Chasing Science: Science as Spectator Sport
By Frederik Pohl
Tor/Tom Doherty, 251 pages, $23.95
We are well into that time of year when households across America are weighing the question of where to spend their summer vacation. Back and forth it goes. Mountains or seashore? Tanglewood or Branson? Door County or Window Rock?
But maybe you’re different. “I have it,” you blurt. “Why don’t we go to the old Homestake Gold Mine in South Dakota? Buried down in the shaft is the first neutrino telescope ever built. It’s designed to track neutrinos, subatomic particles that travel to Earth from the core of distant stars.”
Or you say: “How about Los Angeles? We could picnic in Griffith Park and climb to the observatory and watch the seismographs at work. They’re the old-fashioned kind, with the rotating drums and needles, but they still detect earthquakes anywhere in the world.”
Or: “We could go to Dinosaur Ridge National Landmark in Morrison, Colo., where there are preserved dinosaur tracks. It’s part of what’s called the dinosaur megafreeway, which 100 million years ago was the coast of a great inland sea, and dinosaurs left their tracks in the wet ground.”
If your family looks at you as if you are from Mars, resume your original deliberations: French Lick or French Quarter?
But if yours is one of those families that not only would find the possibility of your Martian origins interesting but know that Mars has two moons, Phobos and Deimos, there is a book out there designed for you.
Frederik Pohl’s “Chasing Science: Science as Spectator Sport” is difficult to categorize. It is in a way a travel book. But it is also a memoir and a celebration of the unceasing human enterprise that has fascinated Pohl for most of his 80-plus years and provided the raw material for his writings: science, the systematic effort to wring a confession out of an unrepentant universe.
Pohl, of north suburban Palatine, is one of the world’s most-honored science-fiction writers. He is a self-confessed science junkie who, though he lacks formal scientific training, loves it in all its forms, “whether I find it in a laboratory, an observatory, on the slope of a volcano, or in my own backyard.”
His passion has caused him to chase science all over the planet, in some 50 countries as well as in every state of the Union. “My relation to science,” he writes, “is the same as my relation to the New York Mets. I don’t hope to make the team, I just like to watch them play–the difference being that, for me, science is even better as a spectator sport than baseball ever was.”
Pervading the book is the good-natured assumption that you share Pohl’s ardor. If you do, then he’s your guide on a most unusual journey, an idiosyncratic exploration of a number of areas of study chosen, it would seem, more for their accessibility to the armchair scientist than out of any desire to represent the scientific spectrum. Thus we have disquisitions on astronomy and telescopes; the space program; volcanoes and earthquakes; tidal waves, floods and glacial activity; caves and tunnels; and fossil-hunting and archeology. Each chapter is packed with enlightening details. Though he’s not a scientist–perhaps because he’s not–Pohl has an admirable gift for making difficult concepts easy to understand.
Here is Pohl on how a particle accelerator such as the main ring at Fermilab in west suburban Batavia works:
“[D]ig a circular trench around your laboratory, lay a metal pipe in the trench, pump all the air out of the pipe, and fit it with rings of magnets all around its perimeter. Then you . . . start loading it with clusters of particles–say, with protons, for a starter. The magnet rings around the pipe go on and off in rapid succession; each set of magnets pulls the clump of particles toward it and goes off in time to turn it over to the next set. When you’ve accelerated your particles as fast as you can get them to go, you redirect their final circuit of the ring and smash them into a metal target; then you look to see what fragments have been produced.”
In such a way have physicists worldwide identified the various subatomic particles called quarks.
And here is some of Pohl’s readable history of the science of plate tectonics:
“[T]hat bright and curious-minded man, Francis Bacon, studied the new maps of the landmasses around the Atlantic Ocean that had just begun to be made by far-voyaging European explorers. Bacon noticed a funny coincidence. Queerly, the eastern coast of South America looked as though it would fit right into the western coast of Africa, if only the broad Atlantic Ocean hadn’t happened to lie between them. . . .
“Then, early in the twentieth century, a man named Alfred Wegener came along and said that the fit between the coastlines was no coincidence. He said it was because, yes, the two continents had once fitted together, and the only reason they were apart now was that all the solid land of the planet was in constant slithering motion around the world. He called that process continental drift. Not many scientists paid any attention, though, for reasons that had as much to do with the somewhat unlovable personality of Wegener himself as to the merits of his ideas, and Wegener’s speculation was pretty quickly forgotten.
“However, it was rescued, a generation or so ago, by a Canadian scientist named J. Tuzo Wilson. It wasn’t just continents that drifted, Wilson proclaimed. Every last bit of Earthly crust–continents, islands, sea bottoms, and all–was floating on the planet’s semiliquid core of magma, like patches of fat on the surface of a pot of cooling chicken soup.”
Pohl further lards his narrative with the gleanings of his 60-year personal scientific quest. He gives an unforgettable account of watching a total eclipse of the sun with hundreds of other goggle-eyed passengers on a cruise ship in Hawaii. He takes you from Mt. Etna in Sicily to Stonehenge in England, from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida to the Very Large Array of mobile radio telescopes in Socorro, N.M., and from the Great Barrier Reef and its corals off the coast of Australia to the Chinese city of Chengdu, with its 2,200-year-old marvel of an irrigation system. You travel from Kentucky’s Mammoth Cave to Capri’s Blue Grotto, from Pompeii in Italy to Machu Picchu in Peru, even to Russia’s Star City, where cosmonauts train, all the while following in the restless footsteps of Pohl, who appears to have been everywhere (not to mention having seen everything; he tells us he was in Seattle on May 18, 1980, when nearby Mt. St. Helen’s erupted, and at a 1986 meeting in the Kremlin when, under the approving eye of Mikhail Gorbachev, the apostle of glasnost, or openness in discussing social problems, Soviet writers arose one by one to tongue-lash their nation as foreign visitors gaped in disbelief).
One of the most appealing aspects of this book is Pohl’s tossing in of edifying little asides, such as the fact that a 10-story, solar-power tower built in the Mojave Desert never fulfilled its promise to supply cheap electricity to Californians but is today supplying heat to a local fish farm; and that East German swimmers in the 1976 Olympics pumped air into their rectums to make themselves more buoyant; and that the Soviet Union would have been first to discover the Van Allen radiation belt but for its own paranoia. When it launched Sputnik in 1957, trumping the U.S., the USSR had the historic little satellite radio all its readings back to Earth in code. When it passed through the Van Allen belt it was not over Soviet territory, and non-Soviets hearing the signals could not understand the code. By the time it passed over the USSR, and the Soviets could pick up the signals once again, it was no longer in the radiation belt. A U.S. scientist discovered the belt the following year.
But the heart of the book is its detailing of the various scientific explorations you can undertake on your own, many, if not most, previewed by Pohl and bearing his seal of approval. He touts everything from the “viewer-friendly” volcano Kilauea in Hawaii and Albert Einstein’s perfectly preserved study at Princeton University to the Von Karman auditorium at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., where space freaks can watch pictures come in as they are sent back by unmanned space probes, and the Mazon Creek area an hour south of Chicago, where a feast of ancient, fossilized scorpions and jellyfish can be found. Observatories and national laboratories that welcome visitors are cited, as are out-of-the-way museums, such as Charles Darwin’s home in England and the National Museum of Kenya in Nairobi, which has an elaborate reconstruction of a famed dig where the Leakey family found some of its best specimens of early humans. Pohl even appends a list of some 400 of the world’s science institutions that are open to the public, in addition to recommending various books, magazines and science convocations.
This is an invaluable reference for anyone with a whiff of scientific interest, or those with children whom they would like to inoculate with a zest for science. Pohl’s enthusiasm is so contagious, his narrative so accessible and his example so stirring–Who can fail to be impressed by an octogenarian possessed of such energy and messianic zeal?–that it may even do the unthinkable and make some converts among the multitudes who slept through chemistry class.
