From space probes to sundials

In full Star Wars fashion, a probe was deliberately smashed onto a comet named Tempel I by NASA’s spacecraft Deep Impact last Sunday. It was done so that we could dwell into materials present when the Solar System was born around 4.6 billion years ago. This spectacular event happened 83 million miles away from the Earth, in full Technicolor for beachgoers in Waikiki coast in Hawaii to witness on large screens while we here were doomed to watch the unmaking of a political leadership on our TV screens. Deep Impact’s mission was a spectacular smash – with its probe speeding at 23,000 miles an hour and having the energy of five million tons of dynamite. It smashed onto comet Tempel I with the mothership 5,000 miles away, a distance considered a front-row seat in space terms. This enabled the mothership to collect data that, in the words of one scientist, "would be enough to keep me busy to my retirement."

The science that usually grabs us now are often those that grab us when we choose movies to watch. Lots of explosions with debris and blood gushing all over. Deep Impact’s probe is an experiment to figure our what our Solar System is made of and naturally since we are of this neighborhood in this universe, it will also tell us how those heavenly bits came to form our own planet and ourselves. Pretty deep, eh? Wait till you hear about the other experiment that hopefully will tell us what was there a tiny fraction of a second just a little after there was "nothing" in the universe. I have nothing against science fiction, but I just wish we were as intrigued about what we are made of and what was there before the universe ever came to be as much as we are about the Revenge of the Sith.

The biggest scientific instrument on the planet is a "ring," 27 kilometers in circumference covering 10 towns, some of it in France, some of it in Switzerland. One hundred meters above this ring, the grapes in the vineyards and the belled Swiss cows peacefully flourish in the areas unfettered by the mission of this mother of all rings which will begin in 2007. Called the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), a name that sounds like one of those sophisticated but inexplicable weapons of Batman, it is a ring that will tell us what it was like a billionth of a second after the Big Bang, the start of the universe. "Hadron" is a term for particles inside the nucleus of an atom. The most famous ones are protons and neutrons, but there are literally hundreds of them that just do not live long enough and if they do, end up as protons anyway. At energies never before produced in science, they will make these particles smash against each other hoping to find:

1) A particle called Higgs Boson, which in theory gives "mass" to all other particles. This particle has been dubbed the "god particle," a move I, as a science writer, find really lame considering that we find that the majority of people in this planet run away even when they hear the word "physics," even more if scientists borrow sensitive and loaded terms like "god";

2) Evidence for "supersymmetry" which is a concept which will double all the existing particles known in the "standard model" of physics. The "standard model" is sort of a creed in physics containing all of what is known and confirmed so far in the physical world. If "supersymmetry" is found, it will blow the minds of physicists to reshape their physics or find new jobs.

3) If all that high-speed smashing which will recreate the beginning of the universe could tell us why it gave rise to more "matter" than "anti-matter," that is, more "you and the things you know and can detect" than "not you and all other else that you have no idea of"; and

4) Something beyond the "quark," which is what is now known to be the "smallest," thus the most fundamental of all particles.

The information that will be generated by the LHC each year is of this magnitude: 15 million gigabytes. This is, according to Hazel Muir of the New Scientist, equivalent to stacks of CDs three times the height of Mount Everest, and I think something that will probably be seen on the moon.

While I was taken by the science of Deep Impact and of the LHC, I have to admit that I was deeply enamored by the elegance of a much simpler experiment done more than 2,000 years ago. We (except the fastidious Flat Earth Society) had known the circumference of the Earth long before Magellan demonstrated the world was round by circumnavigating it. You can check this out too for yourselves and text all your Filipino friends and relatives who now inhabit almost every corner of the Earth and see if they are anywhere at all where the earth or water just ends and they could see the drop into outer space. If anyone of them claims to be in such a spot, it is more likely that he or she is at the edge of his or her mind than the edge of the Earth. We all have to thank Eratosthenes, the Greek polyglot who measured the circumference of the Earth by looking and studying shadows cast on it. Eratosthenes and his beautiful and elegant experiment opened Robert Crease’s The Prism and the Pendulum, The Ten Most Beautiful Experiments in Science (Random House: NY 2004) which in itself is a beautiful book that I did not want to finish reading right away.

Eratosthenes (circa 276 to 195 B.C.), in one summer solstice within his lifetime, guided by Euclid’s geometry, measured the angles cast by shadows at two places, Alexandria and Syrene, and confirmed them to be equal. This made him realize the relation of an angle to a complete circle and it figured out a way for him to measure the circumference of the Earth. He measured the angle of the shadow cast that hit Alexandria and Syrene to be 1/50th part of a complete circle which meant that the distance between the two places is 50th of the distance around the Earth’s meridian. He measured the length of the shadows cast by the noontime sun in the two cities of Alexandria and Syrene and from which he determined the radius of the Earth. In the unit of his era, which was "stades," he came up with 250,000 stades which come up to about 25,000 miles – very close to what we now know to be 24,900 miles or about 40,000 kilometers. Eratosthenes gave us a beautiful, grounded, realistic sense of the rounded magnitude of our planet using only the faint phenomenon of shadows! And he turned out to be no less correct than if we had a calibrated tape that went around the world to measure it.

So when you go to the car service center for your car’s 40,000-kilometer check and it seems like a boring day for you and the car service people, go for dramatics. Hand them the keys and tell them that your car has just gone around the world and is ready for its 40,000-kilometer check. If you want to be precise, go when your odometer says 40,064.1 kilometers (24,900 miles) since if a highway were built around the world, it would come up to that figure in circumference. If that is not enough, show them the receipt from what I can imagine is the heavenly "Earthway" toll fee. Be prepared though to be given a funny look or a loony pass.

Spectacular or not, collaborative or lonesome, expensive as a space probe or costless as a sundial, science experiments have a beauty about them because as Crease in his book said it in a way I could not say better, they achieve for us "a foothold on reality, unshackling our intellects and deepening our engagement with nature." Their beauty lies in how they uncover for us what the world and the larger universe is. And what they are, as we come to discover in science, are gaping earthly and cosmic chests of mysteries, unsolvable within any one lifetime. But we try anyway – because the spirit of discovery, even against incalculable odds, is the hallmark of what it means to be here and alive.

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