Astronomers From The United States

"My mind doubted that there was any meaning to this exercise. I had not been educated to believe that there could be anything real about telepathy. The demonstration of such powers was all idle speculation to me. Nevertheless, I stayed with the exercise, once again going into a deep trance. An image came up. I saw myself seeing a man, dark-haired and in his forties, walking along a beach on the west coast of Maui in Hawaii. He was without a woman and somewhat sad about it, as he walked into an idyllic make-believe house that I had made for him. I showed him globes and maps. He asked questions and we had a strong rapport. We looked up at billowing clouds, wafting above palm trees which were blowing in the wind. In this imaginative mock-up we shared, he was teaching me about the climate and physical geography of the Hawaiian Islands. I knew I wasn’t guessing. I was either “channeling” some truth or imagining something vivid. My female partner broke into my reverie to inform me that the man had lost his wife by death, was a meteorologist and journalist by profession, and had spent much time on Maui. She said my description fit him to a T."

"Can we really accomplish a program like Mars 1999? The sad truth is, we won’t be able to do it in today’s climate. Today’s paralysis will be tomorrow’s paralysis unless the workings of the institutions and the attitudes of individuals at the helm change toward the positive. The prerequisite to a successful Mars 1999 program is not engineering feasibility. It is people. And there is hope. Meanwhile, as the dust settles from Challenger, NASA continues to search its soul. In the wake of the accident, it becomes all the more evident that the U.S. civilian space program has been suffering from conflicting interests and goals, intercenter rivalries, uneconomical operations, and an apparent inability to make the sweeping changes that are required. Management of the space station program suffers from this confusion. The space agency’s technical achievements have been, and continue to be, extraordinary. Nowhere can more intelligent and competent engineers and scientists be found. But there appears to be a bureaucratic inertia that inhibits the innovative thinking and risk taking required to blaze new trails."

"Observations such as the observer effect of quantum mechanics, psychokenesis, remote viewing, anomalous healing, UFOs, abductions, crop circles, precognition, near-death experiences, reincarnation, mediumship, free energy effects have all been investigated and verified as anomalous. It only takes time to integrate the widely scattered data, but once this is done, some patterns begin to emerge. From all this I proposed that we need a bigger box of scientific inquiry to embrace anomalous phenomena - a new science. Among many of these experiments, I found a common denominator some of us call consciousness."

"This situation is intensified by the fact that, in spite of the appearance of polluted cities of the Third World, the United States continues to lead the way in exploiting the environment. With only five percent of the world’s population, we Americans consume one-fourth of the world’s energy and one-third of its raw materials. I am not proud of this. My own sense of grief is especially heightened by the fact that I am a citizen of the leading polluter nation, as well as being an individual member of a supposedly sentient species which is causing the greatest mass extinction since that of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. Most of us are complacent, distracted or conveniently ignorant, in part because of the overwhelming depth of the situation. As Walt Kelly’s Pogo said, “We have met the enemy, and the enemy is us!”"

"I sympathize with my former colleagues in Houston who are spending ten years, perhaps forever, awaiting their flights into space. But this alone cannot justify the shuttle.On the positive side, I believe that an unmanned space program emphasizing applications satellites and the exploration of the planets would be both economical and fundamental in our quest for knowledge. Such a program could be funded annually for between one and two billion dollars and thus free money and resources for more urgent priorities. Cooperating with the Soviet Union may reduce the costs further."

"In 1979 Jahn and I began to develop a new mutual interest, although we did not learn of our commonality until several years later. The subject was psychokenesis, and it was so far outside our left-brained aerospace view of reality that it would take several years before either of us felt comfortable speaking about it in public. We were “closet parapsychologists,” afraid to reveal ourselves to the skeptical frowns of our Princeton colleagues. Nevertheless we began, independently, to explore inner space; it was so intriguing and had such a siren’s call to our thirst for understanding that we simply had to heed it, even knowing that the world would look on in disbelief if it were disclosed."

"Two years ago, I resigned from the scientist‐astronaut program primarily because of NASA's indifference to science in its manned space efforts. Since then an impressive array of scientists associated with the Apollo program have also resigned for similar reasons. They include the chief scientist, the director of the Lunar Receiving Laboratory, the principal investigator of Apollo lunar surface geology, the curator of the lunar samples, and another scientist-astronaut.It seems utterly incredible that so many well-respected scientists could resign at a time one would suppose to be their finest hour - the return of the first rocks and detailed pictures from the lunar surface. Eugene Shoemaker, now the chairman of Caltech's Division of Geological Sciences, quit his Apollo work “out of deep concern for the direction of the nation's space goal.” He described Apollo as a “poor system for exploring the moon… The same job could have been done with unmanned systems at one-fifth the cost three or four years ago.” […] In these times of conflicting, uncertain goals both inside and outside NASA, I think the unmanned planetary program provides a good example of what can be done. The Mariner 6 and 7 flyby missions gave us remarkable pictures and valuable scientific information, yet each cost less than 15 percent of the price of sending two test pilots to the moon.In the future, probes will be sent to the Martian surface and to the other planets; these relatively inexpensive projects should go far in satisfying our most fundamental reason for going into space: to understand nature and ourselves better by exploring the universe."

"Interviewer at astronaut interview: Dr. O’Leary, would you submit to a hazardous two-year journey to Mars? O’Leary: Whew. A two-year trip to Mars. I must admit that I haven’t given it much thought. Are you serious? Interviewer: Sure we’re serious. You’re twenty-seven years old, you could be an astronaut for twenty years and within twenty years we could be sending men to Mars. And Mars is your field of specialty, isn’t it, Dr. O’Leary?"

"Deke [Slayton], I’ve spent a month now at flight school, have flown fifteen hours and soloed, and after much soul-searching, I have decided to resign from the program. I guess flying isn’t my cup of tea."

"My contemplation led to what might be one of the most radical and yet believable (to me) conspiracy theories of all: if we do our healing work well, someone will either point a gun to our heads (and maybe shoot it) or give us a bribe to keep quiet, to cease doing our work if we want to stay alive. Sometimes they can even order us to help them do their dirty work."

"Dear Mr. [Al] Gore: I am a former astronaut, Cornell professor, physics faculty member at Princeton University and visiting faculty member in technology assessment at the University of California, Berkeley School of Law, I was Mo Udall’s energy advisor and speechwriter during his 1975 Presidential campaign, author, AAAS Fellow, World Innovation Foundation Fellow, NASA group achievement award recipient, and founder of the New Energy Movement.You have asked the public to address the important question, “How can we reverse global climate change?” I agree that taking on that task is critical for our collective survival. You have also stated that we must freeze and drastically reduce our carbon emissions. I agree.The most promising answer to your question is surprisingly simple and can be summed up in two words: new energy. My experience finds that serious discussion of new energy is still politically incorrect in mainstream circles, which is appalling. Delays in implementing life-saving innovation will be at our collective risk and peril. The urgency for action in these times is unprecedented in the human journey. Quantum leaps in energy innovation, which some of us in the scientific community are aware of, can provide the needed solution, hopefully in time to avert global disaster."

"Nuclear power. Carbon sequestration at coal plants. Ethanol-from-corn. Other kinds of biofuels. Carbon cap-and-trading. Hybrid cars. Conventional electric cars. Air cars. Gas-turbine micropower. Efficient powerplants. Hydrogen economy. Hydro-power. Geothermal energy. Solar. Wind. Tides. Waves. Ocean thermal gradients.Which one(s) of these will solve our climate crisis and give us a large and lasting contribution to energy sustainability? The sobering answer to any truthful inquiry, I am sorry to say, is none of the above."

"Between 2002 and 2006, I taught a course in the Masters program in Transformational Psychology at the University of Philosophical Research in Los Angeles. Part of the intent of the course was to embrace all four cultures of the Phoenix. The title of the course was Science, Ecology, Ethics and Consciousness. The attendance was low, but the students that did attend were among the most aware and sentient beings I have ever met. They began to understand how important all four cultures were for our future, and if we leave out any of these qualities and beliefs, or specialize too much in any one, we will box ourselves in.[…] I believe that the world needs to come together in a blend from the four cultures of the Phoenix, but only the “Spiritualists” of consciousness scientists can provide lasting solutions. All other groups [Truth-Seekers, Deep Ecologists, and Pragmatists] simply do not have the awareness to get there, but they have an important role to play in presenting the depth of our problems."

"The Pale Blue Dot image of Earth is not a stunning image. But that didn’t matter in the end, because it was the way that Carl romanced it, turning it into an allegory on the human condition, that has ever since made the phrase “Pale Blue Dot” and the image itself synonymous with an inspirational call to planetary brotherhood and protection of Earth."

"Marine navigation blends both science and art. A good navigator constantly thinks strategically, operationally, and tactically. He plans each voyage carefully. As it proceeds, he gathers navigational information from a variety of sources, evaluates this information, and determines his ship’s position. He then compares that position with his voyage plan, his operational commitments, and his predetermined “dead reckoning” position. A good navigator anticipates dangerous situations well before they arise, and always stays “ahead of the vessel.” He is ready for navigational emergencies at any time. He is increasingly a manager of a variety of resources--electronic, mechanical, and human. Navigation methods and techniques vary with the type of vessel, the conditions, and the navigator’s experience. The navigator uses the methods and techniques best suited to the vessel, its equipment, and conditions at hand. Some important elements of successful navigation cannot be acquired from any book or instructor. The science of navigation can be taught, but the art of navigation must be developed from experience."

"The Earth is an irregular oblate spheroid (a sphere flattened at the poles). Measurements of its dimensions and the amount of its flattening are subjects of geodesy. However, for most navigational purposes, assuming a spherical Earth introduces insignificant error. The Earth’s axis of rotation is the line connecting the north and south geographic poles. A great circle is the line of intersection of a sphere and a plane through its center. This is the largest circle that can be drawn on a sphere. The shortest line on the surface of a sphere between two points on the surface is part of a great circle. On the spheroidal Earth the shortest line is called a geodesic. A great circle is a near enough approximation to a geodesic for most problems of navigation."

"Mans can't make moons"

"The working of great administrations is mainly the result of a vast mass of routine, petty malice, self-interest, carelessness and sheer mistake. Only a residual fraction is thought."

"... Dark matter provides the additional gravitational pull to bring model and reality broadly into alignment. Researchers now routinely take this model – Einstein plus dark matter, often called the ‘null hypothesis’ – as their starting point and then perform detailed calculations of galactic systems to test it. ... Most recently, Stacy McGaugh at Case Western Reserve University in Ohio and his team documented that the pattern of rotation in spiral galaxies seems to precisely follow the pattern of the visible matter alone, posing yet another challenge to the null hypothesis."

"Why does MOND get any predictions right? It has had many a priori predictions come true. Why does this happen?"

"People have been looking for this dark matter because there is a Nobel prize, for sure, waiting for whoever discovers it."

"... I was deeply shocked when it was not my predictions or any of my immediate colleagues' predictions that came true in my data — but Milgrom's. This was completely outside my conceptual framework."

"The current cosmological paradigm, the cold dark matter model with a cosmological constant, requires that the mass-energy of the Universe be dominated by invisible components: dark matter and dark energy. An alternative to these dark components is that the law of gravity be modified on the relevant scales. A test of these ideas is provided by the baryonic Tully-Fisher relation (BTFR), an empirical relation between the observed mass of a galaxy and its rotation velocity. Here, I report a test using gas rich galaxies for which both axes of the BTFR can be measured independently of the theories being tested and without the systematic uncertainty in stellar mass that affects the same test with star dominated spirals. The data fall precisely where predicted a priori by the modified Newtonian dynamics."

"... It was (in part) Gross’s excessive enthusiasm for string theory in the mid-80s that drove me (as an impressionable grad student at Princeton) away from theoretical physics (and into astronomy). String theory may have been a beautiful idea, but it made no predictions that could be tested experimentally in the then-foreseeable future. That’s not science. A quarter century later and the theoretical physics community has yet to wake up and realize that there is new physics right under their noses – just not the new physics they’ve been expecting (GUTs, strings, membranes, etc.). Galaxy dynamics are consistent with a single, universal force law, but this unexpected behavior has largely been ignored because it doesn’t fit with particle theorists’ dreams of super symmetric dark matter particles. That we do not understand the observed behavior makes it more interesting than the “expected” (but unobserved) new physics: who ordered this?"

"I came to the subject a True Believer in dark matter, but it was MOND that nailed the predictions for the LSB galaxies that I was studying (McGaugh & de Blok, 1998), not any flavor of dark matter. So what I am supposed to conclude?"

"A long time ago when I first got interested in MOND, having come from the background where I believed in dark matter, I wrote a proposal saying, "Gee, this theory had its predictions come true, ... we should look into that" and it was rejected, you know, very harshly. And I thought "OK, the community is not willing to fund this kind of thing" — this was almost twenty years ago. And so I basically did a global substitute, replaced MOND with dark matter, resubmitted, and I got my money. ... Pavel is totally correct that scientists are focused on getting grants, because that's what you need to support your students, and your postdocs, and getting the data, and all those sort of things. And I would like to believe that that was an anecdote from the distant past, but I am aware of a colleague who had this experience very recently where this person did not even mention MOND in the proposal, but the panel came back saying "MOND is no good — you must not spend money on this." ... the panel had associated ... this person's name with having at some point written a paper about MOND and projected that onto this proposal that ... did not mention MOND. And so it really is that bad."

"You can lead a theorist to data, but you can't make him think."

"Obvious results provoke opposition. The more obvious the result, the stronger the opposition."

"It is often stated that the evidence for is overwhelming. This is not quite correct: the evidence for mass discrepancies is overwhelming. These might be attributed to either dark matter or a modification of gravity."

"Whenever I come across a case that doesn't make sense in MOND, it usually doesn't make sense in either."

"I've never observed wisdom to emerge from shouting."

"My gut reaction to all these questions is negative. But it appears that one set or the other must be answered in the affirmative. Either way, we are missing something fundamental about the nature of our universe."

"One should not only be truthful, but as complete as possible. It does not suffice to be truthful while leaving unpleasant or unpopular facts unsaid."

"A long standing prediction (Milgrom 1983) of MOND is that rotating galaxy curves will fall on a single mass-velocity relation with slope 4: Mb \propto Vf4. This prediction is realized in multiple independent data sets. Gas rich galaxies fall where predicted by MOND with no free parameters. There are not many predictions in extragalactic astronomy that fare so well a quarter century after their publication. … a physical understanding for why galaxy formation in the context of ΛCDM should pick out the particular phenomenology predicted a priori by MOND remains wanting."

"I have experienced time and again people dismissing the data because they think MOND is wrong, so I am very consciously drawing a red line between the theory and the data."

"The concordance model of cosmology, ΛCDM, provides a satisfactory description of the evolution of the universe and the growth of large scale structure. Despite considerable effort, this model does not at present provide a satisfactory description of small scale structure and the dynamics of bound objects like individual galaxies. In contrast, MOND provides a unique and predictively successful description of galaxy dynamics, but is mute on the subject of cosmology. … it is far from obvious that the mass spectrum of galaxy clusters or the power spectrum of galaxies can be explained in MOND, two things that ΛCDM does well. Critical outstanding issues are the development of an acceptable relativistic parent theory for MOND, and the reality of the non-baryonic dark matter of ΛCDM. Do suitable dark matter particles exist, or are they a modern aether?"

"To the Editor of the Bulletin: In Professor Hart's most interesting and illuminating article printed in the Alumni Bulletin he remarks that barring certain exceptions "petticoats are considered to have no place in Harvard or a Harvard Catalogue." Unfortunately this statement is only too true, and I believe the time is ripe to take serious account of the important and indispensable services that women are rendering to the University in technical and administrative positions in her offices and her institutions. We have recently read in the papers of the death of Miss Henrietta S. Leavitt of the Astronomical Observatory, whose work in photographic photometry gave her an international reputation... in fact, the services that the women have rendered at the Observatory are too well known in the scientific world to need further comment. ...Harvard should follow the lead already taken by the other large universities of the country, including California, Chicago, Columbia, Princeton, and Yale, in recognizing high grade service afforded by women on its staff, and this recognition should be not merely the inclusion of their names in the Catalogue... but should carry with it privileges of retirement and pension funds and of leave of absence at stated periods in order to afford opportunity for study and research. Several of the universities named are already ahead of Harvard in this respect, and in some of them women occupying high grade technical positions take rank with instructors and assistant professors when their acquirements and the nature of their work make them worthy of it. ...my heading "Petticoats in Harvard" is not an attempt to bring up the question is... only a plea for fitting recognition of scholarly work efficiently and faithfully performed in our midst by an unrecognized body of experts."

"By the death of Miss Leavitt on December 12, 1921, the Observatory lost an investigator of the highest value. She had obtained a comprehensive experience in photographic photometry, and had developed a clear appreciation of the difficulties involved in the theory and practice of this important research. Her work on standard magnitude sequences was nearly concluded at the time of her death, but she had hardly begun work on her extensive program of photographic measures of variable stars. In the foregoing summary no mention has been made of Miss Leavitt's work on standard photometry..."

"How far are the spiral nebulae? How large is the universe? We cannot begin to answer these questions unless we measure the distance of heavenly objects. The breakthrough was made by Henrietta Leavitt, who was interested in a rather special class of stars, the Cepheids. The intensity of light coming from Cepheids rises and falls regularly with time... Concentrating on one of the Magellanic Clouds, she found that there was a very close relationship... The brighter the Cepheid was, the longer its period. The distance of the Magellanic Cloud is so great that the stars there can be regarded as all being effectively the same distance from the Earth. If you are in Los Angeles, everybody in Carnegie Hall is about the same distance from you. ...Suppose that a Cepheid in the cloud has a certain brightness and a period of one week. Now look at another Cepheid in some more distant galaxy. If it has the same period, we can assume it has the same intrinsic brightness, and yet it is dimmer than it should be. ...we can work out the relative distance from Earth. A star of the same intrinsic brightness that is twice as far away will be four times dimmer. ...It is slightly complicated by the effects on brightness of interstellar dust clouds, but it was a huge step forward."

"Miss Henrietta Swan Leavitt, for more than twenty years a member of the staff of the Harvard Astronomical Observatory, died at her home in Cambridge on Dec. 12. She was a graduate of Radcliffe College, and had studied astronomy as a graduate student. She joined the staff of the Harvard Observatory in 1895, and finally was in charge of the department of photographic stellar photometry. She determined the brightness of a series of stars near the north pole ranging from the fourth to the twentieth magnitude; discovered four new stars and 2,400 variables of about half of all the known variable stars; formulated a law establishing a definite relation between the brightness and the length of period of such variables; and made other noteworthy achievements in astronomy. The scientific results of her work form parts of volumes 60, 71, 84, and 85 in the "Annals of the Harvard Observatory.""

"The photographic plates from Peru that Leavitt was studying in Harvard covered two clouds of stars, known as the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds... During the course of her painstaking work, Leavitt noticed that the Cepheids in the Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC) showed an overall pattern of behaviour in which the brighter Cepheids... went through their cycle more slowly. The initial discovery was reported in 1908, and by 1912 Leavitt had enough data to pin down this period-luminosity relationship in a mathematical formula, established from her study of twenty-five Cepheids in the SMC. ...Leavitt found a clear mathematical relationship between the apparent brightness of a Cepheid in the SMC and its period... This could only mean that the absolute magnitudes of Cepheids are related to one another in the same way, since the distance effect is essentially the same for all of the Cepheids in the SMC. All that was needed now was to find the distance to just one or two Cepheids in our neighborhood... so that distances... could be worked out from the period-luminosity law that Leavitt had discovered."

"She and others realized that one needed only to calculate the distance to these [Magellanic] Cepheids, which almost certainly were roughly the same distance to the earth, to have a useful yardstick for measuring other distances."

"She deserved the Nobel Prize for her work."

"Hubble tackled two of the most fundamental questions of the universe: how old is it, and how big? To answer both it is necessary to know two things—how far away certain galaxies are and how fast they are flying away from us. The red shift gives the speed at which galaxies are retiring, but doesn't tell us how far away they are to begin with. For that you need what are known as "standard candles"—stars whose brightness can be reliably calculated and used as benchmarks... Hubble's luck was to come along soon after an ingenious woman named Henrietta Swan Leavitt had figured out a way to do so."

"As a senior in 1892 Leavitt was introduced to astronomy. She was fascinated by it, and after graduation she enrolled in a course to study the subject full time. Tragically Henrietta Leavitt was suddenly struck down by a serous illness, and she was forced to spend over two years at home recovering. Her illness left her profoundly deaf. ...when she felt fit enough she put forward her name in 1895 as a volunteer worker at Harvard College Observatory."

"In addition to these larger labors, Miss Leavitt took part in various minor investigations. She gave considerable time to the discovery of new celestial objects. Altogether, she found 4 new stars, 2400 variable stars, or about one half of the known variables, and various asteroids and other objects."

"One of the most striking accomplishments of Miss Leavitt was the discovery of 1,777 variable stars in the Magellanic Clouds. These results were [made] possible by photographs of long exposure made at Arequipa with the 24-inch Bruce refractor and forwarded to Cambridge. Some of these plates had exposures of from two to four hours and showed very faint stars, among which nearly all the variables are found. ...from a study of 25 of them, the important law was derived, that the length of period bears a definite relation to the absolute magnitude."

"Miss Leavitt was of an especially quiet and retiring nature, and absorbed in her work to an unusual degree. She had the highest esteem of all her associates at the Harvard Observatory, where her loss is keenly felt."

"Apart from her few and very important scientific papers, Leavitt left behind almost no traces of her life. She was born on the Fourth of July 1868 in Lancaster, Mass., and died of cancer on Dec. 12, 1921. Her will tells nearly all. She left an estate worth $314.91, mostly in Liberty Bonds, with a few items such as a desk valued at $5. She never married and had few living relatives. She also left behind a legacy of a great astronomical discovery."

"About 1906 a Durchmustering of variable stars was proposed at the Harvard Observatory. Somewhat later this was undertaken on plates included in the Map of the Sky... A comparison of the photographs of a number of these regions by Miss Leavitt led to the discovery of several hundred variables and other special objects. Among them were a number of stars of the Algol type."