This Monday, I went to see the new Christopher Nolan film about the life and work of J. Robert Oppenheimer, the leader of the team that invented the atomic bomb.
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This Monday, I went to see the new Christopher Nolan film about the life and work of J. Robert Oppenheimer, the leader of the team that invented the atomic bomb.
I have grown up in the shadow of the twentieth century; I was born near the beginning of its last decade and to a degree always knew much of the broad strokes of the century’s history in the United States. The first decade of my life was a time of optimism and hope, the Cold War had just ended a year before I arrived, life seemed to be good, and to me everything was a wonder to behold. I knew the story of how we got to that point, the broad strokes of American history more broadly and of the history of my home city of Chicago more particularly from as far back as I can remember thinking of such things. I knew a world where the threat of nuclear war was a thing in the past, a nightmare that never came to pass now that the Soviet Union had fallen, and America & the rest of humanity had survived the long nightmare of the Cold War.
In many ways, Christopher Nolan’s new film Oppenheimer tells that story that I grew up knowing, of American determination to overcome seemingly insurmountable obstacles with a can-do attitude that won this country its independence, the good guys our Civil War, and a transcontinental union of states that promised liberty, democracy, and peace to all who lived within it. In the years since of course I’ve learned the hard truths of this country’s history, all the people whose lives, hopes, and dreams were thrown by the wayside in the name of our national progress. I still believe in the dream of that progress, ever the optimist, yet that optimism is tempered by the realism that life in this country has never been fair or equitable for all of us.
For all of the tropes of the great man that the film Oppenheimer plays with, it still tells a story of one man and his colleagues, his fellow theoreticians, engineers, and scientists working in a moment pushed along by the uniformed protectors of that progress to use their brilliance to craft something that could harness the pure energy of the Cosmos to be the ultimate weapon to end what was then the ultimate war imaginable.
Christopher Nolan is famous for his use of sound to tell his stories. Of all his films, the one that before Oppenheimer which touched me the most was Interstellar, which used the minimalist score composed by Hans Zimmer to describe what it might be like for humans to soar past our solar system and to far distant stars at sub-light speeds with little chance yet an enduring hope of returning home to the ones they loved ever again. I watched Interstellar on a transatlantic flight in January 2016 on the way back to London where I was then living from Chicago-O’Hare. That flight was entirely at night, thanks to the long winter nights in the Northern Hemisphere, and so for a few hours before we landed just before dawn at Heathrow, my entire world was Interstellar, which left my jet lagged mind far more confused than usual the rest of the day in my flat.
Zimmer’s score for Interstellar, in particular the great theme “No Time for Caution” pulses with the clockwork rhythm of time itself, a telling motif for a film all about the complexities of spacetime that a non-expert such as myself can hope to understand yet often fall short of grasping. In Oppenheimer there are rhythmic, chronic beats, there is a great pulse that underscores the most pivotal moments of the film, yet where Nolan uses sound itself, less so music, contributes to a compelling, and all-consuming story of the beginning of something with great promises of both wonders and terrors alike.
One of my new favorite music YouTubers talking about what makes Interstellar’s music so good.
I watched Oppenheimer in IMAX, though not on 70 mm film as no such cinemas within a 400 mile radius of Kansas City are showing it on anything but digital prints. Sitting where I was on the right-hand aisle, I perhaps got more of the sound from that side than the left, or the perfect sound that one would find in the center of the room; and in my humble opinion, most cinemas have their sound far too loud in general nowadays anyway. Yet I still felt awed by the way that the sound consumed everything else that I could feel, see, and yes hear when it fitted the story. This matched the great silences, not lead-ins to a horror jump scare, but meditations on the numinous echoes of something approaching the divine in the power wielded by that American Prometheus as Dr. Oppenheimer has been called.
In the Summer of 2016, a few months after that flight into the world of Interstellar, I traveled to Vienna, one of the most beautiful cities I’ve ever visited, and the first stop I made after arriving in the Innere Stadt was at the Haus der Musik, the second music museum I’d visited during my time in Europe after the Finnish Sibeliusmuseum in Turku. Yet unlike the Finns, this Viennese institution included an entire floor dedicated just to sound, the Klangsmuseum, where sound was visualized using colors on the walls. I began to connect ripples I’d seen all my life in water with the sounds I heard that day, which has proven useful. As I’ve gotten older, and my love for music to concentrate during the day has led me to use in-ear headphones more and more, my hearing has probably taken a slight dampening, leading to me not necessarily hearing less overall but instead noticing the vibrations of sound more and actually feeling sound in my body while I’m hearing it.
So, for me sound is not just something I experience with one sense, my hearing, but with my sense of touch as well. It’s one of the things that a live concert can give the listener that a recording can’t always provide. Whenever I hear a familiar opera in a theatre, I am usually struck a little unexpecting at the physical sound the timpani makes during the overture, and the way the sets creak and reflect sound back towards the singers and out to us the audience. I have learned how to judge without particular precision how far away a lightning strike is by listening for the gap before the thunderclap and the length that thunder echoes about the world around me as well as within me when it’s a particularly close one.
The world that Dr. Oppenheimer created felt removed for much of my life, for the man who said of himself “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds” created a means of mass destruction which after 1945 has never been used in war. For much of my life, the threat of nuclear weapons seemed to be something consigned to a past when our ideologies kept us apart, spurred our distinct methods of innovation, and made enemies out of onetime uneasy allies. Yet today, as other powers rise to a level of strength and aggression that they could challenge the record of nuclear weapons, I’ve found myself worried about it in recent years for the first time in my life. I’ve found in my professional experience that it takes several attempts for a lesson to settle into the learner’s mind, it took me three tries to learn both Latin and Irish to really understand both languages and how they work. All this made Oppenheimer less a film about an event firmly in the past, something perfect to borrow a grammatical term for things that have happened and are in the past, but more something which tells an imperfect story of events with continuing resonances in the soundscape of our world today.
I may have grown up in the shadow of the twentieth century, yet I and my generation will have a great effect on the events of the twenty-first. I hope that we can learn the lessons of the century that came before us, and use Dr. Oppenheimer’s achievements not to create deterrents through the threat of mutually assured destruction but to establish human cooperation out of our mutual interest in surviving to live in a future to come.
Concerns have been raised lately over the risk that the increasing artificial intelligence of our computers poses to humanity. I think the risk truly lies in who teaches these computers and what they are taught.
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Concerns have been raised lately over the risk that the increasing artificial intelligence of our computers poses to humanity. I think the risk truly lies in who teaches these computers and what they are taught.
There have been stories of humans striving for divine heights for millennia, whether it be Icarus flying too high as the wax of his wings melted in the Sun’s rays, or Dr. Frankenstein creating life from the remains of the dead only to find his creation a terror because it couldn’t find a home in human society. In more recent generations stories of cyborgs like Darth Vader, the Borg, and the Cybermen have shown the horrors that augmenting the human body with mechanical parts could bring, especially if those augmentations overwhelm the human.
Many of these risks bear resemblance to the countless stories in our history of people who were raised to fear rather than to love. Darth Vader is merely a tragic figure in a mask lacking most of his limbs without all the anger, hate, and rage that boiled inside that suit sinking the man deep within the façade of Vader so that his climb out, his redemption took the greatest of effort and over two decades to achieve. A central fear over artificial intelligence is in how narrow-minded computers traditionally tend to be. They are machines that run on binary code, 0s and 1s, which allow every one of their decisions to be narrowed down to an up or down choice. There’s little nuance in that, nuance that distinguishes the human from the machine.
In the last few years our machines have gotten far better at interpretation and understanding hints of nuance. What started as humorous easter eggs embedded into virtual assistants created by Apple, Amazon, Google, and Microsoft like answers to riddles or references to the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy have become the minute personalization of service provided by the newest generation of artificial intelligences, notably those developed by Microsoft’s Open AI, the creators of Chat GPT. I was unsurprised to see that Chat GPT could devise information for me regarding very particular subjects like André Thevet (1516–1590), the focus of my dissertation, or about the Ancient Order of Hibernians, the largest Irish Catholic fraternal order in the United States of which I am a member. Yet what struck me was the speed at which Chat GPT learned how to communicate and relay ideas. No longer was there a bias towards English and several other languages as has been the case with the other AI text generator Google Translate; Chat GPT was able to answer questions I asked it in Irish, and when I pressed on further in the Connacht dialect that I speak it replied in the same.
I am cautious about using artificial intelligence without due process or consideration of the ramifications. I want the things I write to be my own, without much bias from a computer beyond the fact that nearly everything I write today is typed on a computer rather than written by hand. This reminds me of how our very understanding of language is technologically influenced from the start. Without the technologies we and our ancestors developed over thousands of years our languages would exist orally, spoken and sung, heard, yet not read. The very word language comes from the Latin lingua, which has a very close sibling word dinguameaning tongue, not unlike how in English an older synonym for language is tongue itself. This distinction is pressing for me because much of the ancient history of my Irish Gaelic ancestors was only written down centuries after the fact, rendering those stories from the ancient epics prehistoric in the eyes of the historical method. I recognize their view: after all many of the characters in epics like the Táin Bó Cuailnge are thought to be personifications of ancient gods and goddesses, Queen Medb in particular. I still bristle a bit in frustration at hearing that, especially when an explanation I wrote of the anglicization of my family name from Ó Catháin to Kane was referred to as a “prehistory” by one fellow academic. Without the technology of the written word there is little precedent that we would find acceptable to distinguish one people’s history from another people waiving it off as mere prehistoric myth.
Still, artificial intelligence remains central to my life and work today from my ability to interface with the computer in my car vocally to the spell check that doesn’t care for the handful of Irish names in the previous paragraph telling me to rework those. Over the last three weeks readers of the Wednesday Blog will have seen a series of images that I created using Open AI’s image generator DALL-E 2. I once had more skill as a sketch artist, but have long since fallen out of practice, in part due to the discouragement of an art teacher years ago. So, rather than try to create all these images myself with paper, pencil, and watercolors I instead decided to see what an artificial intelligence could do. I asked DALL-E 2 to create images in the style of Claude Monet (1840–1926), the French impressionist painter whose works I deeply admire that depicted all of the main characters as well as several of the settings on Mars. Those images came to embody “Ghosts in the Wind” in a way that I’m quite pleased with.
The fears that many of the leaders in artificial intelligence have been speaking of lately reflect as much the potential that their creations hold as in the worry that our own long history poses. We have seen time and again as technologies are created and twisted for destructive purposes. This call for caution is very much warranted in that long lens, yet I think behind it is a concern that there are enough people or powers out there who would want to use artificial intelligence to further their own ends to the detriment of everyone else. Many of the beta canon explanations for the Borg lie in genetic experimentation with nanotechnology injected into organic tissue that overwhelms the organic and through a collective hive mind dreams up a desire to assimilate all other organic life. Whether we’re looking at that emerald tinted nightmare or at the vision of a computer that will only stop its program once it’s played all the way through, we need more safeguards against both the human inclination towards chaos that will continue to influence A.I., and against the resolute binary inclination towards order of the machines. As the moral of Fritz Lang’s 1927 film Metropolis––the first great science fiction film to ask about artificial intelligence––says: the mediator between the head and the hands must be the heart.
I often stop myself mid thought when considering questions of truth to ask whether I believe in something or know of something. The distinction here is rather simple, knowledge is founded upon evidence, upon scrutiny & careful consideration of the facts of a case. Belief on the other hand is more of a gut feeling, it’s something we can discern but never really know until that feeling is backed up by fact-based evidence. Of all the forms of knowledge we have yet devised perhaps the most precise and useful is science, or rather the Scientific Method, which is fundamental to understanding the most innate truths of our world.
Both belief & science are built on a certain degree of faith. If the hard facts found in scientific inquiry are the bricks used to construct a house for our collected wisdom built up over every generation, then faith is the mortar that keeps those bricks together. You have to have faith in your senses, in your reasoning, and in the methods and tools you use to come to your scientific conclusions. Similarly, faith is necessary to believe, faith in an idea, in a hope, yes even in a dream of eternity. I’ve been using the English for these ideas so far, but now I think it might be useful to dive into the Latin, which will give us a better idea of how these concepts of belief, science, and even faith, interact in our Modern English.
In Latin the verb crēdō fits my own understanding of belief best. This verb refers to the action of believing and trusting in something, for belief is inherently an active thing. This verb is the origin of our English word creed, and in fact is the opening word of the Latin version of Nicene Creed. Something is credible because it can be believed, and so perhaps there is a certain degree of belief necessary and inherent in science whose facts and statements have enough credit to be considered irrefutable.
Science is itself an English adaption of the Latin word scientia, which had its origins in the Late Roman Republic as an abstract noun referring to the present active participle sciēns, a form of the verb sciō meaning “to be able to,” or “to know,” or “to understand.” Sciō is a practical sort of knowing, it refers to a manner of knowledge that can be tested, reviewed, and proven. Science relies on these proofs to survive and flourish, yet moreover science relies on the tools used to know being credible in their utility. You wouldn’t use a dull knife to cut meat, let alone blunted senses or scientific instruments to prove the fullness of our perceivable reality.
I have a deep admiration for many of the great scientific thinkers of the last few generations, and frequently mention the likes the great public science educators as Drs. Carl Sagan, Neil DeGrasse Tyson, and my generation’s favorite science teacher Bill Nye as people whose curiosity and intellect I look to for inspiration. It is striking then that someone like me who does believe in God, who is a practicing Catholic, would be so admiring of thinkers who themselves are profoundly atheistic in their worldview. I understand where they’re coming from, the existence of God cannot be proven through science, that is an indisputable fact, and to say otherwise would likely diminish the power and vitality of my own faith. I don’t mind that God cannot be proven real or otherwise, for the simplest summation of God in Christian theology as I was taught it, largely coming from the Latin Catholic and Greek Orthodox perspectives, is that God is a paradox. God can only really be approached through belief, through the hope that one might be doing things as some original Creator hoped things would turn out, because in my tradition Free Will is something fundamental to Creation.
I think of God in terms of a Divine Essence, certainly not physical let alone personal in a way that we as humans could fully understand a guy sitting across a table from us. I wonder then can we say that we knowGod, for knowledge relies on those same proofs born out of scientific inquiry? I’m not sure there, and I hesitate to talk about a personal relationship with God because how does one really go about talking to or feeling for someone who can’t be discerned by our methods or means? In the end, if God exists, as I believe, then it relies on that same belief, guided by faith, in Latin fidēs, a word that can also mean reliance, trust, confidence, or a promise that the thing you believe in, whether it be the accuracy of the Webb telescope to find for us the rings of Neptune in greater detail than ever before seen, or in the existence of a God who created all things at some moment deep beyond the furthest reaches of our known past.
I used to think that one could place God’s act of creation at the moment of the Big Bang, after all the image of a great explosion fit neatly with a certain idea of an outpouring of Divine Love, caritas in Latin, that is so central to the writings of many of the mystics of the Church. Yet now using scientific measures our experts have determined that the Big Bang was caused by an eruption of pure energy that had built up before the beginning. It makes me wonder whether we will learn more about those earliest moments as time goes on, whether today’s and tomorrow’s cosmologists will find new truths determined by their own proofs of what might well have happened when all matter in our Universe was compressed into a minute area of tremendous mass.
It seems fair to me to argue then that the moment of Creation did take place, and that at some point our own abilities as humans, all our own wisdom, ingenuity, and cleverness, will reach its limit. Thankfully our scientific tools have yet to reach that limit, and I doubt that limit will be reached in a good long while. It is in our nature as humans to continue pushing the boundaries of our knowledge, first beyond the campfires our ancestors gathered around on the long cold nights of the Last Glacial Period which ended somewhere around 11,700 years ago, then as we learned to plant crops and live sedentary lives, building villages, towns, and later cities where we settled.
As our ancestors continued to develop their societies, they continued to fill in the edges of what became their maps, pushing the edges of what they came to call Terra incognita (unknown land) further and further out to the periphery until 500 years ago the disparate human family was reconnected through our ingenuity and technology transforming the oceans that were once barriers into bridges which we today can cross with ease. In the last seventy years those boundaries have begun to be pushed upward and outward from our home planet and into the stars beyond. We are explorers driven by our desire to understand the unknown, to see over the next horizon. Yet at the core of all that exploring we have continued to explore ourselves, to look within and ask deep questions about who we are not just as physical beings made of flesh, blood, and bone but as individuals, personalities each distinct from the rest. It is this exploration of the self that continues to drive our desire for some greater truth than we can know, a memory of a Creator who began our long and winding story as a species billions of years even before we ourselves evolved into the species we are today, Homo sapiens, discerning humans.
In times now past our ancestors often turned to belief rather than science to answer their questions, to find truths behind the mysteries they faced in their lives. Ideas of monsters, magic, and spirits out for good or ill were born from that worldview. Today, many of those same phenomena could be readily explained using the tools that our sciences have provided, yet still there are limits to our reason, for there are limits to what we as rational beings are capable of. The fullness of God as I believe in such a Divine Essence is beyond that reasoning, something reliant on my belief supported by my faith, my reliance in the possibility of the wisdom that such a Word, to borrow from St. John’s Gospel, promises. That belief is far from scientific, yet it is reinforced by my faith that we as humans can make sense of the reality into which we exist through our own tools, our Scientific Method.
I am a Historian of the History of Natural History, or a Stáir ar Stáir an Nádúir in Irish. This means that I study how animals and plants were understood by naturalists in the past, in my case during the mid-1500s, or what I like to call the Late Renaissance. Central to all of this is the fact that the animals I study are all from the Americas, so they were brand new to the French and Swiss naturalists whom I study. In a sense then, natural history seeks to provide a history on human terms for nature. It seeks to bring something so vast as nature down to our level and make it familiar.
In my research this story focuses on the maned sloth (Bradypus torquatus), a species of three-toed sloth that’s native to the Brazilian Atlantic Forest. It was first recorded in a work of natural history by the Frenchman André Thevet in his 1557 book The Singularities of France Antarctique. Thevet has become famous in the history of natural history for using local names for local animals, rather than calling it a “sloth” he called it a “haüt“, his rendering of the local Tupinambá name. To me this is critical to understanding the History of Natural History, for while you could look at an animal and call it a “sloth” because it moves very slowly another option is to turn to the people who’ve lived alongside it for generations and ask them what they call it. This is what Thevet did.
Last week I got the chance to spend a couple days down in New York City, during which time I wanted to pay a visit to the American Museum of Natural History, arguably one of the preeminent institutions dedicated to the study of nature in this country. It’s a nice enough place, though I’ll admit the exhibits tend to be a bit dated now in 2022. Still, the American Museum offers a good foundation for the layout of such museums around the country. Like its Chicago counterpart, the Field Museum, my favorite such museum, the American Museum has sections focusing on Zoology, Paleontology, Botany, Astronomy, and Anthropology. It seeks to be an encyclopedia of nature in one big building on the edge of Central Park, something it does quite well.
What has struck me the most over the last few years of choosing to visit natural history and science museums in every city that I visit is how all of them try to tell the same story, a history of nature from the Big Bang down to the present. The Field Museum does a wonderful job of capturing this in their Deep Time exhibit, the place where you can find the dinosaurs, in that it begins with that first primordial burst of energy that got everything started and it ends with a wall showing all the species that have gone extinct already in our current age alongside a ticker counting the number of species currently going extinct. We model our natural history on our own history, and frankly our own history is one bookended by a lack of life, whether it be before we exist or after we’ve died.
It’s important that we understand the fact that our perspective is born entirely out of our own experiences. So, we understand the course of time as a linear and finite thing. Past generations have thought of trees and plants as animated creatures like us, while today we recognize they are living if perhaps not as sentient as we animals are. Many among us have understood nature through faith, prescribing that energy which drives all creation to a Creator, a Divine Essence as I like to call the most paradoxical and incomprehensible. (One of these days maybe I’ll release an episode all about the idea and promise of God.)
Thevet understood the sloth to be “most deformed” because of its strange shape and notable slowness. To his perspective it wasn’t a normal creature, natural to its own world yes, but not normal as he understood normal. We still today describe things that are “normal” or “ordinary” as things that we find familiar and comforting. I do it just as much as the next person (see the episode two weeks ago about cultural homogenization). In moderation this is a good thing, it allows us to formulate a baseline, a control, against which we can better understand the unusual and extraordinary around us. The beautiful thing about Nature is as much as our science has made great progress in seeking to describe and understand it, there’s always more out there for us to learn about.
I’m going to leave it there this week. If you haven’t noticed, my voice is failing me today. Let me finish with the thing that I myself will eventually want written as my epitaph (however many decades away that is): stay curious.
This July, while I was preparing for the Longest Commute, I made my usual pre-trip browse of the audiobooks available on Audible that I might be interested in listening to during the long hours in the car. On this particular trip I had even more driving time than usual to listen to books, podcasts, and music as I made my way through the varied scenery of the Midwest, South, and Northeast. I already had a biography of the German naturalist Alexander von Humboldt on my listening list, and there were other books I’d downloaded for previous long drives that I had yet to touch such as a memoir by actor Cary Elwes about his time making The Princess Bride. But I wanted something that related to the trip itself, something to get me even more excited about the things I’d be seeing along the way.
I settled on an Audible original called The Space Race which tells the history of NASA and Roscosmos from the launch of Sputnik 1 in 1957 up into our current generation of public and private spaceflight agencies and companies competing and cooperating in our continued reach for the stars. The whole story was narrated by Kate Mulgrew, an actress I know best from her role as Captain Kathryn Janeway on Star Trek: Voyager and seeing her name on the billing was among the reasons why I chose this particular thing to listen to. I won’t call it a book, it was more of a series of radio shows with a combination of narration, talking heads, and scenes set in the next century.
Those scenes, the ones set in the future are the ones I want to talk to you about today. They posit that the only way humans can ever hope to reach a habitable planet orbiting our closest neighboring star, Alpha Centauri, would be by a generational ship, one where the original passengers’ grandchildren would be the ones to set foot on that planet, and would only be possible through genetic engineering to ensure that those humans who made it there would be well suited to the environment they found and would soon call home, after all any trip that takes three generations to complete would have no path of return.
I for one am eager to see humanity reach beyond Earth and our Moon towards Mars and beyond. We have the potential to do really tremendous things, to learn so much from those experiences about our universe and about ourselves. Why else would TV series and films like the ones from Star Trek be so intriguing to me? They offer us a vision of a future where our introduction to our cosmic neighborhood makes us better people and ushers in a veritable golden age here on Earth. Why would that not be a thrilling prospect?
I listened to the last few scenes of The Space Race while I was driving east along I-10 in the Florida Panhandle, and the moment when they acknowledged that in the world of their story that genetic engineering would be necessary for such a voyage, I felt chills. So, let me ask you this question: if the purpose of exploration at any scale is both extroverted and by equal measures introspective, if the curiosity at the heart of any exploration is a part of what makes us human, then to what lengths should we go to satisfy that curiosity? Should we go as far as to transform our very genetic code, the most essential biological parts of who we are?
This is a question I really worry about. I’m as much an everyday explorer as anyone else, yet there are limits for me as to how far I’m willing to go to satisfy my curiosity; I don’t know that I would want to push myself to such a point that I’d be willing to change who I am just to see over the next horizon. We are who we are because of so many complex and intricate pieces to our identities. Untangle any of those threads and are we still the same person? It makes logical sense that future explorers would consider adapting themselves to the environment of the planet they’re seeking to visit, yet among the things that make us human are our roots to this our home planet. What would the humans who first set foot on that alien world be like if they have no memory of their own world?
If we are to engineer ourselves in any way to adapt to life as a spacefaring or interplanetary species, then let it be technological rather than biological engineering. Let’s create the habitats we would need to survive on Mars so that we can travel to other worlds as ourselves and not as some engineered offshoot of humanity growing ever distant from the source. Let’s take with us our collective memory of all our triumphs and our faults. Let’s bring our stories & music, our proclivities & our imperfections with us for they are what make us human.
And if our explorers should meet anyone out there who is just as curious about the unknown as we are then let them meet us as we are. Let them see us for who we are. Let them see both our problems and our possibilities.
If there are any reasons why I find myself drawn to Galileo, this distant Italian astronomer who lived 400 years ago it’s that we have two things in common: we’re both stubborn and occasionally grumpy. I’ve known the basics of Galileo’s story for most of my life; he was an astronomer who was born in Florence and worked in the Venetian Republic at the University of Padua who was one of the first to use a telescope to look out into the night sky, making him the first to observe the Galilean moons of Jupiter, collectively named today for the man himself. His support of Copernicus’s heliocentric model––that the Earth revolves around the Sun––contributed to his falling out with the Papacy and his eventual arrest and trial by the Roman Inquisition who put him under house arrest for the last few decades of his life.
Of course, the real story isn’t quite that simple, after all many of his opponents agreed in principle with what he was arguing, they just didn’t like how he argued it. Still, Galileo’s contributions to science and to human knowledge of our cosmos overall are undeniable. In the last few weeks, I’ve thought about Galileo quite a bit as Jupiter has come the closest to Earth in its orbit for the first time in decades. I got a good look at Jupiter both through a telescope and with my own eyes on Friday night a few weeks ago up at the Kopernik Observatory and even was able to take a better-quality picture of it than I’ve gotten before with my phone.
Jupiter as seen with an iPhone camera on the 4th Friday in September at the Kopernik Observatory in Vestal, NY. Photo: Seán Kane.
I see in Galileo an inspiration of sorts because of the things he did. He was able to prove that the Moon wasn’t perfectly spherical by observing the shadows of the crater walls (what he called mountains) on the lunar surface. Using those shadows, the effects of the lunar geography, Galileo could prove the existence of something he otherwise wouldn’t have been able to see. It’s like how when it rains the best way to actually see the raindrops falling on your head is to look at them with a dark background like a tree or a darker-colored house. Otherwise, the water droplets will blend in with the ambient colors surrounding them. Likewise, we can see the Moon and the planets because it’s the light of our Sun shining on them that is reaching us here. The Moon doesn’t light itself up, nope, nor does the Earth, rather it’s the Sun that naturally does the job.
Here lies an interesting development in this story: the Sun lights up the Earth during the day, but the Earth is now still lit up at night. Only a few generations ago our ancestors figured out how to use electricity to light up our lives and turn the darkness of night into something new entirely. As long as I can remember I’ve been fascinated by this idea, that even at night some places are well lit. I wonder today if our cities might even be built with night in mind, if there’s more artistry in the architecture when the buildings are lit up by electricity rather than by the Sun’s rays? Certainly, we have more control over how our buildings are lit in this context rather than during the daytime. One of my favorite ways to experience a museum is after dark when all the lighting being done has been devised by an exhibit designer trying to control all aspects of how the exhibit is lit through their own lighting patterns. The British Museum does a really awe-inspiring job with lighting the Parthenon Marbles in such a way that their great shadows climb up the walls of their room making them seem even larger-than-life than they already are.
Still, in Galileo’s day before electric lighting they could see more of the night sky. It’s a sign of the world that we live in that it wasn’t until my 28th year that I actually saw the band of the Milky Way up in the night sky. Even in my youth growing up on the farm on the western edge of the Kansas City metro I never saw it. I think seeing the night sky in all its splendor gives us a chance to reconnect with our past before our industrialized modern world, to reconnect with the lights that illuminated our ancestor’s nights and memories. I’ve talked before here about how profound it seemed to me to be able to see light from Vega that had left that star when I was a child, well the same is true for seeing the same moons of Jupiter that Galileo first saw in 1610 from his telescope in Padua.
As winter approaches here in the Northern Hemisphere we’ll get to see a lot more of the night sky. The days are already here when the sun is setting in Binghamton during dinner time. The fall chill is in the air. It amazes me that October is already upon us, after all it feels like we were just in August; but then again, I probably say the same thing a few times every year. When I was little and first learning the names of the months in school, I remember being given worksheets that included pictures for each month to personify that time the better to remember it by. March was shown as a lion, April as a storm cloud, and May as a flower. In the Fall, September was a tree having reached its fullest bloom after the summer heat, and October was a collection of fallen leaves surrounding a Jack-o-Lantern.
I wonder how Galileo would’ve personified those months, or if he even would’ve thought of doing that? The month of my birth, December, is often associated with the beginning of the Holidays, in my tradition of Christmas specifically. Yet it’s also often thought of as the beginning of winter even though the worst of the winter cold and snows don’t come until January. Yet the seasons here in North America are different than those in Europe; in fact, I found that our months and seasons make more sense in Britain than they do in America where the weather changes at a more expected time than its fluctuations here in America allow. In my Midwestern home I’ve experienced Halloweens in the snow and Halloweens in summer conditions. In my year living in London though, admittedly now a heat island, when it got cold in October it stayed cold until March.
How different then is our world from Galileo’s? How much has our industry and development changed the world we live in? And how different will the world be at the end of this century from the world I knew as a child at the end of the last century? These are all questions I’m going to leave you with today.
I had a restless night on board the Auto Train, from the flashing lights to my right as the curtains in my roomette with the rocking of the train, to the audible voices in the corridor beyond, to the frequent bumps and lurches on the rails. Still, after about 7 hours I decided to get up, shower, and get dressed for the day ahead. I had breakfast in the dining car as we crossed the James River and rolled through Richmond, Virginia. That capital city was radiant in the morning sun.
Crossing the James River.
At 9:30, a good half-hour ahead of schedule, we pulled into the northern terminus of the Auto Train in Lorton, Virginia, a suburb of Washington, DC nestled in the hills near the Potomac. I stepped down onto the platform soon after, collected my car, and drove into the Virginia morning bound for my main stop of the day. Virginia is one of the two oldest English colonies in North America, founded in 1607 with the establishment of Jamestown. The Puritans of New England, better known as the Pilgrim Fathers, didn’t arrive until 13 years later in 1620. Whereas the Puritans established a theocracy in the North, here in the South the Virginians established a plantation society focused on wealth and farming.
The plantations of Virginia inspired the culture and social order of the rest of the South down into the present. In some ways, these plantations are akin to the ranches of the Southwest and haciendas of the old Spanish colonies because they are all focused on the same overarching thing: using the land for its profits.
It was one such plantation that I was driving towards that morning as I passed Fort Belvoir, Mount Vernon, the home of the first President of the United States: George Washington. I’ve spent a lot of time in DC compared to the rest of the East Coast, but in all those trips I’ve never made it out to Mount Vernon, largely because I haven’t had a car on most of those trips to make the journey, or because I just couldn’t fit it into a busy schedule. So, upon seeing how close the Auto Train station in Lorton is to Mount Vernon I knew I had to fit a stop in.
Mount Vernon.
Mount Vernon sits on high ground overlooking a bend in the Potomac about 15 miles downriver from Washington, DC. The mansion house itself was first built by Washington’s father Augustine Washington in 1734 on land that the Washington family had owned since 1674. George Washington began inheriting parts of the estate in 1754 before becoming its sole owner in 1761. The image of himself that he most wanted to be remembered by, that of Farmer George, is best realized there at Mount Vernon, which has been carefully and diligently restored to its appearance in 1799, the year of Washington’s death, by its current owners the Mount Vernon Ladies’ Association.
Washington’s Tomb.
Arriving on the grounds I first made my way towards Washington’s tomb, wanting to see as much of the outdoor things to see there in the morning before the afternoon heat index well over 100ºF set in. At one point there was talk of burying Washington in the crypt beneath the rotunda of the US Capitol building, yet ever the one to avoid grandiosities Washington instead insisted on being buried in a new vault on Mount Vernon, the place he loved more than any other. His tomb is fittingly simple, a vault with an iron gate in which he and his closest family are buried. Outside of it are two obelisks which mark the graves of other Washington relatives who died in the 19th century. A short walk from Washington’s grave is another memorial marker, this one honoring the enslaved African Americans who worked on Mount Vernon. Both were somber sights to behold, the former a tomb of a man who did so much in his day to establish the precedents of our government still in place, the latter a marker of horrendous evils inflicted by that same man upon those who he relied on.
One of the great highlights for me was that afternoon when I took a guided tour of the Mount Vernon mansion, a Palladian structure that has been often used as a model for many later neo-colonial buildings to the point that the layout and interiors seemed almost familiar to me. In some respects, it reminded me of the big farmhouse that I grew up in from the front hall to the social rooms on the ground floor, which in my old house were largely all one big room, to the formal dining room off to the side. On the upper level the idea of having guest bedrooms is something that was very real to me, as we had more sleeping space for guests in that farmhouse than we had for ourselves, though there was only 1 guest bedroom in the place. On the upper level I saw the room where Washington died, restored according to a painting from the 1830s that used eyewitness testimony to be accurate to how the room had looked 30 years before.
After the deaths of George and Martha Washington and their immediate relatives Mount Vernon fell into disrepair, owing in part to changes in the plantation economy and soil exhaustion in those well-settled parts of Virginia. I was touched to learn how the estate was honored and protected by both sides during the Civil War, being one of maybe only a handful of places considered neutral. This saved and preserved Mount Vernon from meeting the same fate as many of its peers throughout the South which were often burnt and ransacked by the passing armies.
I left Mount Vernon after a good 6 hour visit and made my way northwest across northern Virginia to my hotel for the night near Dulles Airport. In general, when it comes to a bigger city like DC, if I have my car with me, I usually prefer to find hotels that are outside of the center but close to a train or metro line so that I can leave my car in a park-and-ride for the day and go into town, while not having to pay downtown hotel or parking rates. I had some ideas of going into DC on this trip, perhaps to visit the National Zoo, but ended up choosing not to, instead staying out near Dulles both that evening due to exhaustion from travel and the poor sleep the night before, and out of an eye for budgetary frugality.
The following day I did make one tourist stop at the National Air and Space Museum’s Udvar-Hazy Center, a massive hangar near Dulles that houses the Smithsonian’s impressive aircraft and spacecraft collection. There’s an old Air France Concorde in there, as well as the Enola Gay, the B-29 that dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima on 6 August 1945. The Space Shuttle Discovery is also housed there, in its own wing of the hangar surrounded by other spacecraft, including John Glenn’s Friendship 7, and a collection of German, American, and Soviet rockets. They even have Chuck Yeager’s Glamorus Glennis, a Bell X-1 in which Yeager became the first human to break the sound barrier in 1947, traveling at Mach 1. I wandered around these feats of human ingenuity and engineering so excited to see each and every one of them. But I knew I needed to be moving again, back on the road north, hopefully to make good time in reaching that night’s hotel.
I left Dulles at around 13:30 that afternoon, driving around the western and northern sides of the Capital Beltway to I-95 and aiming my car northeast along that great artery of the Interstate system that parallels the Atlantic coast from Miami to Maine. Today though I would only be passing through four states, Virginia, Maryland, Delaware, and Pennsylvania. As I was driving through Baltimore, taking the Fort McHenry Tunnel under Baltimore Harbor, I decided to adjust my route a bit and not go straight to my hotel in suburban Philly but instead to make a stop at Pat’s the King of Steaks in South Philadelphia because “it’s on the way.” I made it to Pat’s just after 5 pm, as the glow of the evening sun seemed to be like twilight as it shone between the old brick buildings around the intersection of S. 9th St, Wharton St, and E. Passyunk Ave.
Provelone without
The last time I was in Philadelphia in October 2019 I made my first visit to Pat’s after it was suggested to me as the best option for a cheesesteak by the park rangers at Independence Hall. I found it to be as good as I was told, a wonderful steak sandwich that was one of the easiest meals I’d yet found to order. In my case, I get the “Provolone without,” that is a provolone cheesesteak without onions. On this visit I was happy to be able to have Pat’s again after the pandemic kept me from traveling throughout the East for much of 2020 and 2021. These sorts of steak sandwiches, invented by working class immigrants and their children in the big old cities like Chicago and Philly are a real wonder for American cuisine. I’d compare the influence of the cheesesteak to that of the Italian Beef, a Chicago invention that is more slowly expanding in reach beyond that lakeside metropolis to be known and loved throughout the US.
While waiting at a traffic light near the old docks on Columbus Boulevard, I looked off towards the banks of the Delaware River at the great wharf buildings that were once the beating heart of that city’s international trade. It was through one such building that my 2nd great-grandfather Edward Maher arrived in this country in 1878, receiving an honorable discharge from the British Merchant Navy in which he had served for several years. Though I don’t know which wharf or which dock was the one that witnessed his arrival in America, I felt that the sorry pair I spied that evening in their faded grandeur could well serve as proxies for the spot where that one of my own ancestors first set foot on these shores.
The idea to stop at Pat’s on the way into Philly was good from a geographic perspective, but as soon as I’d left Pat’s and made my way back onto I-95, I quickly found that from a time and traffic perspective that it wasn’t my finest moment. I crawled through Philly that evening, making it to my overnight hotel after an hour of bumper-to-bumper traffic. By then I was just as exhausted as the night before, and not in the mood to try or do anything fancy. So, I sat down on the sofa in my hotel room, turned the TV to WHYY (Philadelphia’s PBS station) and spent the evening watching Nature and NOVA, two of my favorite shows on the air.
The next morning, I woke early, and quickly packed up my things, checking out of the hotel by 8:45. I made it to the 9:10 train at the Norristown Transportation Center with a good 15 minutes to spare, enough time to buy a new Key Card, the local transit smart card issued by SEPTA (the Southeastern Pennsylvania Transportation Authority) and boarded the regional service bound for the Center City. The plan that day was pretty simple: I wanted to visit the Academy of Natural Sciences, my favorite stop on my last trip to Philly in 2019, and then get back out to my car in Norristown to begin the last leg of the trip with a drive up to Binghamton. As luck would have it, nothing went wrong with the trip that day. I made it into Philly by 10:00 am, and walked from Suburban Station to the Academy in good time, arriving about 5 minutes after they opened their doors for the day.
The Dinosaur Hall.
The Academy of Natural Sciences is, in my humble opinion, the best natural history museum in the East. When it comes to natural history museums, I’m especially fond of the dioramas, the displays of taxidermied animals on naturalistic backdrops, of which the Academy has plenty spread out across 3 floors. Their dinosaur collection is smaller than either the American Museum in New York or the Smithsonian’s in Washington, but when it comes to dioramas Philly has them both beat in how they’re laid out and how intimate they seem. This is especially true compared to the ones in New York where the rooms are so dark that it almost feels hard to really get an appreciation for the animals on display. My two favorite natural history museums in the US are my “home museum” the Field Museum in Chicago, and the Denver Museum of Nature and Science, both of which ought to be the poster children, or better yet the type species of American natural history museums in how they set the standard that other museums ought, in again my humble opinion, to follow.
While I was at the Academy, I noticed there was a film crew in the dinosaur hall. I looked to see who was on camera and was surprised to find it was British documentary filmmaker Dan Snow. My general rule when running into famous people is to treat them like anyone else, give them their space, and don’t disrupt what they’re doing. How would you feel if you were working, and some random guy walked up to you and started chatting? I later had a very short but pleasant exchange with him on Twitter about seeing him there. Nice guy.
I wandered around the halls of the Academy of Natural Sciences for a good two hours, just soaking all of it in. When I first agreed to come to Binghamton for my PhD, one of the big things I agreed to myself was that I’d take advantage of being so close to so many wonderful cities with astounding museums to visit as many of them as I could. Because of the pandemic I haven’t been able to be as thorough at that promise as I would’ve wanted, but I’m confident in the future as I find my way into better jobs that I’ll be able to afford the odd weekend trip to see places such as this.
From the Academy I went down into the subway under Market Street and took the trolley to 30th Street, exiting at Philadelphia’s grand Amtrak terminal, where I had a quick lunch of a chicken teriyaki bento box and looked into how to get back to my car in Norristown. I could either wait an hour and catch the same train I took that morning back out to the suburbs, or I could take a timelier route on Philly’s L and interurban services and get there far sooner. Naturally then, I chose the latter, returning to the subway to catch the L to 69th Street, where I transferred to the Norristown High Speed Line, a 13.4 mile (21.6 km) interurban that runs by, among other things, Villanova University. So, at 12:40 I found myself back in my car in the Norristown Transportation Center’s garage, quickly writing out some postcards and setting my navigation system to take me north to my final stop on this Longest Commute, my place of work itself, Binghamton, New York.
The last leg of the trip was the shortest, a mere 2.5 hours between Norristown and Binghamton along the Northeast Extension of the Pennsylvania Turnpike (Interstate 476) to the northern edge of the Wyoming Valley just outside of Scranton and then a quick jump up Interstate 81 and across the New York border to the Susquehanna valley and Binghamton. I finally arrived at my apartment at 4:30 pm on Thursday, 11 August, a full 14 days after leaving home.
Elements of this trip have been in the back of my head for a while. Over the past few years, I’ve considered driving back to Binghamton via DC or Philly, having usually done so via Cleveland or Pittsburgh. There are places in all these cities that I’ve wanted to see for a long time, wishes that my younger self had that I’m finally fulfilling. This longest commute took me through 14 states (Missouri, Illinois, Kentucky, Tennessee, Florida, Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, Virginia, Maryland, Delaware, Pennsylvania, & New York). The trip in full saw me travel 3,022 miles (4,863 km) across much of the Midwest, South, and Northeast of this country.
So, that’s it. That’s the story. To those of you who have been listening and reading over the last 3 weeks, from the bottom of my heart thank you, thank you, thank you. This episode, no. 39, marks the end of Season 1. I started The Wednesday Blog on a whim one morning after a sleepless night in March 2021 after I decided I wanted to write something personal and non-academic for a change. At the time I said I’d stick with it as long as it was fun and not tedious. Well, that first run of 38 blog posts set the stage for the podcast, which I started on another whim after dinner one night in November 2021. About halfway through the first season of the podcast, I decided I’d call the season over after a max of 40 episodes, to try and keep things even with the number of blog posts I published before the podcast started. So, here we are. I hope “The Longest Commute” has been as fun for you to hear as it was for me to experience and later write.
On Sunday morning, 31 July, I awoke to my first sights and sounds of the Emerald Coast. This particular stretch of Florida’s Gulf Coast along Santa Rosa Island and Choctawhatchee Bay is famous for its rich green waters and white sandy beaches. The sight of the bay out my window was one of the first reminders of where I was, that I was not in fact back home in Kansas City nor in that modern hotel room in Nashville. No, I was now in the Gulf Coast, the southern seaboard, of the United States.
I spent the better part of the first day on our balcony attending to a series of morning Zoom calls, before heading out to the beach around lunchtime. In preparation for the beach, I replaced my usual slip-on shoes and black socks for a pair of brown leather sandals that I bought for a day-long float trip down the upper reaches of the Colorado River back in the Summer of 2018. Still, I retained my usual khaki trousers and summer golf shirt, lest I move entirely out of the realm of comfort.
I quickly found that I had arrived at the beach well after much of the seashore fun had passed. The majority of my relatives had had their fun in the ocean waters that morning and were now returning to their rooms to beat the worst of the afternoon sun. So went most of that week in Destin. I found myself caught up in my own over-thinking more than in enjoying the moment, and never did go for that swim in the ocean that everyone kept talking about. The complexity of the idea left me hesitant and wandering that far from a place where I could dry off and change back into my normal clothes without potentially expanding the reach of the ocean or its sandy shores even further was my limit.
A dolphin cow and her calf swam up next to our boat.
On Monday I boarded one of two pontoon boats that carried the 24 of us from my family who made the trip to the seaside and traveled from Destin Harbor out to an apparently famous local haunt called Crab Island. I imagined it would be a large rock tethered to the ocean floor that would be just big enough to be a curiosity for all the tourists flocking to the emerald waters there and was pleasantly surprised to find that Crab Island was actually a shallow part of the bay which allowed for people to walk with ease through the water without much risk of drowning. As with my thoughts on Sunday, I did not join in the aquatics and remained firmly on the boat, but I still enjoyed the time out on the water.
That evening several from our group went to a local pub in the area called McGuire’s that reportedly has some of the best steaks in the country. I considered it but ended up trying their bangers and mash, which were so wonderfully memorable. While I was there, I participated in an unusual custom local just to that establishment of signing dollar bills and stapling them to the walls of the pub. In my own case, my dollar bill was signed “Bhí Seán Ó Catháin anseo, 1 Lúnasa 2022.” After the fact I kicked myself realizing I forgot a key part of the verb, which should have been written “Bhí Seán Ó Catháin anseo é, 1 Lúnasa 2022.” Still, should you be in the area and want to see it, my dollar bill is likely there stapled onto the lid of a very large barrel (I thought of it as a hobbit door) in the room behind the gift shop.
My dollar bill at McGuire’s Pub in Destin, FL.
On Tuesday I got to experience the power of the thunderstorms that build up on the Gulf of Mexico. Most of Tuesday the skies remained cloudy and gray, with various stages of rain from sprinkles to showers falling down on the barrier island that we were staying on. The island in question is the easternmost reaches of Santa Rosa Island, a long and skinny barrier island stretching from Pensacola Harbor in the west to Destin Harbor in the east. Yet as a great many cases in this country’s long history longstanding naming conventions couldn’t be allowed to get in the way of a good marketing opportunity, and in 1950 at the urging of a local developer the eastern 1/3rd of Santa Rosa Island was transferred from Santa Rosa County to Okaloosa County and renamed Okaloosa Island, the name you can buy on keychains, t-shirts, and tag on your Instagram stories when you visit.
We stayed in a beach resort on Okaloosa Island called Destin West. The resort is split between a bayside horseshoe and a beachside block. Our condo in the middle of that bayside horseshoe was a 7th floor penthouse with a neat rooftop balcony that provided marvelous sunrise and sunset views over both the Gulf of Mexico and Choctawhatchee Bay. What’s more, I was delighted by the visions of the night sky that flickered into view each night from that rooftop. On Sunday night my parents and I ventured up onto our rooftop and spent a good hour gazing up at the stars. The sky was first illuminated by the pinpoint of light that is Arcturus, roughly 36.7 light years distant from Earth. Thereafter we gazed up, me laying in a sun-bathing chair, as more and more stars greeted us as the light of our Sun faded further below the western horizon. My Dad and I saw an even better view of the night sky a few hours later when we wandered down to the beach to try and get some wave recordings for this podcast, seeing then the band of the Milky Way arc over our heads in all its nebular glory.
I’m sad to report the wave recordings came out as static. I guess I needed a better microphone.
The other great highlight from the week in Destin was all the time I got to spend with my family: parents, cousins, aunts, uncles, grandparents, and the young children of my cousins. Many of you are listening or reading this week, and I hope this makes my appreciation for all of you very clear. On Tuesday night, I went out on the town with some of my cousins, going towards Destin’s Harborwalk where we enjoyed some of the local music, some good food and drink, and for several of my kin a nice jump off a perfectly good tower. A few days later I returned with more relatives, this time parents and kids included, and got to rediscover that Harborwalk all over again in the daytime.
One of the more fascinating experiences that I had while on the Emerald Coast was visiting first the Native American mound located in downtown Fort Walton Beach, and secondly a sea turtle conservation center in Navarre Beach. The mound was likely built around 850 CE by a people identified archeologically as the Pensacola Culture (fl. 1100–1700). The mound builders in Fort Walton Beach were among a wider culture of mound builders extending throughout the interior of North America called the Mississippian Culture who dominated the Mississippi Basin from around 800 to 1600. Among the most famous Mississippian mounds is Cahokia, located just across the Mississippi from St. Louis in Illinois, which remains one of the top archeological sites I still want to visit. The Mississippians mysteriously disappeared just before the arrival of the Europeans in North America without much certainty as to why. I for one would love to learn more about them.
The Navarre Beach Sea Turtle Conservation Center has a lot in common with many a local science center that I’ve visited, including Broome County, NY’s Kopernik Observatory. It’s staffed by locals who clearly are not only dedicated to the center’s mission but are also themselves keeping the lights on, and it seems to be a focal point of a local advocacy message within the community. The Gulf Coast is home to a wide range of animals and plants, among which are several species of sea turtles. We got to see one green sea turtle named Sweet Pea who lives in the pool located inside the Conservation Center. Sweet Pea was found in Gulf Shores, Alabama with fishing wire stuck far down her throat and wrapped all around her body. In the veterinarians’ efforts to save her they ended up having to amputate one of her front legs, and she’s also missing a piece of her shell, but now she lives a happy life in her pool. Sea turtles are increasingly threatened by human activities along the coast, including fishing, littering, and the use of white flashlights on beaches at night which keep the sea turtles from laying their eggs in the sand out of fright. This is one area where sea turtle conservation and astronomy intersect, as in both cases red flashlights are far better to use than white or blue ones, as red is a cooler color and less blinding to the eyes of either a human or, clearly, a sea turtle.
Sweet Pea the Green Sea Turtle.
Over the last few days of my time in Destin I got to know the roads leading out of that resort town quite well, volunteering to drive a parade of relations to the local airport for their own flights home. On Friday morning, 5 August, I made my own departure from Destin, driving north toward Interstate 10 which I took east. I first stopped in Tallahassee, the state capital, with the sole intention of seeing the Florida State Capitol and then returning to the highway to finish my drive southeast to Orlando. As it turned out, I ended up getting lunch at a local Whataburger, refueling, and making a very brief stop at the State Capitol to photograph it, resulting in an hour delay in Tallahassee. This pushed my arrival in Orlando back from late afternoon to early evening, yet that was only the first delay.
One of the things I noticed foremost about driving on Florida’s highways is how aggressive the drivers in the Sunshine State are. In the Midwest if the speed limit is 70 mph the traffic might flow at around 75-79 mph, yet here with a similar 70 mph speed limit the traffic was staying steady if forceful at a grander 85 mph. I quickly caught on and kept up with the traffic, finding I was getting cut off and being honked at less by the locals and tourists alike, and after a few hours of driving I merged off I-10 and I-75 and onto Florida’s Turnpike, a tollway which runs northwest to southeast across Central Florida and then down the Atlantic coast until terminating near Miami. I was excited to see what this turnpike would be like, as every state tends to like to give their tollways their own particular flair. Massachusetts for one has grand signs arching over their turnpike at every service plaza, and Illinois––the state of my birth––used to have a network of toll oases that were glass bridges over the tollways, most of which are now gone, though they’ve kept the very large circular oasis building on I-88 in DeKalb. Florida’s Turnpike proved to be about as overstated as I expected, with its grand service areas that were advertised nearly once every mile.
I wasn’t planning at stopping at any of them but ended up pulling over at the first one I came across because of a warning sign I saw almost as soon as I’d merged onto the turnpike: “All lanes blocked at US-27 due to wreck, find alternate route.” I checked my map and confirmed that US-27 was between where I was and Orlando. So, I turned to my car’s navigation system and found an alternate route that would take me off the turnpike before the wreck and back on again just after it. “Great!” I said, pulling back onto the highway. It was only a half an hour later when I was pulling off the turnpike and onto my alternate route that I began to realize how frustrating this would be, as that alternate route took me from a 70 mph highway onto a series of rambling backroads that led to the northernmost suburbs of Orlando where farm traffic mixed with the Mercedes and Volvos going to and from the new neighborhoods and resorts that were being built in those farm and swamp lands.
Finally, finally after another hour of meandering through the backroads of Central Florida I returned to the turnpike well past the wreck that had shut down “Florida’s Main Street” and into one of Central Florida’s famous summer thunderstorms. Now, I’m from Tornado Alley so I know a thing or two about thunderstorms, but I can swear to you now that these Florida thunderstorms are nothing like the ones that build up off the eastern face of the Rockies and rain down on the Great Plains. Oh no, these are tropical downpours that build up as the cold Atlantic air meets the warm Gulf air over Central Florida, itself a barely-above-sea-level peninsula and proceeds to dump all the water the heavens can muster onto anyone below. It reminded me of what the Ferengi on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine say about the rains on their home planet Ferenginar, “No, it never rains, it only pours!” As a matter of fact, the hyper-profit hungry Ferengi may well be a good model for understanding Florida, or what I saw of Florida, a state that has a noticeable government bureaucracy (just look at all the tollways around Orlando) but maintains a strong “Survival of the Fittest” attitude about life. I even argued on multiple occasions during my time in the state that they ought to change their state motto to that: “Florida, the Sunshine State. Survival of the Fittest.” The remainder of my time in Florida was marked by the threatening clouds of its immense thunderstorms.
I stayed in the tourist area south of downtown Orlando near International Drive with the idea that if I was close to a couple major highways, I’d be able to get to my two main destinations on that part of the Longest Commute easier. Still, I was overjoyed to discover that I was effectively staying in a part of town that could be called Chicago South, for no sooner had I gotten there than I realized there was a new Portillo’s location just a few minutes’ drive from my hotel. For those of you who aren’t aware, Portillo’s is a chain of Chicago restaurants serving local favorites from the city of my birth like Chicago hot dogs, Italian beef sandwiches, Maxwell St. Polish Sausages, Italian Sausages, as well as burgers, salads, and Mrs. Portillo’s famous chocolate cake. And yeah, I may have eaten there a few times while I was in the area, seeing as I haven’t gotten back to Chicago since 2020 yet.
On Saturday, 6 August I decided to go into Orlando and see what there was to see in a city famous for its theme parks that wasn’t actually in a theme park. I was kind of interested to go to Disney World again, 25 years after my last visit at the age of 4, in large part because there was a rumor (I could never confirm it) that they have a toco toucan (Ramphastos toco), which is the one that’s at the center of the action in Chapters 5 and 6 of my dissertation. Yet with all that said it turns out that the Orlando theme parks are far too expensive to visit on a TA stipend, especially when you’re just going as an individual and not with a significant other or a group. So, instead I went to visit my two usual haunts in a new city: the local science museum and the local art museum.
A vertical farming demonstration
The Orlando Science Center is located in a large round building on the edge of a city park that was built in the 1990s. It houses a lot of wonderful science exhibits aimed at introducing children to the main topics of the STEM fields, and it’s clear the children of Orlando get a lot out of that museum, which is wonderful. The one hall that I spent a fair bit of time in, the one hall that was the closest to what I’ve come to expect in a science museum, was the dinosaur hall, where a series of casts of famous fossils were found, including a cast of Stan the T. Rex. That said, I was out of the Orlando Science Center in just over 30 minutes, having seen pretty much the entire place. Thankfully, my ASTC membership got me in there for free.
From the Science Center I decided to walk across the park to the Orlando Museum of Art, a pretty building set into the far edge of the park from the Science Center. I paid my admission fee and began to stroll around their limited galleries, finding one on Ancient American art especially fascinating, but the rest of it, a collection of contemporary art from around Florida, was not really my style. I do love some types of contemporary art, especially contemporary architecture and the smooth lines that evoke it in paintings and sculpture, but I’m not as fond of the imperfections that seemed to be glorified in the art on display in that museum. It’s just not my taste. A bit let down by that experience, on the walk back to the car I searched on my phone for another museum I remembered seeing when I was researching this trip, and while I thought I found it I instead ended up at the art museum on the beautiful campus of Rollins College, one of the top liberal arts colleges in the South, and somewhere based on what I read and saw of the place I wouldn’t mind teaching at someday, perhaps.
The main reason why I chose to go to Orlando was to use that city as a launching off point for a day trip east to the Kennedy Space Center at Cape Canaveral. Some of my earliest memories are of pictures from the Apollo program and of the space shuttles in books and on TV. Those of you who have read and listened to the Wednesday Blog (thank you!) will know that I’m a space nerd. So, when I heard we were doing a family trip to Florida, I first looked up how far our vacation spot was from the Cape.
I arrived at the Kennedy Space Center’s Visitor Complex at 8:15 am, a full hour and 15 minutes before the gates opened, which meant I was also one of the first in line to go through those gates when they did open at 9:30 am. The opening of the Visitor Complex every day is announced by the playing of the national anthem over the PA system, in a rousing and triumphal manner that proved to be a sign of things to come. I began my tour of the KSC by catching the tour bus to go out to the Apollo-Saturn building a few miles northeast from the main Visitor Complex near the Vehicle Assembly Building, where NASA’s spacecraft are put together and stored before launch) and launchpads 39A and B where both the Apollo missions of 1969–1972 and the Artemis missions of my generation have and will launch from. At the time that I visited, 7 August 2022, Artemis 1 was housed inside the Vehicle Assembly Building awaiting its launch to orbit the Moon. The launch window is scheduled for 29 August at the earliest, a few days after this episode is scheduled to be released. So, fingers crossed that it works!
In the Apollo-Saturn building I got to see a mockup of the Apollo mission control, a Saturn V rocket, and an inspiring half-video, half-staged performance telling the story of Apollo 11’s landing on the Moon in the summer of 1969. I found all the videos that greet you when you enter each building at the KSC to be quite triumphant and grandiose in their tone and music. It’s actually quite fun, though a bit jarring in our current climate of division and fear in this country.
A Saturn V rocket in the Apollo-Saturn Building.
The building I liked the most was the Atlantis building, which houses the Space Shuttle Atlantis and honors the space shuttle and ISS programs all together. As much as Apollo and Sky Lab were the space programs of my parents’ youth, so the Space Shuttle and ISS were the space programs of my youth. It was quite moving for me to finally see a space shuttle up close, and the feelings of bitter sadness that I felt when the shuttles were retired in 2011 returned ever so slightly. I was almost moved to tears seeing the memorials in that building dedicated to the Challenger and Columbia crews who lost their lives in 1981 and 2003 respectively. Many people in my parents’ generation have said that they stopped watching space launches after Challenger broke up upon liftoff, and as for myself I can remember when the news bulletin came in on NPR announcing that Columbia had broken up upon reentry into the atmosphere on that warm Sunday, 1 March 2003.
The Space Shuttle Atlantis
My Dad and I were out in the fields on our farm, doing what I can’t remember, and he kept the radio running in his truck that time. As I heard the news I remember looking up to the south and seeing a jet trail far up in the sky. Now, I know that Columbia broke up over Texas, not Kansas, but in my memory that jet trail was Columbia in its last moments. It’s a memory that will always stick with me.
After a nice lunch in the Cosmic Café, I returned to my touring, visiting the Mars building to see the end of an inspiring video telling us “The first human to walk on Mars is living among us today!” with a NASA employee up on the stage pointing out into the audience saying proudly “and that person could be one of you!” I for one am curious about the idea of going up into Space, maybe someday I’ll do it, but for now I don’t think I’m healthy enough for it. From there I walked over to the new Gateway building, which houses a collection of new and newly proposed spacecraft from NASA’s commercial partners including SpaceX, Boeing, and Lockheed Martin, among others. One example from a company whose name I can’t remember was an expandable space habitat which at its full size is 3-storeys tall and can serve as a home, workplace, and laboratory for the astronauts onboard whether in orbit, in transit, or on the surface of another world.
My final stop at the KSC was in the Heroes building, an exhibit which honors the NASA and allied astronauts who have ventured up into Space over the last 60 years beginning with the Mercury 7. The building culminates with the NASA Astronaut Hall of Fame, at the center of which stands a fine statue of astronaut Alan Shepard, the first American to leave our home planet in 1961.
I left the Kennedy Space Center at 3 pm, a good 6 hours after I first passed through the entry gates, having fully enjoyed my day. The one thing, after leaving and now writing about that experience that I wish I’d done is bought a pack of NASA themed playing cards that were for sale in the gift shop.
The following morning, I was up at 9 and out of my hotel by 10:45 for one of the most memorable legs of any trip to date. I was leaving Florida not by road but by rails. At 12:30 I had the Mazda Rua loaded onto the car-carriers attached to the rear of the Auto Train and boarded it myself at 15:30, sitting happily in my sleeper compartment, my roomette, when we pulled out of Sanford, Florida at 5 ‘o clock that evening. I enjoyed the complimentary dinner service in the dining car, choosing the Amtrak Signature Flatiron Steak with green beans and a baked potato, along with a starter salad with Newman’s Own Light Italian dressing, a dinner roll, and a glass of Chardonnay. The 3-course meal was finished off with a slice of cheesecake, a sign of where I was headed, back to the Northeast after an overnight stop in the DC area.
I fell asleep on the night of Monday, 8 August somewhere in southern South Carolina to the gentle sound of the rails beneath me, the soft swaying of the Superliner sleeper car an old and comfortable feeling to me, having experienced it a handful of times on the Southwest Chief between Kansas City and Chicago. Sleep came late, with dreams of an old Mozart tune floating in my head. “Bona nox …”
This week, some exciting news about the upcoming launch of Artemis 1.
The audio clips used today come from the NASA Audio and Ringtones Library. You can learn more at http://www.nasa.gov/connect/sounds.
As long as I can remember I’ve known Neil Armstrong’s now immortal words “It’s one small step for Man, one giant leap for Mankind.” They were spoken a couple decades before I was born at a time when my parents were themselves children. I think I may have recognized Armstrong’s voice earlier than many other public figures. Then again, Space exploration has always been a big deal in my life, from the endless sci-fi novels that lined the shelves of our basement library in our suburban Chicago home to the Hubble pictures that adorned the walls of many of my classrooms through the years.
Looking back at a lot of those novels and hopeful calls for future Space exploration and settlement, like Gerard K. O’Neill’s The High Frontier or Stanley Kubrick’s classic film 2001: A Space Odyssey it’s striking how far we are now today in 2022 from where we hoped we’d be over the last 60 years. Our last lunar mission ended 20 years to the day before my own birth in December 1972, and besides the odd Chinese robotic mission we humans haven’t been back to our largest satellite since.
So, in December 2017 when NASA announced the beginning of the Artemis program I was thrilled. Artemis, like its twin Apollo, will take humans back to the Moon at some point later this decade or in the early 2030s. Not only that, but Artemis is supposed to be the beginning of the first permanent human outpost on the lunar surface, the beginning of a new stage of human settlement. Since that announcement I’ve enjoyed the thought that in future when I look up at the Moon, I’ll be able to see from a very great distance places where other humans will be living.
The troubles of the last few years, the great crises we’ve been living in with the pandemic and all its associated problems, have certainly contributed to delays in the launch of Artemis 1, an uncrewed mission that will orbit the Moon and lay the groundwork for future crewed missions in the Artemis program. There were even moments when I admit I worried that Artemis 1 would never leave the ground, like the Constellation program that Artemis replaced.
Many of those worries were relieved a few weeks ago when Artemis 1 was moved onto its launchpad at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The rocket, the first launch of the Space Launch System (SLS), a 365 ft (111.25 m) tall super-heavy lift expendable launch vehicle, now waits for its date on the same Pad 39B where the Apollo missions left Earth five decades ago. Only in the last few weeks has NASA given a deadline for this momentous launch: at some point between 29 August and 6 September 2022.
We stand at a point on the verge of entering a new generation in our exploration of Space, a generation when our horizons are far greater than ever before. The dreams of the 1960s haven’t been forgotten entirely, in many ways the Artemis missions to the Moon and the future Martian landings evoke those dreams best expressed in our stories. What’s more, we have a real opportunity here to make a difference through these missions, to let them inspire us to make our lives better here on Earth. I’ve often heard it said from astronauts that seeing Earth from orbit is a humbling experience, because it demonstrates just how interconnected we all are.
It really brings home what Carl Sagan wrote in his book Pale Blue Dot that we are capable of doing so much more if we recognize our common stewardship of this our home, the only home we’ve ever known. We certainly can use Space exploration in the long term to try to find another home, if we continue to mistreat this one so badly that we need to look for a new one, but it would be far better of us if we use these experiences of visiting strange new worlds to use those experiences to appreciate what we have here even more deeply.
My hope is that Artemis will be a beacon of light in an ever-turbulent period in our history, and that it will be remembered as a moment when humanity came together to achieve a common goal for the benefit of all of us.
Historians like me spend our working days trying to understand past generations, to see their worlds through their eyes and to interpret that world in a way that’s understandable to our modern audiences. I for one would love to see the sloths that my dissertation focuses on as they lived in their own time and place 467 years ago. Better yet, I would love the opportunity to sit down and chat with such greats as Abraham Lincoln, Benjamin Franklin, Eleanor Roosevelt, or Hypatia of Alexandria just to hear these great minds of their own times speak as regular people without all the pretenses, titles, and theories that we frame their lives within our histories.
Unfortunately, as far as I know the time machine hasn’t been successfully built yet, and time travel even by slingshoting an object around a sun hasn’t been attempted yet. Give it a few centuries, maybe. My conversation with Mr. Lincoln will have to wait. Yet there are ways we can gaze back into the past that are possible today. If you’re reading or listening to this at night go outside and look up at the stars and see what you can find up there. Maybe even use a star chart app on your phone to figure out which stars you’re looking at. Once you’ve done that see how many light years distant they are from us on Earth. That light took quite some time to reach us, meaning that that light left those distant stars years, decades, or even centuries or millennia ago.
Last summer I wrote about my profound sense of awe at gazing up towards the light radiating out from the star Vega while sitting on the rim of the Split Mountain Canyon in the Utah side of Dinosaur National Monument. What struck me most was that Vega is 25 light-years away from Earth, meaning that that light left that star when I was still a small child in a moment of my life I look back on quite fondly. What’s more, I knew I could return to the same spot 25 years later in 2046 with my children, if I’m so lucky in the future, and show them the light that left that star on the night when I went up there with my Dad back in 2021.
The same idea is central to how we ought to understand the immensity of space. Einstein is responsible for the development of the idea of spacetime, that time itself is a dimension alongside the others we might already recognize. I often think about this when I’m daydreaming, imagining observing the passage of time in a very small scale by watching the light move across the walls of a room however slowly as the day goes by. This past Halloween evening I sat with a fellow sixteenth-century historian in San Diego’s Waterfront Park and looking out towards San Diego Harbor to the west stared at the sunset as it seemed to almost faintly radiate up and down as it slowly set below the horizon. In that moment I knew I could begin to understand the passage of time just as I learned at a young age to comprehend the passage of space in the form of physical objects moving across the landscape, like cars driving along an open highway.
So, this week’s breaking news from NASA Goddard of the reveal of the first five images taken by the James Webb Space Telescope out in orbit of the Earth was a profoundly beautiful moment for me. Webb captured our first images of galaxies as they existed a mere 4.6 billion years ago. Those same galaxies could look very different today, yet their light has only just reached us across the vastness of Space. That image, Webb’s First Deep Field, was released on Monday evening by the White House after NASA offered a preview of the five images to the President and Vice President. Lucky them!
Webb’s First Deep Field, NASA JWST, Public Domain.
As profound as that deep field is, I was struck more by the potential offered by another one of Webb’s images, the second image released to the public which shows the atmospheric composition of an exoplanet called WASP-96 b, which is about 1,120 light-years from Earth. WASP-96b’s atmosphere confirms the presence of water on that planet’s surface, a sign of potential life on that planet’s surface. This is the part of Webb’s mission I’m the most excited about, its potential to help us in our endeavors to find out whether we’re alone in this vast Universe of ours, or if we’re one planet among many populated and teeming with intelligent, thinking, and innovative people.
I can’t help but mention the picture, which is probably my favorite on an aesthetic level, that being the image of the “Cosmic Cliffs” of the Carina Nebula, a stellar nursery located roughly 7,600 light-years distant from Earth. The vibrant colors of the Carina Nebula even unseated Thomas Wilmer Dewing’s 1904 painting The Lute from the coveted role of my computer’s background, at least for now. A closer nebula to Earth, the Southern Ring Nebula, was also photographed. This time though instead of a stellar nursery this nebula surrounds a dying star in its cloudy sphere. Even more profound are the quintet of galaxies captured by Webb from some 290 million light-years away, old enough that its light was contemporaneous with the end of the Carboniferous Period and beginning of the Permian Period here on Earth, well before even the evolution of the first dinosaurs.
On a side note: the Carboniferous room in the Evolving Planet exhibit at the Field Museum remains my favorite room in that collection; I’ve always loved those trees.
The images released by the Webb team and broadcast Tuesday from NASA Goddard represent 25 years of combined efforts from a whole host of scientists and engineers at space agencies around the globe working together to achieve a common goal. By expanding our knowledge of the universe around us we are also demonstrating to ourselves and our descendants that it is possible to work across national divides, to achieve common goals. When we do pull ourselves out of our current string of interrelated crises and societal problems it will be because we’ve finally decided to work together as one humanity for the betterment of all of us.
We have an opportunity now to gaze into the past, to see light coming from stars that may well have died long ago. Yet with their light memories of their existence remains. With that light we’re reminded not only of what once was both out there and here on our home planet, but also of what could be in our future, of a time when maybe we will explore further afield, spread out from our home not as conquerors but as explorers. Stay curious.
Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane 