Happy Mooniversary

Forty years ago today, the first manned spacecraft landed on the surface of another astronomical body. It was a testament to science and engineering, to the amazing results which can be achieved by a committed and concerted effort, and to the courage and fortitude of all the pioneers who had risked their lives to further our understanding of aeronautics and space exploration. Even after forty years, the moon landings continue to be a source of profound inspiration. Though I was not alive to witness the event itself, I would like to talk a little bit about the effect of the Apollo 11 mission on my life.

As a child, my first great intellectual love was the dinosaur. It started so early that I do not even know how it started. When I was two years old I informed my parents I wanted to be a paleontologist. Where I aquired that word still baffles my parents, but so it went. For the next eleven years I was sure I was going to devote my life to the study of dinosaurs. I hitched rides whenever I could to the Royal Tyrrell Museum in Alberta, confounded my mother by selecting the Encyclopedia of Dinosaurs for my bedtime story (and insisting that she pronounce all the dinosaur names correctly), annoyed the school librarians by fact-checking the dinosaur books we had available (the biggest pet peeve I had was illustrations of Tyrannosaurus Rex with three digits on its arms), and collected a massive quantity of toy dinosaurs. As I began to enter my teen years, however, I realised that the prospect of spending weeks at a time wandering around deserts did not particularly appeal to me. I am sure there were other reasons as well, but that is oddly the most salient point that I remember thinking about. Regardless of the reasons, my childhood fixation on becoming a paleontologist was over. I no longer had an answer to the question, "What do you want to be when you grow up?" It was a distressing turn of events.

I briefly fixated on the idea of becoming a professional writer, but there were a number of problems with that (among them the question of whether or not my writing was good enough). What eventually saved me by providing a new focus was the idea of becoming an astronaut. It was not a particularly well thought out plan, but it gave me a goal to strive for. It did not take me long to discover I was both too tall and lacked adequate vision for the job, but the idea of the space program had still taken root in my mind. As I wrestled with the idea of where to go to university and what I should study, I settled on aerospace engineering at the University of Toronto. Even if I couldn't go into space myself, I figured aerospace engineering was my best chance to be working on the projects that sent people there. Of course, as it does if you are doing things right, my undergraduate experience changed many things about me. As I gradually became aware (helped in no small part by my girlfriend), what I delighted in the most about the idea of working at NASA was the joy of discovery. The idea of doing something that has never been done before to fundamentally alter our understanding of the world, the universe, and our place in it. That, to me, is what makes the moon landing so special. It embodies the ideals of science and engineering - of striving to achieve something monumental, beautiful, and unprecedented. While I eventually decided to focus my energies on exploring the underpinnings of intelligence rather than exploring space as I had originally thought I would, that does not diminish the inspirational quality of the moon landing. In the same way that the giant fossil skeletons of the Royal Tyrrell Museum offered a link to the ancient past for my impressionable young mind, the moon landing provided a tangible example of intellectual daring to guide my future aspirations. I hope everyone will take a moment today to think again about all the intellectual effort and all the industry exerted those forty years ago to do the seemingly impossible; to put a man on the moon. When it comes to inspiration, it is hard to get much better than that giant leap.

Note: The image displayed above was downloaded from NASA's image archives.

UTIAS

This past Tuesday I took a trip out to UTIAS to see a former professor of mine (and now fourth-year project supervisor, but more on that later). What does such a fancy acronym like UTIAS stand for, you might ask? It is the University of Toronto Institute for Aerospace Studies. Even though I am no longer in Aerospace Engineering, I still have very fond thoughts for UTIAS. I find the building very inspiring. The whole place has an ambience of intellectual excitement and scientific daring that makes me want to do something profound (while it is invigorating, that feeling alone, unfortunately, does not actually yield something profound... at least not yet). Unfortunately, UTIAS is rather difficult to get to, being an awkward 22km away from the University of Toronto main campus and not on a subway line (instead it is a rather long subway trip to the end of the line, and then a further bus ride from there). If you poke around the website for a while, you might see them claim that it is only a 30-45 minute commute by transit from the main campus to UTIAS, and you might think, "for a city the size of Toronto, that's not so bad". Well, I don't think that whoever wrote that part of the website actually took the trip from main campus to UTIAS by transit. The subway trip alone is 45 minutes, and that is assuming your train actually goes all the way to Downsview (the last station) and doesn't instead dump you at Wilson (the second to last stop, where my train for some reason decided it was as far north as it needed to go). Then, assuming you have perfect timing and manage to snag the bus just before it leaves the station, you have another 15-30 minutes (depending on traffic).

Anyway, aside from being hard to get to, you also cannot just show up and waltz about the place. Unlike the main campus, where very few places are locked up, you cannot access the main building without a key card or without buzzing the front desk and signing in. However, if you have a legitimate reason to be there, the institute is very nice. There are a ping-pong and pool table in the cafeteria, a very nice lounge, lots of offices, and even more fancy pictures of space and spacecraft (some real, others rather fanciful... although I haven't yet seen a picture of any of the various incarnations of Enterprise, I wouldn't be surprised if there is one somewhere in the building). Also, I'm not quite sure what it is, but the entire place exudes an ambience of the 50s-70s, when lots of money was spent on scientific endeavours and being a scientist was seen as important, daunting, and wonderful (this is how I still see science, but it doesn't seem to be a normal view. Of course, this is probably just a romanticized view of the Cold War era I have garnered through movies like October Sky).

While I know it would be disruptive for those working at UTIAS, I wish they offered public tours. Between the wind tunnels, the Mars dome, the giant flight simulators, the micro satellite lab, and all the other research areas, I think UTIAS would be a wonderful outing for a family visiting Toronto. So, if you are visiting Toronto and are interested in aerospace, try sending someone at UTIAS an email and ask if you can have a tour. You never know, if you sound excited enough they might let you in.

Scientist Appreciation: Paul L. Nunez

Things seem to have worked out nicely. It is Friday, and I just got a little further in the enjoyable book from the library I mentioned taking out yesterday. My appreciation for the book translates to the lead author of the book, and I am thus set to make another contribution to the (made up by me for the purposes of this blog) field of Scientist Appreciation.

Dr. Paul L. Nunez sounds like a pretty cool guy (in my somewhat biased opinion). Why is he so cool, you might ask? Well, he has a highly interdisciplinary background that is very similar to the path that I plan to take (albeit, he switched to neuroscience a fair bit later in his career). He got his PhD in Engineering Physics (which is the old name for the University of Toronto's Engineering Science, the program I started in. Nunez got his degree from University of California at San Diego, though I assume the programs would be at least somewhat similar), but then did his post-doc in the Neurosciences doing EEG studies. What makes it more interesting to me is that most of his engineering work was done in spacecraft propulsion and plasma physics, giving him a link to aerospace engineering (which is the program of specialization I started doing in Eng. Sci. before transferring into science).

I have talked about the importance of interdisciplinary understanding before, so you might correctly conjecture that it is something I feel is important. Hence I highly enjoyed the second to last section of the opening chapter of his book entitled "Philosophical Conflicts" which discusses some of the unfortunate gaps between scientific disciplines. I hadn't realised how much my scientific philosophy had already been moulded by my courses in mathematics and physics until I realised that many of the statements he was making were voicing in words the vague sense of frustration I have had with so many of my courses in the life sciences. For example, he gives the following ratio:

(Time spent in preparation and performance of an experiment)/(Time spent deciding which experiments are worth doing)

And (correctly, I believe) points out that the ratio is much larger in EEG research (and, I think, many areas of biology in general) than in the physical sciences. Pointing out these differences and helping illuminate the underlying causes is, I believe, an important pursuit. It helps one appreciate where researchers in other fields are coming from, hopefully mollifying tensions and fostering the synergistic exchange of knowledge to the betterment of both parties.

Another enjoyable aspect of this section of his book is that he makes his case for the importance of a strong theoretical understanding by way of looking at the history of aerodynamics and aircraft design. While this made me smile because I could reminisce about wind tunnel experiments and the Navier-Stokes equations, it also included some wonderful lines like "If we were mathematicians, we might first try to obtain solutions to these [Navier-Stokes] equations. However, we are not mathematicians, we are airplane designers."

Also, no discussion of aerodynamics would be complete without the inclusion of Prandtl (a man whose work in fluid mechanics is so seminal that John D. Anderson's text Fundamentals of Aerodynamics includes a section titled "Historical Note: Prandtl - The Man". I'm not sure if Anderson intended it to sound like he was colloquially calling Prandtl "the man" or instead intended simply to intimate that this section would focus on Prandtl as a person rather than his scientific works. While I think the latter is more likely, the former interpretation makes me chuckle, so I prefer it). True to form, Nunez closes this section by discussing how Prandtl managed to unify the more mathematically elegant, though practically useless, body of knowledge on frictionless liquids with the empirical knowledge of hydraulics developed by engineers by his introduction of the concept of a boundary layer, thereby allowing fluid mechanics to achieve far greater success as a field with practical applicability but based more solidly in theory.

Anyway, this post seems to have wandered a bit, so suffice to say that I am a fan of Nunez's writing (and, to be fair, Srinivasan's writing too, though I'm fairly certain this part was written primarily by Nunez). Now I should make myself some lunch and get back to reading.