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In pop culture, the public has two general stereotypes about scientists. There is the mad scientist of Hollywood comics and fame, the crackling monster, whose desire to conquer reality and life itself often leads him to discoveries that result in widespread destruction, including his own. . Then there is the more positive image of the tweedy nerd whose enthusiasm for knowledge and discovery can sometimes be off-putting, but often simply contagious.
Neil de Grasse Tyson, the renowned astrophysicist as a science educator and host of the restart of the TV series "Cosmos" by Carl Sagan, is perhaps the best-known living example of the second public image of a scientist. His nerd exuberance is more than deserved by his extensive and profound knowledge, not only about astrophysics, but also about the history and culture of science. In his hands, science seems amusing, joyful and not at all threatening.
"The universe is both the ultimate frontier and the highest upland," write Tyson and Lang. "Shared by space scientists and space warriors, it's a laboratory for one and a battlefield for the other."
The book traces the story of this entanglement between star-driven scientific research and the more immediate perpetuation of war on the ground. According to the authors, the armed forces have relied on astronomers since the beginning of history itself, according to stars to create maps used by the generals and in particular the captains during the fighting. Since then, the world of astronomy and the world of war have been talking and people have been working closely together, relying on their common need for everything from telescopes to GPS satellite technology to by rockets.
In an interview this week at Salon Talks, for example, he refuted the popular version of Albert Einstein who portrayed him as a pacifist.
"He was all for the bomb," said Tyson. "He wrote a letter to Roosevelt saying we had power, we should bomb because Hitler is bad."
The letter is known as the Einstein-Szilárd letter because it was written by the Hungarian physicist Leó Szilárd and signed by Einstein. Einstein warns that "it might be possible to set up a nuclear-chain reaction in a large mass of uranium, by which large amounts of energy and large amounts of new elements alike to radium would be generated "and that the German army is on this fact and is most likely studying the possibility of making a weapon from this research. He recommends "a permanent contact between the administration and the group of physicists working on chain reactions in America," a recommendation that led to the Manhattan project and the development of the first nuclear bomb.
As Tyson told Salon, Einstein had complex feelings about the bomb and opposed its use in Japan. But it is also difficult, as Tyson argues, to quarrel with the reasons that led Einstein to warn Roosevelt in the first place. In other words, the war is complicated, as is the role of scientists.
Tyson writes that "the vast majority of my fellow astrophysicists" do not like to think too much about this reality and rather "retreat before the prospect of war". But as he himself discovered, it is not so easy.
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The book begins with a story of Tyson, who was part of a presidential commission focused on the aerospace industry during the second Bush administration, attending a Space Foundation symposium that was taking place at the same time as the war in Iraq. Tyson was found aggravated by anti-war protesters outside the event, assuming they were "politically naive". But inside, he found that the display screens throughout the symposium were listening to the coverage of the invasion of Iraq, and the scene made him more sensitive to protesters.
Whenever a weapon is described, the reporters "announce the names of the companies that made it," and each time "a company is identified as the producer of a particular instrument of destruction, its employees and managers have fallen Out of order." in applause. "
The illusion that scientists can simply overfly the death and destruction to which their discoveries contribute – or ignore the military-industrial complex that fuels the financing of science and the knowledge that helps it to develop – has been broken.
To be clear, the mad scientist figure of Frankenstein and all the other Marvel films on the market can not be found in this book. Even scientists who have been closely involved in the development of technologies directly intended to kill people, like the nuclear bomb, have not been the sociopaths of B movie entertainment. But Tyson also does not want readers to imagine that scientists are innocent babies, ignoring the implications of working so closely with the military-industrial complex to develop their own work.
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