- as a kind of quick example, I passed out brochures last class that advertised the "Walking with Dinosaurs" extravaganza that rolled into OKC this weekend at the Ford Center downtown (here's a newspaper review and here's the official site where you can get a sense of the show and here's a review by a scientist, Brian Switek, at his blog Laelaps). Dinosaurs certainly loom large as scientific icons in the public sphere, and the idea of thousands of people gathering together in a darkened sports arena to watch million dollar mechanical/puppet/thingamajigs conjure dinosaurs back to the living world is certainly an interesting example of the intersection of science/education/entertainment/spectacle/commerce.

Trying to understand the ecology of dinosaur images as a social phenomenon even as it is a scientific one is part of our task in analyzing popular culture. For example, if the popular success of paleontology as seen by the arena rock status of "Walking with Dinosaurs" -- or the auction of the T. rex skeleton, Sue, in 1997 for 8.36 million dollars, and the busy schedule the copies of her bones have had in traveling around the US and the world -- are indicative of something powerfully significant, it would follow logically that paleontology would be a richly-endowed area of scientific research, with untold numbers of paleontologists-to-be clamoring to take part, right, with huge paleontological institutes part of the university landscape? Ummmm, not exactly. Discuss.

We'll also work on analyzing images themselves, and trying to discern the patterns of meaning that connect dinosaurian imagery -- as one example -- with other aspects of what's going on in particular cultures at particular historical times and comparing them with the present. We'll look at how it was that a prehistoric creature that seems relatively banal to us today -- the mastodon (how many kids run screaming through natural history museums demanding to see the mastodon fossils?) -- was the first fossil exemplar of the idea of extinction, and on whom we projected our images of a vicious, dangerous past. The newly-founded United States was especially pleased to claim this ferocious carnivore (!) as our own mascot: "huge as the frowning precipice, cruel as the bloody panther, swift as the descending eagle, and terrible as the Angel of Night." Such attention to big, cruel, meat-eating tyrants is still common two hundred years later. Exhibit one: Oklahoma's own state fossil, the Saurophaganax maximus [note the maximus!], ushered into state law with the following words:

"Because of the extraordinarily rich paleontological heritage of the State of Oklahoma, the Legislature hereby declares Saurophaganax Maximus to be the State Fossil of Oklahoma. This spectacular dinosaur, the 'greatest king of reptile eaters', once roamed this great land. It is only known from Oklahoma and has surpassed the Tyrannosaurus rex, the 'king of the dinosaurs', as the greatest predator of earth’s history."

We don't want no puny critter representing us, ha! Surpassing T. rex! And if you want to check it out, look no further than the Sam Noble Oklahoma Museum of Natural History, where on the south campus you can see:

"The centerpiece exhibit in the Hall of Ancient Life, the Jones Family 'Clash of the Titans,' [which] shows an encounter between Oklahoma's largest Jurassic animals - the plant-eating sauropod Apatosaurus, which, at more than 93 feet long, is the largest of its kind in the world, and the carnivorous theropod Saurophaganax maximus, the largest of the Jurassic predators."

There's also a mammoth or two, and we'll take a look at how they're presented as well. Feel free to take a field trip of your own and get an early feel for what you think about all this!

If you'd like to explore dinosaurs as modern totems in greater detail, there's no better guide than W.J.T. Mitchell in The Last Dinosaur Book: The Life and Times of a Cultural Icon. Here's an interview with him about the book that will give you a sense of what kinds of questions scholars ask about popular phenomena like these and how they go about theorizing the answers. And there's a chapter excerpt as well: the counter-intuitive, "Why Children Hate Dinosaurs." Were you a dinosaur fan, foe, or indifferent to all the hoopla? Still feel the same today as an adult? Stay tuned, and we'll find out more from each of you.
--------------------------------------------------------------

For more: How do you think the general public view science/paleontology in your country? At paleontologist David Hone's public forum website at DinoBase, he asked the question and you can read the answers given by various scientists. For a quick piece on Oklahoma's dinosaurs, here's a report from News9 by Christian Price, "Oklahoma's First Residents" -- and note that down on the right side of the page in the green sidebar there are some nice video links. And will the whole king of beasts tag become extinct?: see the BBC's report, "T. rex: Warrior or Wimp?" 

Image: Advertising from the producers, at http://www.zrock.com/zforum/about1044.html

science fairs and what you can find there

Okay, back again at last! I've been all tied up with administrative work, including a review of our undergraduate program with the generation of new proposals that took much much much much much much much much more time than I had figured for, so I've been lost to cyberspace for lo these many months. I really look forward to getting back on track (or if I can't find the old one, clearing a path through the electron dust bunnies that have piled up and seeing what turns up)!

As my class in Science and Popular Culture winds down this semester its that time of the year when students begin formulating their individual projects, giving 30 different perspectives on how to end the class as they have their own final say. In revisiting the work from 2007 (yes, it takes me that long to convert piles of stuff on my office floor to files that I can actually access, sad to say!), I came across one cluster of particularly thoughtful projects that honed in on the phenomenon of science fairs, with some participant-observer recollections and mini-surveys. I'll start with some of what they had to say about science fairs, but also feature two offshoots that really got me thinking: one having to do with engineering, and the other with natural history.

The "science fair" idea goes back to 1942 when Science Service (now called Society for Science and the Public) partnered with the Westinghouse corporation to create the Science Talent Search, which would spawn a program for coordinating high school science fairs into a network of regional and then national contests. I've become interested in thinking about these competitions as a part of science and popular culture for lots of reasons: Do they accentuate the idea that some kids are "science people" and some aren't? Projecting ahead from what a science fair entails, what conclusions would students draw about what science is like later on in college or as a profession? What's the effect of focusing on science as a "contest"? For a sense of some of the contemporary aspects of science fairing today, this 2003 article from the New York Times is helpful: "Those Simple Science Fairs Go the Way of the Dinosaurs." One unlucky kid with a modest experiment was dumbstruck to find that "kids had boards that were monsters, nine feet tall," and, the reporter recounts, "one judge laughed out loud at his display. 'And it was not a fun laugh. I wanted to take my board and beat him over the head.'" Yikes! Although one young man -- who came to be known as "Cockroach Boy" back at school -- triumphed with a project that did not entail lasers, DNA testing kits, or time on the Hubble Space Telescope, so it appears there is still a place for a kitchen table kind of project, if it's got a great angle (see it described at the end of the article).

Okay, back to my students and the traditional science fair. Students who had participated generally remembered the experience as a good one, as with one philosophy major stating how important it was to have "hands on learning experience, as opposed to reading out of textbooks," and he judged that his opportunity to compete in a science fair project proved to be "important in that it helped develop my reasoning skills with the application of the scientific method." Sounds like exactly the kind of outcome a science fair planner wants!

However, when the student running the survey asked her interviewees "whether or not science fairs did a good job of facilitating thoughts about science outside of the experience," the answers were much more varied. One middle-aged adult, the student interviewer noted, made a particularly "interesting point. She believes science fairs did a good job of facilitating thoughts about science throughout the progression of the projects and into the exhibition, but felt that without further reflection on the experience in the classroom, she lost much of what she had gained during the process." Another student suggested, however, that "I don't believe it is absolutely necessary for science fairs to bring about additional curiosity within students. As long as they are actively participating, they are gaining valuable knowledge." The student author also was surprised to find, within her admittedly small sample, that the male science fair participants went on to maintain a strong interest later in life in science, while her female participants had not. I love it when the students turn up data that surprises them! It gives me hope that they'll keep thinking about this stuff even after we've all said good-bye...

One issue the student reported back concerned the dynamics of whether or not the science is fair is held as part of the regular school curriculum or outside of it. As one high school principal who was interviewed stated about science fairs:

"Most of ours have been out of school and optional because of the amount of instruction time needed to prepare for projects. End of [term] instruction testing requires most teachers to use every minute of instruction time to prepare for the test. Unfortunately, when projects are prepared outside of school it's hard to determine how much parents have done instead of the students."

Another student recruited her colleagues in the local chapter of Alpha Sigma Kappa (Women in Technical Studies), where she found little enthusiasm for the traditional science fair, which appears to have not been optional. She reported that:

"the general consensus was that teachers mandating a submission from students, in addition to little guidance in terms of expectations, led to the fair being approached as an assignment. The easiest approach to this assignment would be to submit the simplest project, which required the least amount of effort, possible. Oftentimes, the 'individual investigation of something of interest,' which the fair tries to promote by not providing much guidance results in using experiments found in science fair books. . .These books defeat the 'inquiry process' by providing the problem and solution to the readers."

And she's not kidding! When I checked on amazon.com there were a slew of titles offering to show you the way: from Glen Vecchione's 100 Amazing First-Prize Science Fair Projects to Joe Rhatigan and Rain Newcomb's Prize-Winning Science Fair Projects for Curious Kids -- or, if you're not overly ambitious on the prize front, perhaps Science Fair Projects for Dummies by Maxine Levaren will do -- and then those who haven't proceeded in a properly organized manner (waiting for inspiration to strike?) can pay the surcharge for overnight shipping and the advice offered by Sudipta Bardhan-Collen's Last Minute Science Projects: When Your Bunsen's Not Burning but the Clock's Really Ticking. . . and there are more!

This student made a further insightful point: Looking back from her vantage point as a college senior, she argued that the science fair misses the mark in emulating scientific work in several ways:

"in comparing my personal experiences with conducting research in microbiology with my memories of science fairs, science fairs are not representative of 'real-life' scientific work. In presenting my senior thesis, I had to defend my decisions made while conducting my research and the interpretation of the results afterwards to established scientists in the field.To maintain objectivity in judging, contestants [in a science fair] are not confronted by the judges, and therefore, a winning project does not require the contestant to have a thorough understanding of the project. Additionally, 'real-life' science requires teamwork, and science fairs give an unreasonable impression of individual work."

The issue of judges looks like it varies depending on the school district and whether or not it is a formal competition, but the issue of teamwork is a striking one (being mentored by a professional -- allowed in most cases with science fairs -- is not the same thing as teamwork with colleagues). The answer to this artificiality: she suggested that a more compelling experience that turns the teamwork issue inside out was found when she joined the newly formed robotics club at her school, and they competed in three competitions: Botball, FIRST (For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology) and BEST (Boosting Engineering, Science, and Technology). Botball is particularly of interest here locally since it is the brainchild of University of Oklahoma Engineering Professor David P. Miller, the Wilkinson Chair and Professor of Intelligent Systems and Chief Technical Officer of the KISS* Institute for  Practical Robotics [KISS being an acronym for "Keep it Simple, Stupid".] My student reporter writes that "the purpose of Botball is to be both inspirational and educational through building and programming autonomous LEGO robots. The entrance fee for teams includes a training workshop for teachers and robotic kits so that teachers can continue creating robotics projects year-round." The robotics competitions look like they have a whole different feel to them than do the science fairs, and yet they too are seeking to foster creativity and problem-solving. I'm very interested in learning more about this, as it appears that robotics competitions can reach a wider variety of students and sustain their interest and intellectual curiosity and confidence longer than the science fair, at least as traditionally conceived. I love it when my students turn up data that surprises me -- it gives me hope that I won't stop thinking about this stuff after we've all said goodbye!

But the biggest twist was one student's report about how her small Catholic school, through the inspiration of their junior high school science teacher, create anew each year a natural history landscape through their "Hall Project" that brings the idea of teamwork to a whole other level: her project paper was entitled "How to Inspire Nature Lovers, One Papier Mache Animal at a Time." This is how she described the habitats they created inside the ordinary four walls of their school:

"Once the hallways are completely decorated with cellophane rivers, plastic grass, papier mache rocks, and braided vines, they are now ready to be filled with their inhabitants that the students have spent weeks molding and painting. Fish are laid in the rivers, while the birds are hung with fishing line from the ceiling. Lastly the mammals and reptiles are strategically placed within the forests and meadows. It is now, as the last little lizard is placed on top of a nestled rock, that the hallways have been entirely transformed from manila brick walls into a maze of forests, oceans and plains that mimic the wondrous nature rare to the human eye."

She relates that she had been anxiously waiting for her chance to participate since third grade, being primed by observing the hours her brother had spent in the garage making two blue-footed boobies for his year, the first one which "stood with its head turned sharply right to look for predators while perched on a tree trunk, and the second flew, wings spread, over the nearby waters to catch fish." She was, she recalls "ecstatic" when her time finally arrived: "The Hall Project was something that every younger student adored...it is humorous to reminisce, seven years later, about how obsessed my classmates and I were with all aspects of it. The Hall Project seemed so enjoyable since it wasn't just another science class of sitting quietly and taking notes; it was creative and stimulated the adolescent, keen sense of curiosity which made us want to learn more." She contributed two Australian Sooty Owls, which hovered over a river where her friend's platypus swam. She astutely points out that the Hall Project "unconventionally revealed the importance of respect for the environment, in the sense that [we] built it, so it was [our] job to take care of it...[we] learned to respect the 'habitat' by protecting [our] animal creations from swinging backpacks or trampling feet between classes."

The Hall Project educated on multiple levels, as students crafted their animals and the habitats, wrote up note cards with interesting facts about an animal's life that they could convey during tours they conducted during the school's "tourist season" for the elementary school children and for their parents at open house weekend. My student notes that: "The Hall Project made it acceptable for its adult tourists to not have all the answers, as children and society expect of them; so parents were given the opportunity to continue their learning and experience something new, which is often forgotten about and trivialized in the world of raising a family and paying the bills."

She was very proud that her work had allowed her mother "to 'visit' the Galapagos Islands and Australia simply by wandering our halls. For her, as a working adult, this allowed her to imagine these distant lands. As she described her memory of the Galapagos Islands Hall Project: 'I did not know anything about that place, but it opened my eyes to a wonderful island that I never would have a chance to experience otherwise."

A decade later, this college student states, she still carries with her the message of this novel twist on the science fair:

"Nature should inspire awe in people, children and adults alike. If we could love and cherish our simple papier mache exhibits, those feelings should be exacerbated by the knowledge that each of those creatures actually exists. The Hall Project gave [our teacher] a creative way...to warn her students about dangers to the environment. Following in the belief that knowledge is power, the more children (and adults) know about the world and its wonders, they grow more interested. With interest comes love, with love comes respect, and with respect for nature people are more willing to save it ..."

In doing it themselves, I bet they experienced the natural world in a way that -- even with all their big budgets and spectacular camera work -- an Animal Planet or Discovery Channel documentary can't match.

------------------------------------------------

For more: Here's a blog entry on the 2006 student essays from my scipop class, "Student Anthropologists: Through the Looking Glass." For a bit on the history of science fairs, see this blog entry at Women in Science on a 1951 Popular Science article on some female science contest winners in the World War II era; here's a reproduction of the original article itself: "Wanted: Science Talent." Intel has a downloadable glossy brochure from 2001 on the Science Talent Search (which it took over from Westinghouse): Celebrating 60 Years of Science [it's a pdf file with a bit of a download time]. If you're interested in more descriptions and discussion see: "Six Decades of Science Contest Prowess" from the New York Times as well as "A Fine Hour for Squishy Sciences"; "'Go for it, kid': Looking Back on Five Decades of the Science Talent Search" from Science News; and "Is Science Talent Squandered? How Future Scientists Come Undone" from Science News Online.

Images: The first image is from the resource page on Science Fair Projects from the Athens Public Library System, at http://www.clarke.public.lib.ga.us/images/klscifair.jpg. The second one is of a 1950 finalist in the Westinghouse Science Talent Search, located at http://blog.modernmechanix.com/mags/qf/c/MechanixIllustrated/8-1950/lrg_tick_tack_toe.jpg. The third one is the cover image at amazon.com for the book 100 Amazing First-Prize Science Fair Projects, while the fourth and fifth are from the Botball site which has a gallery of their best photos. The last two are of a lesser sooty owl from Nov. 22, 2007 at the Politics and Environment blog and a papier mache dodo, which is the work of British sculptor David Farrer, who specializes in using recyclable materials to make papier mache trophy heads -- a very clever green project.