Timothy Ferris on Hubble
In the new National Geographic, my former professor and adviser Timothy Ferris pays homage to the Hubble Space Telescope, a revolutionary scientific instrument that may be on its last leg. The sense of wonder that Tim conveys in his work, like the critically-acclaimed books Coming Of Age In The Milky Way and Seeing In The Dark, is infectious and inspirational. From National Geographic:
It's curiously appropriate that an unmanned telescope should emerge as a symbol of science, since it was instruments generally—and telescopes in particular—that jump-started the scientific revolution. We tend to think of science in terms of great minds conjuring big ideas (an image that Edwin Hubble himself encouraged, at least when it came to his own research), but that paradigm is largely a holdover from prescientific days, when knowledge was sought principally in philosophers' books. In science, instruments can trump arguments. The disinterested verdict of Galileo's telescope did more than Galileo's arguments to lay bare the shortcomings of the regnant Earth-centered model of the cosmos, and Newton's mechanics endured less for their indubitable elegance than for their being able to predict what astronomers would see through their telescopes. Galileo's contemporary Johannes Kepler, whom Immanuel Kant called "the most acute thinker ever born," was quick to grasp that straightforward observations using scientific instruments could sweep away centuries of intelligent but ignorant discourse. Although he was a mathematical theorist who never owned a telescope, Kepler celebrated Galileo's innovation in an ode, addressing the telescope as, "You much knowing tube, more precious than any scepter."Link
Hubble is Galileo's telescope flung into a Keplerian orbit, and if these two early scientists came back to life today, I expect they would be impressed less by its technological sophistication than by its potential to bring things to light that challenge old ideas—and to publish them on the Internet, science having always been about making knowledge available.
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David Pescovitz concludes: "science having always been about making knowledge available."
Not always. It's also been about making money, about research kept secret to gain advantage; It's not always an altruistic sharing for the common good.
this calls for hubble shirts that say "You much knowing tube..."
@Taylor.R (#1), that isn't me you're quoting.
It's probably a sad commentary on both myself and the Internet that when I read this headline, I thought, "Timothy Ferris? What does that guy know about the Hubble?" Ahh, yes, not that guy (Tim Ferriss). My mistake.
Sorry David, there was no ending quotation mark, so I confused the author.
Hubble images, along with my follow up studies, have been an epiphany for me. I now view the Universe as a living thing--along the lines of "The Mind of God"--and I view my life and life around me much differently.
Disclaimer: I am not a nut!
I have quieted the revelry at drinking establishments with wonderment numerous times by opening my notebook at appropriate moments and slide showing some of my Hubble image collection.
I am sure to be adding images for sometime to come. But I will miss this revolutionary cornerstone in science long after it is gone.
Its successors are sure to render marvels. However they won't be producing quite the photographic picture show the Hubble has.
...Good love letter to a fine program that's overcome more obstacles and fuckups than would normally be allowed. To be honest, I was half-expecting something along the lines of Jeff Bell's bullshit whinings from his little ivory tower at U of Hawaii - as seen ad nauseum on SpaceDaily, alas - but this was an opinion piece worth passing on.
...The sad thing about the upcoming final Hubble Servicing Mission, is that once Hubble finally gives up the ghost - Vegas odds are sometime around 2015, if it's nursed properly - the replacement James Webb Telescope has *NO* visible light imaging capabilities. It's all in the infrared spectrum, and while that's important to scientists, those same scientists are totally oblivious to the fact that those paying the taxes to support such space-based telescopes *WANT* pretty pictures as proof that their tax dollars aren't being wasted on some chrome dome's attempt at ego masturbation.
Bottom Line: No Bucks > No Buck Rogers still applies. You want one, the other has to be there, and vice versa. There's still time to slap a visible light imager on Webb, someone simply needs to slap NASA and JPL in the balls and explain it to them.
I think the new adaptive optics systems can allow ground-based telescopes to compete with Hubble in image quality, although the wikipedia article on the 'Lucky' imaging system notes that Hubble still has advantages in certain situations: "This technique is applicable to getting very high resolution images of only relatively small astronomical objects, up to 10 arcseconds in diameter, as it is limited by the precision of the atmospheric turbulence correction. It also requires a relatively bright 14th-magnitude star in the field of view on which to guide. Being above the atmosphere, the much more expensive Hubble Space Telescope is not limited by these concerns and so is capable of much wider-field high-resolution imaging."
Also, to Om, it's worth pointing out that Hubble doesn't take pictures solely in the visible spectrum either--those colorful pictures you see are almost always false-color images, usually created by assigning visible colors to images Hubble actually took with either infrared or ultraviolet filters along with actual visible-light filters (see this article). If you could see the objects in the Hubble photos in true-color, they'd be much more drab color-wise. No doubt astronomers will continue to create beautiful false-color images from the photos taken by the James Webb space telescope.
The photos are spectacular. The "Hubble's Greatest Hits" gallery picks out some arresting images and explains what makes them special:
http://magma.nationalgeographic.com/ngm/2007-11/hubble/hubble-interactive.html
Cpt. Tim (#4), I'd totally buy one. Someone should send it in to shirt.woot.com :)
I think the false coloring can be misunderstood a little to mean something like "photo-shopping." It is more being used to bring out spectrum and matter that are not readily apparent to human vision but are part of the big picture.
Right, false coloring means that you take photos with three different filters and assign them to be red, blue, and green in the image, even though the filters were not actually taking pictures at red, blue and green wavelengths (for example, one might be an infrared filter). So, like I said, I'm guessing they'll probably do the same thing with the James Webb space telescope, so we'll continue to get a lot of beautiful pictures which don't represent what a human would actually see with their eyes, just like the Hubble pictures.
Ferris' larger point is true. What might we know now about the very origin and nature of reality, along with little mundane spinoffs such as clean energy and antigravity, if the United States had sh!tcanned that worthless space station and completed the Superconducting Supercollider instead?
And now I want a tee shirt that reads "Disclaimer: I Am Not A Nut!" :_>