New at RCSA
Happy 2010 Transformations
by Dan Huff
The New Year inevitably brings thoughts of change and renewal; another word related to these two is “transformation.” Our need to understand transformation in nature is at the root of all science; but like “change” and “renewal,” “transformation” is also a spiritual term used when discussing personal growth and development. Little wonder, then, that in western civilization, where the optimists among us have for thousands of years believed in the perfectibility of the individual and the ultimate triumph of the human spirit, scientific discovery has been viewed as part of this process.
Here’s wishing all of us of a transformative 2010 – on multiple levels.
The most spectacular current example of our drive to understand transformation in nature is the massive Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN on the Swiss-French border. It’s the world’s largest machine at 17 miles in circumference, built to illuminate, among other things, how the universe has changed since the Big Bang into what we see today. The CERN machine is designed to accelerate two opposing beams of subatomic particles to 1.2 trillion volts each and then bang them into one another at energy levels present when the universe, which began as less than the size of an atom, was only billionths of a second old.
The first modern particle accelerator, the cyclotron built by Ernest Lawrence at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1932, was designed to help us understand transformation in the subatomic realm. A foot in diameter, the Berkeley machine boosted protons to just 1.25 million electron volts – far less energy than a trillionth of a calorie, but a vast amount of energy on the atomic scale.
Lawrence’s machine was inspired by the pioneering work of Professor Ernest Rutherford at Cambridge University. In 1911 Rutherford bombarded atoms with helium ions and discovered a small, heavy nucleus inside those atoms. Eight years later Rutherford managed to bombard the nucleus itself, a process that transformed the nucleus of a nitrogen atom into the nucleus of an oxygen atom. He had done what medieval alchemists had only dreamed of doing, transmuting -- or transforming -- matter.
Today, transformation is increasingly relevant to the act of scientific discovery itself.
It’s a theme we take seriously at Research Corporation for Science Advancement (RCSA), a private foundation that has been funding research for nearly 100 years. In fact, it was RCSA that helped Lawrence build his first collider, the granddaddy of today’s LHC. RCSA also helped Robert Goddard create the first modern rockets that are today transforming our relationship with the solar system; and the foundation was instrumental in creating the field of radio astronomy that has helped to transform our understanding of the cosmos. Over the past century, 38 of the early career scientists funded by RCSA went on to win Nobel Prizes; meanwhile, science and its resulting technologies have greatly transformed human life and the American economy.
Yet our need for transformative science has never been more intense. America faces increasing global economic competition, and the world in general faces elemental challenges brought about by climate change, population growth and seemingly ever-increasing energy demands. What these problems require, ideally, are breakthrough scientific discoveries leading to new waves of technology. In a word, transformation.
Of course there are those who argue for a different type of transformation, one that would require us to shrink our numbers, renounce growth economics and unbridled energy use and become “one with nature.” The basic problem with this approach is that it is a decidedly unnatural path for Homo sapiens, whose history is rife with exploitation and expansion. “The need of expansion,” as Victorian era poet Matthew Arnold put it, “is as genuine an instinct in man as the need in a plant for the light, or the need in man himself for going upright.”
Assuming Arnold is correct, what’s a supposedly intelligent species to do given today’s challenges?
While most of us can accept humane and reasonable limits on the size of families over time and the switch to renewable fuels sooner rather than later, humankind’s instinctual drive for expansion in one form or another is unlikely to disappear. This means that barring massive plagues or widespread off-planet migration in coming decades, science and technology increasingly will be pressed to allow us to do more with less, to assist us in continuing to prosper from our natural heritage while also preserving the world for future generations. What the optimists among us expect from science, let’s hope not naively, is that it can be relied upon to transmute the base metal of earth’s finite resources into the gold of increasing prosperity and “the good life” for all, or at any rate, a lot of us.
Current trends are positive in this regard. The recent Copenhagen Summit, if nothing else, represents a species-wide recognition of the limits of our natural environment and a universal willingness to talk. That’s pretty enlightened stuff, given our long, bloody history. Meanwhile, in the United States, the large federal science-funding agencies are exploring procedures to speed up breakthrough discoveries in the physical sciences, biology and medicine; these programs, if successful, doubtless will spawn imitators all across the developed and developing world.
At RCSA, 2010 will see the first Scialog conference. It is an experiment in cross-boundary community building aimed squarely at encouraging early-career researchers, humanity’s most creative scientific cohort, to tackle a major global challenge. The first three-year Scialog round is aimed at improving the efficiency of solar energy conversion, subsequent rounds will deal with various aspects of global climate change. Our goal is nothing short of achieving breakthrough discoveries in this area; but to do so, we must assume greater risks than commonly accepted in the traditional funding process for academic-based scientific research.
Transformation – personal, institutional, societal – is inherently risky, but it is also an essential aspect of the natural world. May all your transformations in this New Year lead to better tomorrows.