In 1993 congress killed what was then the most ambitious scientific project ever undertaken, the Superconducting Super Collider (SSC). The SSC was to be the world's largest and most powerful particle accelerator, but now it's left partially built, rotting in the dessert in Texas.
As a result, the United States has lost the lead we held for so long in advanced particle physics, maybe forever. European nations now make all the discoveries in that field using the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN in Geneva (not coincidentally, that's the same place the WWW was invented - discovery incubates invention). They are honing in on the most fundamental laws of physics, including what may be the "holy grail" of particle discovery, the fabled "Higgs Boson", the only "standard model" theoretical particle not yet detected in the real world, and the one that will resolve important inconsistencies in current theoretical models. They're also unraveling the secret nature of Dark Matter and Dark Energy. These are keystone discoveries, and all we can do is read about them.
That may elicit a "who cares?" from you but the fact is, the country that controls the cutting edge in science will control the future. Fundamental discoveries are being made right now in other countries that will shape the future of science and eventually industry. Europe, China, Korea, Japan, all these countries are pouring everything they can afford into research, science, and education.
But the US has long had a problem with follow-through on brave projects whose importance is difficult for the public to grasp. One excuse, like a cost overrun or bad management, and the whole thing gets killed. That is dangerously short-sighted.
And today, in a sort of myopic rerun, congress wants to kill the next-gen space telescope, despite the fact that it is guaranteed produce fundamental discoveries, and costs less than a few B-2 bombers. Priorities. We're about to give astronomy away just like we gave up on particle physics two decades ago.
The James B Webb Space Telescope (JWST, pictured at top) is under construction right now. It's mostly complete. It is so incredibly powerful it will be able to see back to the beginning of time, back to "First Light".
Here's what that means...
The more powerful a telescope is (i.e. the greater its resolving power), the farther back in time it can see. That's because the universe, having started with a huge explosion called the Big Bang, has been expanding at the speed of light ever since, for around 13.6 billion years. Light from the most distant galaxies has been travelling that long to reach us. So when we look at such an object, we are seeing it as it was 13.6 billion years ago.
Take a minute for that to sink in, it's not an easy thing to come to grips with. Here are some examples:
Our own sun is 8.3 light-minutes away (at the speed of light, 186,000 miles/sec, it takes the sun's light 8.3 minutes to traverse the 93,000,000 miles between us). We see our sun, not as it is, but as it was 8.3 minutes ago. It's gravity effect also travels at the speed of light. If our sun were to explode right now, we would still see its light and we would still orbit it for 8.3 minutes.
Vega is one of our closest neighboring stars. It's in the constellation Lyra and it resides about 25 light-years from Earth. That means that when we look at Vega the light that we see left the star in 1986. Everything we see when we look up in the sky at night is a different distance from us. Some are close, and some are far away.
And some are very, very far away.
The Hubble Space Telescope (HST), now ending it's useful life, has given us tantalizing clues to what the early universe was like, it has peered way back, before our Earth and Sun existed, to stars more than 10 billion light-years away. These "deep field" observations are made by pointing Hubble at the blackest parts of the sky and making very long exposures. But even Hubble has a limit, it cannot see back to the beginning, back to what astronomers call First Light. Way, way back, to the first stars in the universe to "switch on".
That's where the JWST (named after the NASA administrator who oversaw the Apollo program) comes in. It is designed to see the most distant (and hence oldest) objects in the universe. Yes, I know it sounds like a line from the intro of The Twilight Zone, but this telescope can literally see to the very edge of the universe, to the beginning of time and space.
JWST "sees" in the infrared part of the spectrum, collecting light with a 21-foot hexagonal beryllium primary mirror composed of 18 segments that self-adjust to a tolerance better than 1/10,000th the thickness of a human hair. Mirror size correlates to resolution, the Hubble mirror is 90", or 7.5 feet in diameter so the difference is astounding. JWST can detect objects up to 100 times dimmer than Hubble can, and see them with far more detail. If you ever want to be humbled like I was, just read about the technology behind any part of this machine. The intelligence and foresight in its design is mind-boggling. Some of the best brains on the planet have made the JWST the most advanced scientific instrument our species has created.
Consider the thought that has gone into just one aspect of this instrument, it's orbital positioning:
"The JWST will orbit the Sun approximately 1,500,000 km beyond the Earth at the L2 Lagrange point*. Objects at the L2 point orbit the Sun in synchrony with the Earth, which allows the JWST to use one radiation shield, positioned between the telescope and the Sun, to protect it from the Sun's heat and light. The telescope will be in a very large 800,000 km radius halo orbit around L2, and so will avoid any part of Earth's shadow. From the JWST's position, the Earth will be very close to the Sun's position but not eclipse it, while the Moon will show a tiny crescent phase during its maximum angular distance from the Sun."
That's brilliant - a perfect view in any direction with no eclipses or shadows. Earth always in perfect sight for data transmission. Unified heat shielding (that's the tennis-court-sized layered sail at the bottom of the pic). The eye that never sleeps. The Hubble by comparison is in Low-Earth Orbit, and has to contend with all manner of obstacles and shadows and positional problems. The JWST avoids them all. That's just one example of the care that has been taken in its design. Every aspect has gotten similar attention, from the software to the instrumentation. It's a Steinway.
None of this really matters though, if we don't want to pay for it no matter how much of a deal it is. We value war much more than we do discovery, all things equal. We'll throw trillions of dollars at a war for no reason at all, and then turn around and complain that a $5 billion instrument that can tell us where we came from is a waste of money.
On the one hand, I'm glad there are countries out there who don't feel this way. On the other hand, it saddens me to think of my children living in a country that has given up trying to discover.
* I learned about Lagrange points by reading 2001: A Space Odyssey. Since you won't understand the quoted passage above unless you understand what Lagrange points are, here's the definition. Man, it's real work reading my blog, isn't it?
The Lagrange points are the five positions in an orbital configuration where a small object affected only by gravity can theoretically be stationary relative to two larger objects (such as a satellite with respect to the Earth and Moon). The Lagrange points mark positions where the combined gravitational pull of the two large masses provides precisely the centripetal force required to rotate with them.
Clearer now? Good.
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