Porky Pig Projectors

I've been avoiding blogging about presidential politics because at times, both parties infuriate me with plans. It turns out, however, that McCain wins the prize for getting me riled up enough to search for my password to my blog.

At one of the presidential debates, John McCain lambasted Barack Obama for a pork barrel project - a grant for a 2 million dollar projector for the Adler Planetarium in Chicago.

Planetarium projectors are expensive and sophisticated scientific equipment. (If you want to learn more about those that are commercially available through the Zeiss company, check out their webpage). And check it out - it is pretty cool what these new planetarium projectors can do. You can virtually ride through a black hole (without actually having the experience of event horizons or spaghettification - look that one up too). You can travel through space, explore the subatomic structure of atoms, learn about different galaxies - explore the world and all of its wonders from the smallest of the small, to the largest of the large. You can even travel through time and explore what happened at the time of the Big Bang. The new projectors can even simulate oral surgery, something my friend Michelle knows a bit about.)

In today's climate of rapidly collapsing scientific educational standards and the decline of American scientific achievement, you'd think this kind of projector would be exactly what we need to inspire the next generation of students to pursue science careers. Perhaps the reluctance for doing so is our unvoiced shame that the next generation of Americans will be burdened with our generation's disgraceful stewardship of our universe. Future scientists will need to devise new ways of obtaining energy, as we wastefully plow through the earth's limited supply of fossil fuels. They will need to deal with the challenges of climate change due to our extensive use of these fuels in almost every aspect of our lives. They will need to solve many of the problems we have created, from economic to environmental devastation.

I first learned about event horizons and spahettification at a planetarium, during a show on black holes. And maybe knowing the details of the working of black holes isn't worth much these days. But it was experiences of my father taking me to the Franklin Institute's planetarium that got me interested in science in the first place, and launched my career. Now, I became more of a soft than a hard scientist - but a scientist nonetheless. And I owe it not to my science teachers in school (although they may have played some role) but to our Sundays at the museum.

It is a general anti-intellectualism represented in McCain's criticism of the projector that I simply don't understand and will never agree with. Planetariums inspire young minds, they introduce children to the cosmos, they create wonder. Wonder about the sheer improbability of our existence - how small we really are. They provide us with culture - culture being the work of countless generations of individuals - from Kepler to Einstein and beyond, who spent their lives trying to figure out how the universe works. And through their efforts, we have even been able to step out into that universe, and for the first time in history walk on other worlds.

Do we want to live in an America that denies its youth of the inspiration of the scientific endeavor? It is already bad enough - I know undergraduates and even graduate students who don't know the order of operations of math (to refresh, it is exponents and roots, then multiplication and division, and finally addition and subtraction). The decline in scientific education has caused none other than Bill Gates to appear before a congressional committee asking for loosening of visa requirements so that talented scientists from other countries can work in corporations that so desperately need their skills. American scientific education is not working - and parents seem unfazed. It is this ridiculous illusion of American exceptionalism: We're number one, We're number one! Meanwhile, look at your 401K - you don't need to know the order of operations to understand what the "less than" sign means.

In fact, it's worth reading the Adler Planetarium's response to the whole affair - response It points out, among other things, that they never even received the funding for that projector. So Adler planetarium continues to use their 40 year-old projector that no longer has service or parts. Well, some might say that if it's broken, they'd be better off praying for it to fix itself, because they don't have a ghost of a prayer if the likes of anti-intellectual John McCain and Sarah Palin are elected president.

In fact, if you are wealthy and would like to donate to the Adler so they can purchase a working projector, here is a page about donations. If our government can't fund the future, I guess we have to.