My Dell Inspiron Mini 9 netbook came programmed to boot up its browser with Yahoo! on display. That's OK with me, since I get most of my e-mail there; but I do have to resist the temptation to click on Yahoo's often-absurd news leads (see which actress had a lousy, ill-fitting dress at the Oscars!). Today, though, I was intrigued to see a news item on Stephen Hawking.
The news itself is moderately worrying: Dr. Hawking has taken ill. Arguably the man, afflicted for four decades now with Lou Gehrig's disease, has beaten the odds many times over. Yet he is the embodiment of genius for many fans of black holes, time travel, and cosmology; and he admirably has devoted much of his time and energy to sharing his esoteric, mathematical explorations with the public. I recently watched a fascinating Errol Morris film about the enigmatic physicist. Highly recommended!
While on the subject of film, let me also urge you to view a wonderful miniseries, Cosmic Perspective, that WGBH's Nova produced a few years back. This was narrated by the man who probably comes closest to inheriting Carl Sagan's mantle as American expositor of all things extraterrestrial: Neil Tyson, the director of the Hayden Planetarium at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City.
Dr. Tyson's autobiography, The Sky is Not The Limit: Tales of an Urban Astrophysicist, is a must-read. A muscular African American, Dr. Tyson juxtaposes his achievements (running America's most famous planetarium; serving on high-level NASA panels; and many others) with being skipped over by taxicab drivers and shadowed by security guards in department stores. He also tells a first-person tale of life in Lower Manhattan during and after the Sept. 11, 2001, attack on the World Trade Center.
I don't know if MIT's Max Tegmark qualifies as a celebrity cosmologist, but he did write a fascinating Scientific American article a few years back (well, probably more than a few, but less than ten!). Dr. Tegmark's article essentially claimed that any universe that can exist - one in which I am female instead of male; one in which I am writing this on a Mini 10 instead of a Mini 9; one in which Earth's Moon is made of green cheese - must exist, for reasons lying at the intersection of cosmology and quantum mechanics.
Displaying my parochial bias toward nearby Cambridge, MA, I also would put Robert Kirshner in the celebrity cosmologist camp. He wrote a revealing (if somewhat too casual) behind-the-scenes book about the discovery (partly his) that our universe is expanding at ever-faster rates, rather than slowing down, as decades of textbooks have taught.
And then, three thousand miles away, in Pasadena, California, sits Wendy Freedman. Currently she runs the institution that once was home to the men (above all Edwin Hubble) and telescopes (above all the 100-inch reflector atop Mount Wilson) that discovered the universe's expansion. Thus it's only fitting that she was the point person in the decade-long project to use the Hubble Space Telescope to pin down the universe's expansion rate, and with that, its age, density, and ultimate fate.
I doubt any of these folks went into their chosen field in hopes of becoming celebrities, even within the somewhat insular field of extragalactic astronomy. But I take great hope from the fact that, from time to time, they share the digital limelight with the likes of captured Somali pirates and Britney Spears. For this implies that many folks, from all walks of life, recognize the effort and talent that scientists - like artists, actors, and entrepreneurs - bring to their work.
Copyright 2009 Joshua Roth.