***This is a follow up to the above post about gravitational waves, and no longer directly relates to gravitational waves, but rather is my own personal thoughts and opinions***
The last question - "Why should I care?"
"Until now, we have only seen warped space-time when it is very calm — as though we had only seen the surface of the ocean on a very calm day, when it's quite glassy. We had never seen the ocean roiled in a storm, with crashing waves. All that changed on September 14. The colliding black holes that produced these gravitational waves created a violent storm in the fabric of space and time."
~ Kip Thorne
Something that I hear a lot about science is "what's the point?" Gravitational waves have no intrinsic worth; you cant make money off them in any way. I cede this point entirely (for now). Gravitational waves cant be bought of sold, and in fact the LIGO observatories cost of a few hundred million a year to operate. There are certainly arguments to be made for pure research, such as GPS becoming possible using Einstein's equations, or the fact that Hubble's faulty mirror resulted in software being developed that helped doctors accurately find breast cancer in mammograms. There are hundreds of these examples, but the point I want to make is more nuanced.
Science inspires. I'm continually in awe of what science has accomplished and the ways in which it improves human life. This isn't universal, and any tools developed can be used for moral or amoral purposes, but one only needs to look at nearly any metric, such as quality of drinking water, instances of polio, predictive power of equations over time, overall lifespan etc... and see how it tracks along with the development of formal scientific practices, and you see a fairly strong correlation.
In order to continue this trend and invest in the future, young people need to continue to head into STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math) fields. The best way I know to do that is to continue to make science more than bookkeeping or number-crunching, but to make it engaging and inspiring (think Apollo 11).
Last note - There is a tendency to create a divide between liberal arts and science. This is terribly unhelpful at best and detrimental at worst. Many scientists are not good at disseminating their ideas to the public, and this is something that the liberal arts excels at. Data is not inspiring without the understanding that the liberal arts bring.
Cheers,
- Scott
Email subscription (one per post):
tinyletter.com/scottsieke
Science inspires. I'm continually in awe of what science has accomplished and the ways in which it improves human life. This isn't universal, and any tools developed can be used for moral or amoral purposes, but one only needs to look at nearly any metric, such as quality of drinking water, instances of polio, predictive power of equations over time, overall lifespan etc... and see how it tracks along with the development of formal scientific practices, and you see a fairly strong correlation.
In order to continue this trend and invest in the future, young people need to continue to head into STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math) fields. The best way I know to do that is to continue to make science more than bookkeeping or number-crunching, but to make it engaging and inspiring (think Apollo 11).
Last note - There is a tendency to create a divide between liberal arts and science. This is terribly unhelpful at best and detrimental at worst. Many scientists are not good at disseminating their ideas to the public, and this is something that the liberal arts excels at. Data is not inspiring without the understanding that the liberal arts bring.
Cheers,
- Scott
Email subscription (one per post):
tinyletter.com/scottsieke
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