Uranus, Voyager, and the Singularitymagicdragon2July 14 2005, 20:32:45 UTC
More discussion, about Voyager II and stuff, on the same blog. Michael Bérubé teaches literature and cultural studies at Penn State. His site includes links to about seventy of Bérubé's essays, published in academic journals (American Literature, Social Text, Modern Fiction Studies) and in more popular venues (Dissent, the Nation, Harper's, New York Times Magazine).
Of course I contend that Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto are “out there” independent of social construct, having been an Astronomy professor, and having been Mission Planning Engineer for the Voyage II flyby of Uranus (Miranda was one of my responsibilities). And yet… the “discoverer” or “inventor” of Uranus did not, at first, accept that it was a Planet, as, by definition, all the planets were known. He was, after all, a music teacher in Bath, and leaped at the chance to name it after King George III. AND his sister, the abused opera singer, was co-dicoverer/co-inventor, and politicolegal truth established her as Assistant Astronomer Royal and most famous female scientist in the world. AND Neptune was discovered first in France or in England, take sides, and Pluto in America. AND Galileo saw Uranus first through a telescope, but didn’t know what he saw and recorded in his notebook. AND Pluto is arguably not a planet, but merely the largest Trans-Neptunian Kuiper Belt Object known so far. SOMETHING is out there, but we see through a telescope glass darkly, male, female, transgendered, nationalized, marginalized, imperialized, postcolonialized, enmeshed in old theory, revolting towards new theory, dragged down by chains of theory to drown in a sea of ink and flickering phosphor phish. “Natural and healthy evolution of a discipline” begs the question, as Evolution is itself a system of science, healthy presumes a medicalized view of the body, and discipline is most surely a social construct, unless you fall into the snowbanks of Two Cultures. Academic? That’s an anomaly, a 20th century fad, for Science to be dominated by the University, instead of by the Victorian Men of Leisure & Museum Curators, and liberal Curates and Naturalists in the 19th Century; or the virtual corporate web entity of cyborgs right now; or the unimaginable transhumanism beyond the Singularity. Will the argument persist in the Eschaton of Charles Stross, the galaxy-spanning culturea of Vernor Vinge and Iain Banks? Leptons to leptons; quarks to quarks.
Re: Uranus, Voyager, and the Singularitymagicdragon2July 14 2005, 20:33:19 UTC
"Jonathan Vos Post: the 'discoverer' or 'inventor' of Uranus did not, at first, accept that it was a Planet, as, by definition, all the planets were known..."
Thanks for adding that item to the mix! The discovery of Neptune, I think, is every bit as good a demonstration case for Kuhn as was the discovery of oxygen. And I am such a Voyager spacecraft fan; I’m thrilled to hear that you were one of the people responsible for it all. The Uranus flyby was 1986, wasn’t it? And the Reagan Administration wanted to cut the program’s funding. We would have missed seeing those eerie clouds, that gossamer ring, and Miranda. The Neptune encounter three years later was awesome, as well, and imho Pluto isn’t really a planet.
Re: Uranus, Voyager, and the Singularitymagicdragon2July 14 2005, 20:34:02 UTC
Michael, I take a keen interest in how scientific revolutions occur, having been in the leading edge of several. Kuhn was mostly right, in my experience.
I’ve been personally involved in the origins of the personal computer reolution in the early and mid 1970s, and hypertext (working with Ted Nelson); Artificial Intelligence ( a M.S. for devising an Automated Theorem Prover that would run on the massively parallel supercomputers which did not then exist); writing the world’s first PhD dissertation on Nanotechnology (too ahead of its time, so neither accepted nor rejected in 1977, but technically still an “incomplete"); was the first to propose the Artificial Meteorite Strike Spectroscopy that’s the core technology of Deep Impact; was in what was intriguingly called “the Voyager-Uranus Intersetellar Mission;” and then designed Moon Bases, Mars Bases, and Interstellar spacecraft for NASA.
Creativity does not follow strictly logical laws, nor is the “Ideocosm” (space of all possible ideas) explored rationally by most people or groups. For instance, I have a tendency to dream equations at night, and find them (on awakening) to often be true.
Possibly the dreamed equation that had the greatest impact on the real world was my triple integral of a function projected from 9-dimensional parameter space on the Uranus flyby of Voyager II, which I dreamed, refined during the morning shower, and immediately pitched (upon, you know, dressing and driving to JPL) to Dr. Edward Stone, Chief Scientist of Voyager, and later JPL Director. On its basis, several months work of several people were thrown out (they hated me for that) and a new concept applied to the flyby, including a completely different aiming and timing of photographs of Miranda, a part of the mission with which I (as Mission Planning Engineer) was tasked.
You’ve seen those photos of Miranda, which would NOT have been possible without my dream equations. But I only got the “group participation award” from NASA, same as the secretaries and janitors, because of people whose cruder early work was on the cutting room floor, and other specifically got awarded for the “smear campaign” to reduce smear of imaging by multiaxis attutude control. In a nutshell, I showed that a quadratic fit was needed, to replace a previous linear fit, and that when one plunges through the ring plane of Uranus, one needs to minimize the rate of change of smear, rather than (as had been done at Jupiter and Saturn), smear itself. This gives VERY different times and angles for flyby telescopy, and greatly enhanced probability of getting a greater number of less-smeared pictures.
I’m not the only one who does this; an American Mathematical Monthly this year printed a misleading dream proof that P=NP, based on the mathematician on an arbitrarily long round trip interstellar mission. So there is a dream, math, science, science fiction tangle here.
I now claim circa 1,200 lifetime publications, presentations, and broadcasts to my credit (not counting the 40 megabytes of text I wrote for my magicdragon.com domain. Caltech degree-holder, ex-astronomer, and encyclopedist Eric W. Weisstein is lead author, as cited, in over a thousand MathWorld pages (the other contributors are listed on each page, and centrally indexed). There’s that guy who, in some sense, edited over 100,000 wikipedia pages (with his demography bot). Proper use of dreaming and the web, in combination, can’t make a bad writer good, but can make a good one more prolific, by at least a factor of 10. Isaac Asimov, Paul Erdos, Leonhard Euler, and their ilk may not have needed this, but we mere mortals can always use a 1000% speedup. It’s only a matter of time before an “author” of several people, conscious and unconscious, plus machine aid, will achieve a million publications. And onward to the singularity…
Re: Uranus, Voyager, and the Singularitymagicdragon2July 14 2005, 20:34:35 UTC
... Jonathan Vos Post: "I showed that a quadratic fit was needed, to replace a previous linear fit, and that when one plunges through the ring plane of Uranus, one needs to minimize the rate of change of smear, rather than (as had been done at Jupiter and Saturn), smear itself."
OK, I’m in awe. I haven’t plunged through the ring plane of Uranus myself, though I am aware that the planet’s axis is almost parallel to the plane of the ecliptic, so that it’s basically tipped on its side. I keep this knowledge uppermost in my mind just in case I find myself approaching the outer planets. But I was gripped by the Voyager missions on the day in 1981 when I saw Voyager 1’s pictures of a crescent Saturn (which, of course, have to be taken from “behind” Saturn), so thank you, thank you for dreaming the equation for the Uranus flyby.
Re: Uranus, Voyager, and the Singularitymagicdragon2July 14 2005, 20:35:04 UTC
And, Michael, you’re exactly right. Voyager II zoomed past Jupiter and Saturn essential in their ring/moon planes, so that aiming the scan platform’s telecopes was a matter of slow motion along one controlled axis. It took quite a fight, as I suggested, to convince people that it was precisely because Uranus’ spin axis was tilted so dramatically, and the ring/moon plane with it, that we had to maneuver the spacecraft along 2 axes at once, whipping around fast while plunging through the plane.
At the Caltech press conference during the Uranus encounter, I fielded a reporter’s question (although I was merely in the audience, the poject engineers could not come up with an answer on their feet). The question was: if something hit Uranus and shoved its axis around, why didn’t the axis keep going?
My answer was that Uranus was, to a first order, a gyrosciope, which prcessed perpendicular to the force of the putative collision only so long as momentum was being transferred. I started to say something about the effect this would have on magnetism, given the theory of dynamo of metallic liquid hydrogen at the core, but cut myself off, as it seemed too speculative. I missed a great chance to thereby say: “and expect a significant anomaly in the orientation of the Uranian magnetic field.” It turned out to be not centered anywhere near the geometric center of the planet, and skew to the rotaqtion axis.
Sir Arthur C. Clarke has essayed on why distinguished scientists sometimes miss the obvious in their predictions. (1) Failure of Imagination; (2) failure of nerve.
That was a failure of nerve on my part. As when I was writing a science fiction story about the murder of John Lennon, before it happened, and said to myself-“no, I can’t bear this,” and changed it. Later I published “John Lennon Meets T.S. Eliot” in the anthology 13 Rock Fantasies, in Germany. Couldn’t publish my verse play in the USA, as every single line was apropriated from either a Eliot play or poem (and his estate wouldn’t give permission to mingle with mere pop music), or a Lennon/McCartney song (and Michael Jackson’s staff wouldn’t give me permission, on the basis of “who is the T.S. Eliot clown, anyway?
same blog. Michael Bérubé teaches literature and
cultural studies at Penn State. His site includes
links to about seventy of Bérubé's essays, published
in academic journals (American Literature, Social
Text, Modern Fiction Studies) and in more popular
venues (Dissent, the Nation, Harper's, New York Times
Magazine).
http://www.michaelberube.com/index.php/weblog/comments/679/
=====
Of course I contend that Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto
are “out there” independent of social construct,
having been an Astronomy professor, and having been
Mission Planning Engineer for the Voyage II flyby of
Uranus (Miranda was one of my responsibilities). And
yet… the “discoverer” or “inventor” of Uranus did not,
at first, accept that it was a Planet, as, by
definition, all the planets were known. He was, after
all, a music teacher in Bath, and leaped at the chance
to name it after King George III. AND his sister, the
abused opera singer, was co-dicoverer/co-inventor, and
politicolegal truth established her as Assistant
Astronomer Royal and most famous female scientist in
the world. AND Neptune was discovered first in France
or in England, take sides, and Pluto in America. AND
Galileo saw Uranus first through a telescope, but
didn’t know what he saw and recorded in his notebook.
AND Pluto is arguably not a planet, but merely the
largest Trans-Neptunian Kuiper Belt Object known so
far. SOMETHING is out there, but we see through a
telescope glass darkly, male, female, transgendered,
nationalized, marginalized, imperialized,
postcolonialized, enmeshed in old theory, revolting
towards new theory, dragged down by chains of theory
to drown in a sea of ink and flickering phosphor
phish. “Natural and healthy evolution of a discipline”
begs the question, as Evolution is itself a system of
science, healthy presumes a medicalized view of the
body, and discipline is most surely a social
construct, unless you fall into the snowbanks of Two
Cultures. Academic? That’s an anomaly, a 20th century
fad, for Science to be dominated by the University,
instead of by the Victorian Men of Leisure & Museum
Curators, and liberal Curates and Naturalists in the
19th Century; or the virtual corporate web entity of
cyborgs right now; or the unimaginable transhumanism
beyond the Singularity. Will the argument persist in
the Eschaton of Charles Stross, the galaxy-spanning
culturea of Vernor Vinge and Iain Banks? Leptons to
leptons; quarks to quarks.
Posted by Jonathan Vos Post on 07/14 at 04:27 AM
Reply
Uranus did not, at first, accept that it was a Planet,
as, by definition, all the planets were known..."
Thanks for adding that item to the mix! The discovery
of Neptune, I think, is every bit as good a
demonstration case for Kuhn as was the discovery of
oxygen. And I am such a Voyager spacecraft fan; I’m
thrilled to hear that you were one of the people
responsible for it all. The Uranus flyby was 1986,
wasn’t it? And the Reagan Administration wanted to
cut the program’s funding. We would have missed
seeing those eerie clouds, that gossamer ring, and
Miranda. The Neptune encounter three years later was
awesome, as well, and imho Pluto isn’t really a
planet.
Posted by Michael on 07/14 at 10:30 AM
Reply
revolutions occur, having been in the leading edge of
several. Kuhn was mostly right, in my experience.
I’ve been personally involved in the origins of the
personal computer reolution in the early and mid
1970s, and hypertext (working with Ted Nelson);
Artificial Intelligence ( a M.S. for devising an
Automated Theorem Prover that would run on the
massively parallel supercomputers which did not then
exist); writing the world’s first PhD dissertation on
Nanotechnology (too ahead of its time, so neither
accepted nor rejected in 1977, but technically still
an “incomplete"); was the first to propose the
Artificial Meteorite Strike Spectroscopy that’s the
core technology of Deep Impact; was in what was
intriguingly called “the Voyager-Uranus Intersetellar
Mission;” and then designed Moon Bases, Mars Bases,
and Interstellar spacecraft for NASA.
Creativity does not follow strictly logical laws, nor
is the “Ideocosm” (space of all possible ideas)
explored rationally by most people or groups. For
instance, I have a tendency to dream equations at
night, and find them (on awakening) to often be true.
Possibly the dreamed equation that had the greatest
impact on the real world was my triple integral of a
function projected from 9-dimensional parameter space
on the Uranus flyby of Voyager II, which I dreamed,
refined during the morning shower, and immediately
pitched (upon, you know, dressing and driving to JPL)
to Dr. Edward Stone, Chief Scientist of Voyager, and
later JPL Director. On its basis, several months work
of several people were thrown out (they hated me for
that) and a new concept applied to the flyby,
including a completely different aiming and timing of
photographs of Miranda, a part of the mission with
which I (as Mission Planning Engineer) was tasked.
You’ve seen those photos of Miranda, which would NOT
have been possible without my dream equations. But I
only got the “group participation award” from NASA,
same as the secretaries and janitors, because of
people whose cruder early work was on the cutting room
floor, and other specifically got awarded for the
“smear campaign” to reduce smear of imaging by
multiaxis attutude control. In a nutshell, I showed
that a quadratic fit was needed, to replace a previous
linear fit, and that when one plunges through the ring
plane of Uranus, one needs to minimize the rate of
change of smear, rather than (as had been done at
Jupiter and Saturn), smear itself. This gives VERY
different times and angles for flyby telescopy, and
greatly enhanced probability of getting a greater
number of less-smeared pictures.
I’m not the only one who does this; an American
Mathematical Monthly this year printed a misleading
dream proof that P=NP, based on the mathematician on
an arbitrarily long round trip interstellar mission.
So there is a dream, math, science, science fiction
tangle here.
I now claim circa 1,200 lifetime publications,
presentations, and broadcasts to my credit (not
counting the 40 megabytes of text I wrote for my
magicdragon.com domain. Caltech degree-holder,
ex-astronomer, and encyclopedist Eric W. Weisstein is
lead author, as cited, in over a thousand MathWorld
pages (the other contributors are listed on each page,
and centrally indexed). There’s that guy who, in some
sense, edited over 100,000 wikipedia pages (with his
demography bot). Proper use of dreaming and the web,
in combination, can’t make a bad writer good, but can
make a good one more prolific, by at least a factor of
10. Isaac Asimov, Paul Erdos, Leonhard Euler, and
their ilk may not have needed this, but we mere
mortals can always use a 1000% speedup. It’s only a
matter of time before an “author” of several people,
conscious and unconscious, plus machine aid, will
achieve a million publications. And onward to the
singularity…
Posted by Jonathan Vos Post on 07/14 at 11:20 AM
Reply
was needed, to replace a previous linear fit, and that
when one plunges through the ring plane of Uranus, one
needs to minimize the rate of change of smear, rather
than (as had been done at Jupiter and Saturn), smear
itself."
OK, I’m in awe. I haven’t plunged through the ring
plane of Uranus myself, though I am aware that the
planet’s axis is almost parallel to the plane of the
ecliptic, so that it’s basically tipped on its side.
I keep this knowledge uppermost in my mind just in
case I find myself approaching the outer planets. But
I was gripped by the Voyager missions on the day in
1981 when I saw Voyager 1’s pictures of a crescent
Saturn (which, of course, have to be taken from
“behind” Saturn), so thank you, thank you for dreaming
the equation for the Uranus flyby.
Posted by Michael on 07/14 at 12:52 PM
Reply
past Jupiter and Saturn essential in their ring/moon
planes, so that aiming the scan platform’s telecopes
was a matter of slow motion along one controlled axis.
It took quite a fight, as I suggested, to convince
people that it was precisely because Uranus’ spin axis
was tilted so dramatically, and the ring/moon plane
with it, that we had to maneuver the spacecraft along
2 axes at once, whipping around fast while plunging
through the plane.
At the Caltech press conference during the Uranus
encounter, I fielded a reporter’s question (although I
was merely in the audience, the poject engineers could
not come up with an answer on their feet). The
question was: if something hit Uranus and shoved its
axis around, why didn’t the axis keep going?
My answer was that Uranus was, to a first order, a
gyrosciope, which prcessed perpendicular to the force
of the putative collision only so long as momentum was
being transferred. I started to say something about
the effect this would have on magnetism, given the
theory of dynamo of metallic liquid hydrogen at the
core, but cut myself off, as it seemed too
speculative. I missed a great chance to thereby say:
“and expect a significant anomaly in the orientation
of the Uranian magnetic field.” It turned out to be
not centered anywhere near the geometric center of the
planet, and skew to the rotaqtion axis.
Sir Arthur C. Clarke has essayed on why distinguished
scientists sometimes miss the obvious in their
predictions. (1) Failure of Imagination; (2) failure
of nerve.
That was a failure of nerve on my part. As when I was
writing a science fiction story about the murder of
John Lennon, before it happened, and said to
myself-“no, I can’t bear this,” and changed it. Later
I published “John Lennon Meets T.S. Eliot” in the
anthology 13 Rock Fantasies, in Germany. Couldn’t
publish my verse play in the USA, as every single line
was apropriated from either a Eliot play or poem (and
his estate wouldn’t give permission to mingle with
mere pop music), or a Lennon/McCartney song (and
Michael Jackson’s staff wouldn’t give me permission,
on the basis of “who is the T.S. Eliot clown, anyway?
Posted by Jonathan Vos Post on 07/14 at 03:07 PM
Reply
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