Oh Say Can You See?

As I write this my South Plymouth neighborhood is popping like a bag of Orville Reddenbacher in the microwave: supposedly you can’t buy fireworks in Massachusetts but I guess you can lease them for the evening.
Farther off more serious, and possibly even legal explosions, seem to mimic a line of thunderstorms approaching: or perhaps more accurately, the sounds recall the sonic booms of my youth.
That’s no metaphor: my father was a ‘lifer’ in the Air Force and when I was a boy it was not unusual to first feel, and then hear the sounds of military jets breaking the sound barrier over the base.
That was the first bit of science that really caught my attention. The idea that objects could travel faster than the sounds they made was intriguing. Seeing the silver jets at air shows go flashing by just a few dozen feet off the ground, followed moments later by their sounds, was exhilarating.
Later I learned that light also had a speed: that the stars in the sky that you watched on your back on a warm summer night, might not actually be there at all anymore: that what you were seeing was in fact ‘old’ light.

Somewhere in the same dark sky where lightning bugs and imported bottle rockets are obscuring the stars on this Independence Day night– but far over the western horizon, another display of pyrotechnics is underway: a $300 million dollar display in fact.
They call it ‘Deep Impact’, hoping I think to get some of the same kind of attention that a recent movie of the same name attracted.
But there’s the problem as well. In order to keep the public’s attention NASA and others in the business of science and space exploration need to please both the public and their peers.
The scientists justified this mission in terms of the potential for uncovering the raw materials of creation –believing that comets represent the primordial play-doh that our solar systems began with. But they also made sure that this mission went off with a ‘bang’ on July 4th: packing their craft with an eight-hundred pound slug of pure copper that they hoped –and publicized, would create a spectacular display in the night sky.
To their credit their aim was true, their copper slug brutally efficient, and the show a perfect coming attraction of the film that would play at 11: fireworks over the water to the sound of the 1812 Overture.

But the thrill is gone – at least for me.
The timpani drum roll that Air Force jets used to produce in my stomach now comes buffered by the disquieting knowledge that the United States spends more of its wealth on weaponry than any other country.
The amazing designs that fireworks experts can produce from canisters of gunpowder fade in the light of the truth that we are the only country in the world that could but does not provide health care for all of its citizens.
The brilliance of the engineers and scientists who managed to build the Deep Impact craft, and hit that far away, moving target does still not justify, in my opinion, the enormous expenditure of time, money, and most importantly, imagination.

Couldn’t our scientists have imagined a way to create ‘energy independence’ without despoiling the arctic wilderness?
Couldn’t our politicians have imagined a way of spreading democracy without destroying a country’s infrastructure and killing thousands?
We bicker amongst ourselves over the cost of educating our children, while we allow $300 million to be spent to take a pot shot at a rock in the sky.

When I was a child sonic booms convinced me that man could move faster than sound.
When I was a young man the idea that it was theoretically possible to move faster than light fascinated me.
Now I see much of science as a kind of acceptable perversion –focusing far too much of its time devising ways to produce perpetually youthful skin (or its illusion), end erectile dysfunction, or set off galactic fireworks displays.

Here on earth, in Plymouth, I am only interested in the speed at which wisdom travels, and I am finding it very difficult to wait even one more star-spangled night.