edgar-mitchell

Sea of Grass 31
this time in West Newton, Massachusetts, a middle-class residential community
just outside of Boston.
The new program focused on a varied range of subjects never before
studied together. These were bold new topics such as star evolution, galactic
evolution, optimization theory, orbital mechanics, space navigation,
rocket propulsion, inertial platforms—abstruse subjects at the time, often
utilizing primitive, simplistic new theories. No one knew the answers to
the questions they posed, just as no one knew what we would encounter in
the heavens. There were other newly formed curricula similar to this one
at Caltech and Princeton, but by and large, this was a new science, and in
retrospect, our understanding at the time was rather naïve and touching.
Was there life out there And if so, was it benevolent, or malevolent Was
it primitive, or intelligent and evolved to any meaningful degree Only the
most daring or reckless asked such questions, as conventional wisdom,
derived both from science and theology, firmly believed the Earth to be
the biological center of the universe. This naïveté was reflected in the
popular culture of the times as well. The movies of the 1950s and early
’60s are interesting in the way they depict America’s childlike understanding
with unobscured honesty, along with a touch of fear, just as it really
was. In the common mind, heaven was just out there above us, not to be
discovered in this life. It’s easy and self-indulgent to laugh now, but there
was no advantage of hindsight, no view to be had but that brilliant light of
discovery, the source of which lay years in the future. I recall that when I
was a teenager, an alien spacecraft was announced to have crashed near
our ranch in Roswell. A flurry of speculation and gossip followed in its
wake, until the next day, when the official explanation was amended and
the government cited the incident as having been a fallen weather balloon.
Was it More recent events and disclosures reveal the weather balloon
explanation to have been silly and deliberately misleading. These events
were in part what made the times so unbearably exciting.
It was here at MIT that I began to learn about quantum mechanics and
the theory of relativity in an academic forum. The universe was starting to
be explained in ways quite different from the conventional wisdom of
classical physics, and certainly different from the way we perceived it to
be through our senses. I understood that if a person were to one day go to
the moon, the voyager would come back a few microseconds younger than
a twin who had stayed behind. I didn’t yet fully understand that at the
bottom of all matter there was no simple, coherent picture of physical
reality. Though they taught the mathematics of the new physics, the larger
issues and the deeper implications of the theories had not, even then, trickled
down to the ordinary engineering professor. Coming to fully understand
the implications of these notions was years away. Only now, as we
begin the 21st century is there a wider knowledge and new evidence that