Michelle Thaller
My kid-in-the-candy store job
I have the most amazing, incredible, kid-in-a-candy store job you could imagine: I'm a scientist.
More specifically, I'm an astronomer (or astrophysicist, if I'm trying to be extra impressive). I'm not saying this job is different from all the rest. Eighty percent of it is red tape and paperwork, I constantly fight for money, and resources, politics, and egos are an ongoing nuisance. And after years of advanced education and training, I get paid a small fraction of what I could make as a Web page designer.
But in that remaining 20 percent of the time, it's my job to explore the universe.
We've taken pictures of our tiny planet rising over the horizon of lunar mountains, made the astonishing discovery that an icy moon of Jupiter may harbor a salt-water ocean, and figured out that we live in a universe with more than three dimensions. (I hope to cover these discoveries in future columns). Just recently, we looked so far into space with our telescopes that we saw back to a time when no stars had started to shine yet. Right now, we're working on finding out how our universe will die. This is important stuff for people to know.
During my stint in graduate school, I took some time off to teach the most challenging, rewarding, infuriating sort of students there are: middle schoolers. Now, I say the following as a person who has given talks at scores of professional meetings and published articles in the nation's top scientific journals: If you can teach a middle-schooler something and actually get it to stick in their head, then and only then can you truly claim to know what you're talking about.
I'm not kidding about this. It struck me during my PhD oral exam - where other scientists test your knowledge of what you learned all those years in university - that what was really saving my hide was the middle-schoolers. They had asked me the most penetrating and creative questions I'd ever been asked about astronomy. And middle-schoolers can surely detect when someone's trying to skirt around a question (much more than a PhD committee seems able to do).
So in this column, what I'd like to do is get back to that purity of science you find in the questions of middle-schoolers. Why not ask the really cool questions and refuse to flinch when the answers lead you to even bigger questions? Sometimes I would tell my students right out that there is no one on the Earth who knows the answers to questions such as "What happened before the Big Bang?" But that shouldn't stop us from trying to answer them as well as we can. Even with all the wonderful tools of science at our disposal, we might not be able to answer a question once and for all, but at least we can see where the path to the truth might lie.
This is where I think a lot of people misunderstand science and scientists.
Science is not a collection of hard facts. Pretty much everything scientists now believe about the universe will undergo major modifications in our lifetime. Probably not the meat-and-potatoes stuff like "the Earth orbits the Sun, not the other way around," but really fundamental stuff like how we think stars and planets form, what the beginning of the universe was like, whether there is life on other planets. Watch for big changes coming your way soon. Not because scientists haven't been doing their jobs right, but exactly because they have.
There will always be the next story, that next view of the universe out there, waiting to be discovered. So, any answer I suggest in this column will very probably be out of date in about 10 years or so.
I not only expect that to be true, I profoundly hope it will.
Michelle Thaller works for NASA in Los Angeles, California.