Originally published 20 June 2004
So here it is, Science Musings on the web, a regular meditation on humankind’s quest to understand the universe, including, of course, ourselves.
Like the column that ran in the Boston Globe for twenty years, this space will not report science. Rather, I will connect developments in science to our rational, emotional, and esthetic lives. Each essay will take off from an ordinary event or observation that might be available to any one of us, and follow it wherever it leads — into the past, the future, the realm of the galaxies, or the realm of the DNA. Expect a little history, poetry, and art. And a measure of religious awe.
It is a theme of this essay (and website!) that our lives are ennobled and made richer by the reliable knowledge of the world that science provides. But not even science, as a social activity, will escape our critical scrutiny.
I have recently retired from forty years of teaching, and my Globe column has come to an end. I find that I need the stimulus of regular writing to keep retirement from becoming an excuse to loll. “Go to the web,” suggested my son Tom.
There is a famous New Yorker cartoon by Peter Steiner that shows two dogs sitting in front of a computer. One pooch says to the other: “On the Internet, no one knows you’re a dog.” My hope is that no one will know that this old dog would never learn the big new trick of internet communication were it not for his son.
A hundred years ago, Scientific American magazine proclaimed the telephone as “nothing less than a new organization of society — a state of things in which every individual, however secluded, will have at call every other individual in the community, to the saving of no end of social and business complications, of needless goings to and fro.”
Another pundit of the time proclaimed the telephone would ring in an epoch “of neighborship without propinquity.”
One hundred years ago, who could have imagined a world in which half the population — or so it seems- ‑go about with a phone attached to the ear. And who could have imagined the internet, a vast and uncensored universe of information and ideas where every dog can have his say.
Well, why not? I’ll give it a whirl. It will help keep me out of the rocking chair and maybe sell a few books to boot.
But more! We have a blog too.
The term is short for weblog — as in web log — coined by Jorn Barger in December 1997 to describe a frequently updated site with links to other sites on the web, usually with comments by the weblogger. The contraction was first used by weblogger Peter Merholz in 1999, when he whimsically broke Barger’s term into “wee blog” on his site.
And so the English language, and indeed the world’s many tongues, acquired a new word.
Blogging is one more way of linking together the billions of personal and institutional sites on the web. It gives every person a potential forum for facts and opinions that is unrestricted by institutional gatekeepers — editors, publishers, librarians, and government censors.
Of course, the obverse side of this development is that without gatekeepers the web becomes a vast interwoven tapestry of fact and foolishness.
We think we know the difference, not because we are smarter than anyone else, but because we trust the filter of science to hold averred facts to the fire of empirical experience.
Why one more blog when every dog from here to Timbuktu is blogging away?
Because we have a combination of sensibilities that are rare on the web: respect for reliable empirical knowledge and an irrepressible sense of wonder – the very elements that made Science Musings in print a twenty-year success.
Half a century ago, the Jesuit scientist and theologian Teilhard de Chardin imagined that natural evolution of the biosphere would lead eventually to something he called the Noosphere, a disembodied intelligence that wraps the planet. Today, the Noosphere is exploding all about us, except we call it the Internet.
I like to think that cultivation of the Noosphere is a worthwhile activity, a way of bringing the world into electronic togetherness — neighborship without propinquity. By cementing virtual relationships around the globe, we make it less likely that we will kill each other over real or perceived differences. By celebrating the universality of science, we diminish differences rooted in accidents of place or time.
There are haves and have-nots on the web, defined by available bandwidth — how many bits per second spew onto your screen — but with a little luck there won’t be a Balkans, a Northern Ireland, a West Bank, or a Baghdad.
For so lofty a goal, this old dog is prepared to learn one new trick.
