I know Donald Trump won’t read this, but I feel it still
needs to be said, on the day we hear that NASA’s Earth Observation funding is
in jeopardy, that no matter how political a subject is, the gathering of
information itself is never a political act.
Climate change is regrettably, a very hot political
potato, the science is very clear cut, the physics describing how molecules interact
with different wavelengths of photon is highly detailed, and people who state global
warming is fake because it’s snowing have failed to grasp the obvious
difference between the words climate and weather.
The accusation in question is that by studying the effect
of climate change on the planet, NASA is shutting down conversation on the
causes, and forcing policy makers to enact unnecessary regulation and
prohibitions; that the act of studying the Earth’s climatic systems is a
politically motivated act.
Amongst the hundreds of ongoing projects that form the
highly respected and world renown Earth Observation program, NASA has been
flying radar equipped planes over Antarctica for decades, and they have constructed
a highly detailed 4D map of the ice cap; its shape and structure, and how it
moves and flows over time. They have
found geological features buried under millions of years of ice, and lakes and
rivers hidden forever from view. They
have found an entire sub-Antarctic hydrological cycle. This is data, it’s not policy; it doesn’t say
you can’t have a car with a large V8 engine, it just tells us something about
the world we didn’t know beforehand.
Discovering how energy enters and exits our atmosphere
and oceans is not policy. Measuring the
changes in gas and particle levels across the Earth’s surface, seeing how they
move and rise and fall and mix is not policy.
Establishing climatic norms across large time spans and geographical
areas, and then identifying deviations from the norm is not policy.
Political decisions have to be made in the light of this
and all other relevant data, but they are made by political institutions. Just because research produces data that
forces political institutions to make decisions they would rather avoid does
not mean that the research is flawed.
There is a device at the Sandia National Laboratories in
Albuquerque called the Z machine. It was
built in order to verify that America’s thermonuclear arsenal would remain
effective years after the warheads were manufactured, now that test detonations
had been outlawed by treaty. To do this
it can produce, for an instant, the temperatures and pressures that initiate
thermonuclear detonation in the deuterium tritium fuel. There is possibly no greater political act
that working on potentially world ending super weapons, and yet even here the actual
data been gathered is not political.
The Z machine produces the Z effect, in which a target is
surrounded by a nest of thin wires that are then explosively vaporised by a
massive electrical pulse. The wires
transform in to a cloud of intensely magnetic plasma, which then collapses and
generates an immense x-ray pulse, this hits the target from all directions, and
blasts the surface outwards at relativistic velocities. In obedience to Newton’s second law, this
outward force must be countered by an inward force, and the target is
crushed. The energies involved are pure hyperbola,
billions of atmospheres and billions of kelvin.
The periodic table as we know it is a grouping of elements
by the characteristic which they possess in environments that humans would be
comfortable with. Crank the pressure up
to one million atmospheres and the table would bear no resemblance to the one
we all saw in class, or shower curtain in my case. At high temperatures or pressures, the unique
properties of the elements change. Our
physics was built on the surface of the Earth, but in reality most atoms in the
universe exist in a very different environment.
They are crushed within planets and stars, or drift in giant
intergalactic clouds, which surprisingly are enormously hot, so hot in fact we
didn’t spot them for decades as we were looking in the wrong part of the
spectrum. Most of the universe inhabits
a region our physics in only beginning to understand.
Our particle accelerators and massive lasers, and
z-pinches allow us to establish fundamental physics at high energies, where
most of the universe’s physics actually happens. True, as a consequence it does teach us how
to blow up one very small part of the universe very effectively, but that is
not the fault of knowledge.
I am a massive fan of space exploration. The fact that we may soon inhabit a world where
no living person has been anywhere except the Earth is a failure of our
civilisation. We should be doing much
much more, we should be on the surface of Mars, we should be drilling through the
icy moons to the oceans beneath, we should be using nuclear propulsion to get round
our system in a reasonable time frame.
Yes, it would take massive resources, and trillions of dollars, but we
spent trillions on weapon systems that prevented their own use, so perhaps an opportunity
has already been missed.
But if we could only do one thing in space, learn about
our world, or learn about the others, then it would have to be this home of
ours every time. We cling to our small
rock with only the slightest sliver of atmosphere to cosset us, and to deliberately
fail to understand the workings of that, the effects of that, the consequences
of that, seems incomprehensible.
There is no such thing as political and apolitical
science. It is an artificial delineation
that is only created by politicians at times for expediency. We don’t mind what you say on the news, and
how you pander to the crowd on the hustings, just leave the very clever men and
women to get on and find real answers.
