Marcia Dunn, reporting for the Associated Press, has an article on the Hubble Space Telescope repairs that are underway. NASA astronauts on the space shuttle Atlantis are in orbit and have secured the space telescope. Now the astronauts can begin to make various repairs the telescope needs after 19 years in orbit. The repairs almost didn’t happen. NASA was going to allow the telescope to fall into disrepair until it had a change of heart in 2006.
To learn more about Hubble, I would recommend Phil Plait’s “Ten Things You Don’t Know About Hubble” at the Bad Astronomy Blog. (For even more geekery, you can follow Astronaut Mike Massimino on Twitter.) Hubble has enabled us to see stars 1/ten billionth as bright as what we can see with the naked eye. This, in turn, has led to scientific break throughs. For example, (per Wikipedia) it has allowed us to calculate the rate of expansion of the universe.
Scientific advances often go hand-in-hand with technological advances. It’s probably no accident that Western science began to take off around the same time as telescopes and microscopes were invented in the late 16th and early 17th centuries. (It also helped that Constantinople was threatened and conquered by the Turks leading to a lot of books and scholars fleeing to the West.) Since then, we’ve been off to the races. The difference between the past 450 years as compared to the 450 years that preceded is staggering. In Europe, the year 1100 probably looked quite a bit like the year 1550. But, clearly a time traveler from 1550 wouldn’t know what to make of the year 2000. The Hubble Space Telescope is part of this process. I’m frankly happy to live in such a time. All too often, it’s easy to lose site of how far humans have progressed –for all our failures– in such a short period of time.
Funny how often these days one is reminded of what Zhou Enlai said about the French Revolution.
Battle histories are always written by the victors, and paeans to “our” great scientific advancement (which I, for one, have had nothing to do with, notes a grateful world) over the benighted Dark Ages with considerable use of rosy tints. That is, of course, the era which produced Botticelli, Donatello, Brunelleschi, Dante, Chaucer, Desprez and Luis Milan. Shakespeare wrote without electricity; Bach managed okay without Garage Band. No doubt the 11th century serf could have benefitted from our superior hygiene, the Germ Theory of disease, and the eradication of his inbred masters in the early 20th century, assuming he survived the Marne and Passchendaele and their technical advancements in the art and science of high-volume long distance killing; what he would have made of 8-Tracks, moon rocks, or Jessica Simpson is another matter, since he probably would have been hit by a bus by that point.
Sure 1550 may have looked almost identical to 1100. Can you say for sure that 2150 will look better than 1700?