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FORYOURCONSIDERATION BY JEFF HESTER Not the end of science The emerging science of process I picked up a copy of John Horgan’s The End of Science the other day. Horgan is a good writer with impressive rhetorical skill, but the book itself is a travesty. Horgan is a true believer that we have reached the end of what science can tell us, leaving him keenly attuned to things that might support his faith, but deaf to things that do not. What I saw in Horgan’s prose more than anything was a mixture of hubris and failed imagination. The future of science will, without question, be different from its past. But Horgan seems convinced that because he, personally, cannot envision what that future will be, it must be a dead end. From where I sit, things look different. Last month, I wrote about tiers of scientific thought. From observation, to catalogs and categorization, to predictive description, to explanation and a search for mechanism and physical law, science has come a long way. But while science continues to delve aggressively into the fundamental nature of reality, the last century and a half has also seen something different. Rather than looking for new physical laws or testing ever more esoteric theoretical predictions of those laws, scientists are increasingly asking a different sort of question: “Once you know the rules and the way pieces move, how does the game unfold?” For want of something better, I’ll call this kind of science the “science of process.” I need to be clear that I am not talking about process in the way an engineer does. Engineers begin with a goal, and then design processes to accomplish that end. To an engineer, process is inherently teleological, meaning it embodies the last of Aristotle’s four causes: purpose. But the science of process has nothing to do with Aristotle’s philosophy. Purpose is superfluous. Instead, the science of process asks what happens when you throw all of our observations, descriptions, and physical laws into a pot and put it on to boil. Looking forward in time, the science of process asks, “Given the way things work, what will happen next?” Looking back into the past it asks, “Given the way things work, how did we get here?” Once recognized, the emergence of the science of process is not difficult to see. A century ago, cutting-edge astronomy meant classifying stars and galaxies and discovering the sizes of things. In sharp contrast, astronomy today looks at the process of star formation and evolution, the process of galaxy and structure formation, and even the processes that gave rise to physical law itself. Astronomy is hardly alone. Modern geology and planetary science are built on processes such as tectonism, volcanism, impacts, and gradation. Medical research talks less of organs and their function, and more about processes and their interactions. The exploding field of brain science looks at learning, memory, Astronomers have come a long way from the days of simply categorizing different kinds of galaxies. Now, they use observations combined with detailed models to understand how galaxies like our own Milky Way evolved over billions of years from indistinct blobs to complex spirals. behavior, and even consciousness, not as things or patterns or events, but as processes. And then there is biology. Absent the process of evolution, biology vanishes as a modern science. The science of process relies on Newton, Einstein, and Bohr, but it takes a very different approach. For one thing, nature doesn’t respect boundaries between academic disciplines, so neither can the science of process. The science of process isn’t looking for that one equation that explains everything. Instead it looks at the emergence of complexity from underlying simplicity, and at the emergence of pattern and order from underlying complexity. That’s a very different ballgame than measuring this number to test that prediction. Destructive testing of ideas remains paramount. But we have to carefully rethink what kinds of questions can and cannot be answered, and what those answers might look like. The science of process draws on a host of new experimental, observational, methodological, and theoretical tools. There are technologies like the fMRI, which allows us to watch the brain as it formulates thoughts. Blindingly fast computers allow us to handle huge amounts of data and watch processes play themselves out in virtual universes of ones and zeros. Nonlinear dynamics and the mathematics of complexity weren’t yet part of the curriculum when I got my Ph.D. The term fractal wasn’t even invented until my senior year in high school. Things get messy when science reinvents itself. It’s the Wild West. Nobody owns a crystal ball. Maybe one of the reasons it is so difficult for a science journalist to recognize and appreciate the change taking place is that the scientists who are remaking their fields don’t really understand the impact yet either. The science of process is tackling problems that hold the promise of revolutionizing our understanding of the cosmos, of our world, and of ourselves. In retrospect, each new tier of scientific thought has brought with it changes even more profound than the one before. I doubt that this one will disappoint. Jeff Hester is a keynote speaker, coach, and astrophysicist. Follow his thoughts at jeff-hester.com. NASA/ESA/C. PAPOVICH (TAMU)/H. FERGUSON (STSCI)/S. FABER (UCSC)/I. LABBÉ (LEIDEN UNIV.) BROWSE THE “FOR YOUR CONSIDERATION” ARCHIVE AT www.Astronomy.com/Hester. 12 ASTRONOMY • JUNE 2016
ASTRONEWS PERU CHILE BOLIVIA ARGENTINA BRAZIL Buenos Aires 0 0 Atlantic Ocean Rio de Janeiro Sao Paulo Site of meteorite explosion 1,000 miles 1,000 km BIG SPLASH. The meteorite exploded some 1,000 miles (1,600 kilometers) off the coast of Brazil over the Atlantic Ocean. ASTRONOMY: ROEN KELLY EMPTY SPACE. Galaxies exist in long filaments separated by vast voids. But new work shows these voids may hold one-fifth of all normal matter. Mapping the cold Milky Way Surprise meteorite strike On February 6, a room-sized meteorite (16 to 23 feet, or 5 to 7 meters) burned up over the Atlantic Ocean, exploding with an energy equivalent to 13,000 tons of TNT — and yet it took weeks for anyone to notice. U.S. government sensors picked up the event and reported it to NASA, though exactly how it was detected was not disclosed. And since no one reported seeing the blast or was able to recover fragments (any shards that survived are likely at the bottom of the ocean), we don’t know much more about it. The rough size of the meteorite can be estimated based on the energy of its explosion and by assuming it comprised the same materials as the much larger meteorite that exploded over Chelyabinsk, Russia, in February 2013. That blast released 34 times more energy. — K. H. Telescopes.netOFFICINA STELLARE ORION • QSI • SBIG • SKY-WATCHER USA • SOFTWAREBISQUE • STARLIGHTEXPRESS • TAKAHASHI • TELE VUE • THE IMAGING SOURCE • VIXEN PLANEWAVEAPOGEE IMAGING • ASA • ATIK • CANON • CELESTRON • CORONADO • FARPOINT • FLI • iNOVA • JMI • KENDRICK • LUMENERA • LUMICON • LUNT • MEADE • MOONLITE Introducing Primaluca Labs The One and Only Cooled DSLR PLL700DAC Now with a Fan. A must have of Astronomy Meade LX90 8” DUST MAP. The Atacama Pathfinder EXperiment (APEX) telescope in Chile views the sky at millimeter wavelengths, longer than infrared and shorter than radio waves. This light comes mostly from cold gas, the kind that will eventually condense and collapse to form new stars. From 2008 to 2010, APEX mapped the Milky Way, and scientists have finished combining the data to form a breathtakingly detailed picture of our galaxy’s cold clouds where the next generations of stars will form. — K. H. ESO/APEX/ATLASGAL CONSORTIUM/NASA/GLIMPSE CONSORTIUM/ESA/PLANCK B: ESO/APEX/ATLASGAL CONSORTIUM/NASA/GLIMPSE CONSORTIUM/ESA/PLANCK/VVV SURVEY/D. MINNITI/S. GUISARD/ACKNOWLEDGEMENT: IGNACIO TOLEDO, MARTIN KORNMESSER 1973 Lunokhod 2 (USSR) LUNAR DRIVING DISTANCE RECORDS 1972 Apollo 17 lunar rover (United States) 1971 Apollo 15 lunar rover (United States) 1972 Apollo 16 lunar rover (United States) 17.3 miles 27.8km 16.8 miles 27.1km 22.2 miles 35.7km 24 miles 39km 1970–1971 Lunokhod 1(USSR) 6.5 miles The four NASA lunar rovers — three 10.5km used on the Apollo missions and one for 2013 spare parts — cost a total of $38 million. Yutu (China) 330 feet 100 meters, est. 0 5 10 Miles 15 20 25 FAST FACT 0 5 10 15 20 25 30 35 40 45 Kilometers ROAD TRIP. Three different countries have explored the Moon using roving vehicles, though only NASA also had humans on the surface to drive them. ASTRONOMY: ROEN KELLY AND KOREY HAYNES 5348 Topanga Canyon Blvd. Woodland Hills, CA 91364 Mon-Sat: 9am-6pm (PST) Toll Free: (888) 427-8766 Local: (818) 347-2270 Fax: (818) 992-4486 WWW.ASTRONOMY.COM 13
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