Dean - The New York Times book of physics and astronomy : more than 100 years of covering the expanding universe

The New York Times

BOOK OF

Physics and
Astronomy

MORE THAN 100 YEARS OF COVERING
THE EXPANDING UNIVERSE

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2013 by Itzy. All rights reserved.
The articles in this book were first published by The New York Times from 1888 to 2012.
All rights reserved. The printing, copying, redistribution, or retransmission
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ISBN 978-1-4027-9326-4

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T he relationship between journalists and scientists has not always been harmonious. And in many circles today it still isnt. Most fields of science use a lexicon that hardly anybody from the public understands. In fact, most scientists cant even communicate with fellow scientists from other disciplines for the very same reason. So when the time comes for a journalist to report on a discovery in which the ideas might be obscure, the language intractable, and the discoverer inexperienced with public communication, the chances of error for the journalist are high. When combined with the journalistic tradition to not show your final draft to the person you interviewed, youve got a recipe for rampant misconception.

Meanwhile, the journalistic ethos to report both sides of a story implies an honesty of coverage intended to respect all views, no matter how much they differ from one another. In politics and religion, of course, people fight wars to declare who is right, and its not the job of the dispassionate journalist to judge this in advance. In science, a journalist can either report on a discovery, or report on an emergent controversy. But when two scientists disagree, its because theyre in need of moreor betterdata to show that one of them is wrong, or both of them are wrong. In the face of compelling evidence, scientists generally agree and move on, never seeing the conflict as an occasion to have killed one another.

For the journalist, however, its tempting to allocate column space to fringe ideas, offering them as the opposite view to the mainstream. Who wouldnt want to cheer the underdog? But journalists dont always see the limits of this exercise. They know to not interview the person who is sure Earth is flatjust to get an opposing view. But at some point, awareness of the published scientific literature can inform these choices. If its not a scientific controversy it shouldnt be a journalistic one. Moreover, urges are strong to write phrases such as, these new discoveries will challenge cherished theories or scientists must now return to their drawing boards. Fact is, research scientists are always at the drawing board. And no theory is cherished, at least not in the way a pious person might revere a religious artifact. In science, all ideas, all hypotheses, all theories, are fair game to be overthrown. And some of our highest honorsincluding Nobel Prizesgo to those who succeed. Any resistance the scientific community might offer to ideas that conflict with our prevailing understanding of the universe will be proportional to the accumulated evidence that supports our understanding in the first place. In fewer words: Extraordinary ideas require extraordinary evidence.

Apart from these subtleties, most scientific discoveries overthrow no previous idea at all. They simply emerge from our ignorance, filling gaps in our base of cosmos knowledge and wisdom. These are new paradigms, without reference to whether any paradigm has shifted.

One of the great, uncelebrated challenges of science journalism has been to convey this textured, but booby-trapped, landscape on which science discovery unfolds. The New York Times has done this better than most. Thats because its editorial policy, whether done on purpose or by accident, treats science not simply as intermittent news stories but as an enterprise to be monitored, tracked, reported on, and interpreted. How else could the discovery of the Higgs boson, an important but obscure subatomic particle with no obvious or foreseeable utility to the human condition, garner a banner headline on page one?

A book just as long, or longer, could easily be assembled from articles on advances in medicine, on the environment, or on engineering marvels. But this book explicitly honors the fact that physics lies at the beating heart of the operations of the universe; that physics is the founding science of 20th-century geopolitics; and that astrophysics is the founding science of wonder. Under that journalistic umbrella, science is part of human culture. Science is life.

During middle school and high school, I clipped every article on physics and astrophysics that appeared in the daily New York Times and in its Sunday magazine. Where others kept family photos, secure in albums, I mounted frail newsprint. Overall, the Times coverage was quite goodbrought about by a new generation of journalists devoted to reporting solely on science stories. There are scientifically literate journalists who nurture relationships with scientists, who review the relevant research literature, and who reach beyond the perfunctory press releases issued by science agencies. What a luxury for a newspaper to support such a staff. Regardless of what they occasionally got wrong, I wouldnt have to look farin print, radio, or televisionto discover how inept everyone else was at this task. So I came to greatly respect the science journalists of The New York Times. And I also came to see their telling of this timeless and epic adventure of cosmic discovery as a kind of time-capsule-in-the-makinga chronicle of our species search for how the universe works and what our place within it might be.

Neil deGrasse Tyson
New York

INTRODUCTION
AN INVITATION TO OUR READERS

S cience is a search for knowledge about the natural world in which we live and a struggle to apply this knowledge in the worlds dark corners of ignorance. It is a realm where researchers seek, see, find and ponder, often in a state of surprise or even awe.

This book invites you to enter into this quest. The portal is the archives of The New York Times, in particular its coverage of physics and astrophysics, realms that have dominated science and the popular imagination like few others in modern times.

Of course, a collection of articles from The New York Times cannot be a comprehensive guide to physics and cosmologyat least not for all of it. In the first place, The New-York Daily Times began publication in 1851, so we missed Archimedes, Newton, and other early giants of the field. Plus, for the first few decades of its life, the newspaper, which became