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Reprinted from: Green Bay Press-Gazette
http://www.greenbaypressgazette.com/

June 17, 2007

Guest column:
Let's discuss the language of science - and space

By R. Aileen Yingst
Guest columnist

I am truly blessed to be a planetary geologist. This infant field of study is exciting and visionary, one in which the mundane tasks that come with every job — clocking in, checking the reports of yesterday's shift, documenting my work — are colored by the exotic nature of my study "location." My tasks involve sending commands to a rover on Mars, where the travel time of those commands at light speed is more than 20 minutes, and I am constantly aware of the awesome responsibility of operating a machine as proxy for the rest of humanity.

It isn't every field where you know that the robot currently obeying your commands will someday reside behind glass in a museum on another world when you are long dead.

On the other hand, I am in one of the few professions (along with lawyers, politicians and journalists) where people who don't know me nevertheless feel a certain freedom to criticize what I do. Regardless of how convinced I am personally of the importance of my work, I often find myself faced with the question: Why should Americans spend tax money on space?

This is a fair question. Having a profitable debate on the funding of space science is extremely important. The problem is that it cannot occur if both sides do not have a basic fluency in the language of science. Why is this so? Because the vocabulary, the worldview, is not a shared one. I can enjoy eating cheese without knowing how it's made; but I can't enter into an intelligent discussion of whether we should make it at the expense of something else without some knowledge of the process.

In the same way, if we don't share the same vocabulary during a debate about where our science money goes, we only talk past one another as we decide which scientific endeavors our democratic society should pursue. More importantly, we can't make a true cost-benefit analysis without a basic understanding of both the costs and the benefits. How does one weigh a NASA budget that contributes to a mounting federal debt against the benefits of an endeavor that has produced and does produce knowledge and technology that saves lives and grows the economy? On the one hand: high cost and risk to personnel. On the other: development of technologies like weather satellites, fetal heart monitors, CT scans, MRIs and the miniaturization of electronics that made my laptop possible. And of course, my very favorite (no, not Tang): WD-40. How do we choose if we don't understand the value of both options?

There is not enough room here to give a detailed exposition on the language of science and the scientific method. But having taught at the college level, my experience is that students tend to be not just poorly versed in science, but scared of it as well. How sad, considering that we are all born little scientists. Anyone who has witnessed an 8-month-old explore a new toy by shaking it, dropping it, putting it in her mouth, examining it from all angles and then trying to break it in as many ways as possible, knows whereof I speak. And my teacher parents would be furious if I did not state that the problem is not with our education system, but is endemic to our society. We must choose, then, as a society, to embrace this latest tool of our genius, the scientific method.

We must make demands on ourselves and our children and insist on science literacy. We should leave our schools as fluent in science as we are in our native language. Science is the language of the 21st century, the language of economic prosperity for the individual as well as society. It informs everything from the debate on global warming to the best methods of protecting our troops to the level of radon we should allow in our water. It is not a religion, just a tool — but a tool that is as crucial for each individual's success as learning to balance a budget, as important to our collective future prosperity as, well, learning to balance a budget. At the very least, insisting on science literacy will result in citizens fluent in the science-based skills of careful observation, rigorous testing and pursuit of provable fact over opinion.

So let us have this absolutely crucial dialogue on the funding of space science. But let us eschew uninformed rhetoric and have the dialogue intelligently and fully. Let it be a true scientific debate.

R. Aileen Yingst, is a planetary geologist at UW-Green Bay, and director of the Wisconsin Space Grant Consortium