It could be said that the world was too small to contain David Schramm’s vision. Schramm, who died in a small plane crash Dec. 19, pushed frontiers–of the universe and of reality–on a scale few could imagine or would believe possible.
As one of the world’s leading proponents of the Big Bang theory, he helped establish a theory of the universe that most astrophysicists now support: that the cosmos mostly consists of some finite amount of invisible, unknown matter. “Many people thought Dave was going to win the Nobel Prize for that,” recalled University of Chicago colleague, Rocky Kolb.
Certainly, the scientific community has lost a valued member with Schramm’s passing. His thinking and leadership, colleagues say, helped unite physicists who study the universe on the smallest and the largest scales. “He had, for the last 25 years, been a real driving force in cosmology,” said Sir Martin Rees, Royal Society professor at Cambridge University in England.
Last year, Schramm talked passionately of the viability of science, offering a rebuke to those who claim that the relevant scientific truths about the universe already have been discovered. His words could help plot a path for scientific study and philosophy in the 21st Century.
Q: Is there any truth to some scientists’ claims that we are facing the limits of knowledge?
A: In every generation of scientists, there are a few who–their careers being over–make statements that all the big problems have been solved. They feel because they’ve done great things, there can be no great things left to be done–otherwise they would have done them.
For example, Albert Michelson, the first U.S. Nobel laureate in physics who won the prize in 1907, said in 1894 that physics was essentially over, that it would only be measuring things to the fifth place of the decimal. Of course, the whole revolution in modern physics of quantum mechanics and relativity came shortly after.
Q: Some claim speculative science undermines what is called pure or empirically verified science. Do you agree?
A: What I think they miss is that speculation is always at the frontier of any field of science. It can take you into domains that at the time are untestable. But if we want to do science–and it’s true that it’s not going to be accepted until tested–we come up with ways to test these things that are not obvious at the time.
Speculation is not in the same realm as the empirically verified, which makes up the core of science. To try to use speculation as a way of casting down all of science is to totally lose this perspective.
Q: How are these two types of science related?
A: Advocates of the limits of science imply that when some speculative aspect of a theory is proved wrong, the whole structure is knocked down. Not true. Any new theory has to encompass the old, what already has been proved by experiment.
For example, in Big Bang cosmology, we know the early universe was hot and dense. We know this from experiments, not because it was a neat idea. The Big Bang most certainly is not a complete description of the universe. And new theories will come along that will show that the early universe had some different conditions. But we do know that our early universe went through a hot, dense phase. And no new theory is going to throw that away.
What is your response to claims that such theories are doomed to languish in the realm of the speculative because they can never be tested at the energies of the Big Bang?
A: The greatest test is to duplicate conditions of the early universe. That’s going to be a long time in coming. But a theory can make predictions about some phenomena where you don’t have to duplicate the entire early universe.
For example, some of these unification theories (that seek to unify quantum mechanics and general relativity, the pillars of modern physics) predict super symmetric particles–a new kind of elementary particle. If these particles are found, that certainly would be strong evidence for the theory. And it would not require going to the energies of the Big Bang, just to the energies that require the production of these particles.
Q: What impact might these doomsayers of science have on science in the 21st Century?.
A: For the most part, I think they do harm in the sense that a bright young person hears these statements and thinks there’s no future here. That could be disastrous because it’s the brightest, most intuitive minds that push the frontier.
But I’m more concerned that such views give Congress fuel to justify short-term views on science. Congress is always looking for excuses not to finance long-term research because it doesn’t impact re-election. But the impact of science takes longer than a congressional term.
Q: Why should we care if science solves the mysteries on its frontiers?
A: Because science, more than any other endeavor, pushes civilization forward. If you turn it off, you turn off what drives the future. When you have a firm understanding of something by experiment, it changes your philosophical approach. I don’t think it was coincidental that the Renaissance occurred at the time Copernicus was teaching us that the Earth was not the center of the universe. Imagine, for example, the tremendous philosophical impact learning that life exists on other than Earth would have.
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An edited transcript
